# Research Papers — 2025-10 · bundle page 105 of 217

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### DCMIL: A Progressive Representation Learning of Whole Slide Images for Cancer Prognosis Analysis

Authors: Chao Tu, Kun Huang, Jie Zhang, Qianjin Feng, Yu Zhang, Zhenyuan Ning
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14403v2

The burgeoning discipline of computational pathology shows promise in harnessing whole slide images (WSIs) to quantify morphological heterogeneity and develop objective prognostic modes for human cancers. However, progress is impeded by the computational bottleneck of gigapixel-size inputs and the scarcity of dense manual annotations. Current methods often overlook fine-grained information across multi-magnification WSIs and variations in tumor microenvironments. Here, we propose an easy-to-hard progressive representation learning, termed dual-curriculum contrastive multi-instance learning (DCMIL), to efficiently process WSIs for cancer prognosis. The model does not rely on dense annotations and enables the direct transformation of gigapixel-size WSIs into outcome predictions. Extensive experiments on twelve cancer types (5,954 patients, 12.54 million tiles) demonstrate that DCMIL outperforms standard WSI-based prognostic models. Additionally, DCMIL identifies fine-grained prognosis-salient regions, provides robust instance uncertainty estimation, and captures morphological differences between normal and tumor tissues, with the potential to generate new biological insights. All codes have been made publicly accessible at https://github.com/tuuuc/DCMIL.

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### The Role of Social Learning and Collective Norm Formation in Fostering Cooperation in LLM Multi-Agent Systems

Authors: Prateek Gupta, Qiankun Zhong, Hiromu Yakura, Thomas Eisenmann, Iyad Rahwan
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.MA, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14401v2

A growing body of multi-agent studies with LLMs explores how norms and cooperation emerge in mixed-motive scenarios, where pursuing individual gain can undermine the collective good. While prior work has explored these dynamics in both richly contextualized simulations and simplified game-theoretic environments, most LLM systems featuring common-pool resource (CPR) games provide agents with explicit reward functions directly tied to their actions. In contrast, human cooperation often emerges without explicit knowledge of the payoff structure or how individual actions translate into long-run outcomes, relying instead on heuristics, communication, and enforcement. We introduce a CPR simulation framework that removes explicit reward signals and embeds cultural-evolutionary mechanisms: social learning (adopting strategies and beliefs from successful peers) and norm-based punishment, grounded in Ostrom's principles of resource governance. Agents also individually learn from the consequences of harvesting, monitoring, and punishing via environmental feedback, enabling norms to emerge endogenously. We establish the validity of our simulation by reproducing key findings from existing studies on human behavior. Building on this, we examine norm evolution across a $2\times2$ grid of environmental and social initialisations (resource-rich vs. resource-scarce; altruistic vs. selfish) and benchmark how agentic societies comprised of different LLMs perform under these conditions. Our results reveal systematic model differences in sustaining cooperation and norm formation, positioning the framework as a rigorous testbed for studying emergent norms in mixed-motive LLM societies. Such analysis can inform the design of AI systems deployed in social and organizational contexts, where alignment with cooperative norms is critical for stability, fairness, and effective governance of AI-mediated environments.

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### MedTrust-RAG: Evidence Verification and Trust Alignment for Biomedical Question Answering

Authors: Yingpeng Ning, Yuanyuan Sun, Ling Luo, Yanhua Wang, Yuchen Pan, Hongfei Lin
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.IR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14400v2

Biomedical question answering (QA) requires accurate interpretation of complex medical knowledge. Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising capabilities in this domain, with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems enhancing performance by incorporating external medical literature. However, RAG-based approaches in biomedical QA suffer from hallucinations due to post-retrieval noise and insufficient verification of retrieved evidence, undermining response reliability. We propose MedTrust-Guided Iterative RAG, a framework designed to enhance factual consistency and mitigate hallucinations in medical QA. Our method introduces three key innovations. First, it enforces citation-aware reasoning by requiring all generated content to be explicitly grounded in retrieved medical documents, with structured Negative Knowledge Assertions used when evidence is insufficient. Second, it employs an iterative retrieval-verification process, where a verification agent assesses evidence adequacy and refines queries through Medical Gap Analysis until reliable information is obtained. Third, it integrates the MedTrust-Align Module (MTAM) that combines verified positive examples with hallucination-aware negative samples, leveraging Direct Preference Optimization to reinforce citation-grounded reasoning while penalizing hallucination-prone response patterns.

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### YNTP-100: A Benchmark for Your Next Token Prediction with 100 People

Authors: Shiyao Ding, Takayuki Ito
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14398v3

Large language models (LLMs) trained for general \textit{next-token prediction} often fail to generate responses that reflect how specific individuals communicate. Progress on personalized alignment is further limited by the difficulty of collecting real-world personal communication data due to privacy constraints. We propose Your Next Token Prediction (YNTP), a task that formulates personalized response generation as token-level prediction conditioned on user interaction history. We introduce \textbf{YNTP-100}, a benchmark built from multilingual multi-day human--agent conversations with 100 people, enabling systematic evaluation of user-specific response behavior. We evaluate external (parameter-preserving) and internal (parameter-updating) alignment methods using metrics of substance similarity and stylistic consistency. The dataset and results are publicly available at: https://github.com/AnonymousHub4Submissions/YNTP100.

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### Suicidal Comment Tree Dataset: Enhancing Risk Assessment and Prediction Through Contextual Analysis

Authors: Jun Li, Qun Zhao
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14395v1

Suicide remains a critical global public health issue. While previous studies have provided valuable insights into detecting suicidal expressions in individual social media posts, limited attention has been paid to the analysis of longitudinal, sequential comment trees for predicting a user's evolving suicidal risk. Users, however, often reveal their intentions through historical posts and interactive comments over time. This study addresses this gap by investigating how the information in comment trees affects both the discrimination and prediction of users' suicidal risk levels. We constructed a high-quality annotated dataset, sourced from Reddit, which incorporates users' posting history and comments, using a refined four-label annotation framework based on the Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C-SSRS). Statistical analysis of the dataset, along with experimental results from Large Language Models (LLMs) experiments, demonstrates that incorporating comment trees data significantly enhances the discrimination and prediction of user suicidal risk levels. This research offers a novel insight to enhancing the detection accuracy of at-risk individuals, thereby providing a valuable foundation for early suicide intervention strategies.

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### Low Power Vision Transformer Accelerator with Hardware-Aware Pruning and Optimized Dataflow

Authors: Ching-Lin Hsiung, Tian-Sheuan Chang
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.AR, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14393v1

Current transformer accelerators primarily focus on optimizing self-attention due to its quadratic complexity. However, this focus is less relevant for vision transformers with short token lengths, where the Feed-Forward Network (FFN) tends to be the dominant computational bottleneck. This paper presents a low power Vision Transformer accelerator, optimized through algorithm-hardware co-design. The model complexity is reduced using hardware-friendly dynamic token pruning without introducing complex mechanisms. Sparsity is further improved by replacing GELU with ReLU activations and employing dynamic FFN2 pruning, achieving a 61.5\% reduction in operations and a 59.3\% reduction in FFN2 weights, with an accuracy loss of less than 2\%. The hardware adopts a row-wise dataflow with output-oriented data access to eliminate data transposition, and supports dynamic operations with minimal area overhead. Implemented in TSMC's 28nm CMOS technology, our design occupies 496.4K gates and includes a 232KB SRAM buffer, achieving a peak throughput of 1024 GOPS at 1GHz, with an energy efficiency of 2.31 TOPS/W and an area efficiency of 858.61 GOPS/mm2.

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### FairBatching: Fairness-Aware Batch Formation for LLM Inference

Authors: Hongtao Lyu, Boyue Liu, Mingyu Wu, Haibo Chen
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.DC, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14392v1

Large language model (LLM) inference systems face a fundamental tension between minimizing Time-to-First-Token (TTFT) latency for new requests and maintaining a high, steady token generation rate (low Time-Per-Output-Token, or TPOT) for ongoing requests. Existing stall-free batching schedulers proposed by Sarathi, while effective at preventing decode stalls, introduce significant computational unfairness. They prioritize decode tasks excessively, simultaneously leading to underutilized decode slack and unnecessary prefill queuing delays, which collectively degrade the system's overall quality of service (QoS). This work identifies the root cause of this unfairness: the non-monotonic nature of Time-Between-Tokens (TBT) as a scheduling metric and the rigid decode-prioritizing policy that fails to adapt to dynamic workload bursts. We therefore propose FairBatching, a novel LLM inference scheduler that enforces fair resource allocation between prefill and decode tasks. It features an adaptive batch capacity determination mechanism, which dynamically adjusts the computational budget to improve the GPU utilization without triggering SLO violations. Its fair and dynamic batch formation algorithm breaks away from the decode-prioritizing paradigm, allowing computation resources to be reclaimed from bursting decode tasks to serve prefill surges, achieving global fairness. Furthermore, FairBatching provides a novel load estimation method, enabling more effective coordination with upper-level schedulers. Implemented and evaluated on realistic traces, FairBatching significantly reduces TTFT tail latency by up to 2.29x while robustly maintaining TPOT SLOs, achieving overall 20.0% improvement in single-node capacity and 54.3% improvement in cluster-level capacity.

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### AlignBeat: A Latent Variable Model for Multi-Class Beat Tracking from Partially Labeled Data

Authors: Jaehoon Ahn, Tae Gum Hwang, Moon-Ryul Jung
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14391v3

Recent neural beat trackers predict beats and downbeats with two independent frame-wise binary classification heads, a convention adopted because a single multi-class head cannot fully exploit datasets that annotate only beats. The heads can disagree, so Beat This moves each predicted downbeat to the nearest predicted beat. We instead predict a sparse set of grid points, each with an event time and one distribution over downbeat, beat and no event, so a downbeat is a beat by construction and no reconciliation is needed. The alignment between grid points and annotated events is latent, and we fit the model by expectation-maximization. Where no downbeat labels were recorded the event class is latent too and is marginalized out. Over eight-fold cross-validation on eighteen datasets, retaining rather than discarding the beat-only labeled data raises beat CMLt by 4.6 points on the datasets that provide it; downbeat CMLt rises 3.6 points over Beat This, with both F-measures moving by less than one point and no post-processing at any stage.

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### BoardVision: Deployment-ready and Robust Motherboard Defect Detection with YOLO+Faster-RCNN Ensemble

Authors: Brandon Hill, Kma Solaiman
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14389v1

Motherboard defect detection is critical for ensuring reliability in high-volume electronics manufacturing. While prior research in PCB inspection has largely targeted bare-board or trace-level defects, assembly-level inspection of full motherboards inspection remains underexplored. In this work, we present BoardVision, a reproducible framework for detecting assembly-level defects such as missing screws, loose fan wiring, and surface scratches. We benchmark two representative detectors - YOLOv7 and Faster R-CNN, under controlled conditions on the MiracleFactory motherboard dataset, providing the first systematic comparison in this domain. To mitigate the limitations of single models, where YOLO excels in precision but underperforms in recall and Faster R-CNN shows the reverse, we propose a lightweight ensemble, Confidence-Temporal Voting (CTV Voter), that balances precision and recall through interpretable rules. We further evaluate robustness under realistic perturbations including sharpness, brightness, and orientation changes, highlighting stability challenges often overlooked in motherboard defect detection. Finally, we release a deployable GUI-driven inspection tool that bridges research evaluation with operator usability. Together, these contributions demonstrate how computer vision techniques can transition from benchmark results to practical quality assurance for assembly-level motherboard manufacturing.

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### Hi-Agent: Hierarchical Vision-Language Agents for Mobile Device Control

Authors: Zhe Wu, Hongjin Lu, Junliang Xing, Changhao Zhang, Yuxuan Li, Yin Zhu, Yuhao Yang, Yuheng Jing, Kai Li, Kun Shao, Jianye Hao, Jun Wang et al.
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14388v2

Building agents that autonomously operate mobile devices has attracted increasing attention. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) show promise, most existing approaches rely on direct state-to-action mappings, which lack structured reasoning and planning, and thus generalize poorly to novel tasks or unseen UI layouts. We introduce Hi-Agent, a trainable hierarchical vision-language agent for mobile control, featuring a high-level reasoning model and a low-level action model that are jointly optimized. For efficient training, we reformulate multi-step decision-making as a sequence of single-step subgoals and propose a foresight advantage function, which leverages execution feedback from the low-level model to guide high-level optimization. This design alleviates the path explosion issue encountered by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) in long-horizon tasks and enables stable, critic-free joint training. Hi-Agent achieves a new State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) 87.9% task success rate on the Android-in-the-Wild (AitW) benchmark, significantly outperforming prior methods across three paradigms: prompt-based (AppAgent: 17.7%), supervised (Filtered BC: 54.5%), and reinforcement learning-based (DigiRL: 71.9%). It also demonstrates competitive zero-shot generalization on the ScreenSpot-v2 benchmark. On the more challenging AndroidWorld benchmark, Hi-Agent also scales effectively with larger backbones, showing strong adaptability in high-complexity mobile control scenarios.

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### Can MLLMs Absorb Math Reasoning Abilities from LLMs as Free Lunch?

Authors: Yijie Hu, Zihao Zhou, Kaizhu Huang, Xiaowei Huang, Qiufeng Wang
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14387v1

Math reasoning has been one crucial ability of large language models (LLMs), where significant advancements have been achieved in recent years. However, most efforts focus on LLMs by curating high-quality annotation data and intricate training (or inference) paradigms, while the math reasoning performance of multi-modal LLMs (MLLMs) remains lagging behind. Since the MLLM typically consists of an LLM and a vision block, we wonder: Can MLLMs directly absorb math reasoning abilities from off-the-shelf math LLMs without tuning? Recent model-merging approaches may offer insights into this question. However, they overlook the alignment between the MLLM and LLM, where we find that there is a large gap between their parameter spaces, resulting in lower performance. Our empirical evidence reveals two key factors behind this issue: the identification of crucial reasoning-associated layers in the model and the mitigation of the gaps in parameter space. Based on the empirical insights, we propose IP-Merging that first identifies the reasoning-associated parameters in both MLLM and Math LLM, then projects them into the subspace of MLLM, aiming to maintain the alignment, and finally merges parameters in this subspace. IP-Merging is a tuning-free approach since parameters are directly adjusted. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our IP-Merging method can enhance the math reasoning ability of MLLMs directly from Math LLMs without compromising their other capabilities.

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### ASecond-Order SpikingSSM for Wearables

Authors: Kartikay Agrawal, Abhijeet Vikram, Vedant Sharma, Vaishnavi Nagabhushana, Ayon Borthakur
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.LG, cs.NE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14386v2

Spiking neural networks have garnered increasing attention due to their energy efficiency, multiplication-free computation, and sparse event-based processing. In parallel, state space models have emerged as scalable alternatives to transformers for long-range sequence modelling by avoiding quadratic dependence on sequence length. We propose SHaRe-SSM (Spiking Harmonic Resonate-and-Fire State Space Model), a second-order spiking SSM for classification and regression on ultra-long sequences. SHaRe-SSM outperforms transformers and first-order SSMs on average while eliminating matrix multiplications, making it highly suitable for resource-constrained applications. To ensure fast computation over tens of thousands of time steps, we leverage a parallel scan formulation of the underlying dynamical system. Furthermore, we introduce a kernel-based spiking regressor, which enables the accurate modelling of dependencies in sequences of up to 50k steps. Our results demonstrate that SHaRe-SSM achieves superior long-range modelling capability with energy efficiency (52.1x less than ANN-based second order SSM), positioning it as a strong candidate for resource-constrained devices such as wearables

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### DRBD-Mamba for Robust and Efficient Brain Tumor Segmentation with Analytical Insights

Authors: Danish Ali, Ajmal Mian, Naveed Akhtar, Ghulam Mubashar Hassan
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14383v4

Accurate brain tumor segmentation is significant for clinical diagnosis and treatment but remains challenging due to tumor heterogeneity. Mamba-based State Space Models have demonstrated promising performance. However, despite their computational efficiency over other neural architectures, they incur considerable overhead for this task due to their sequential feature computation across multiple spatial axes. Moreover, their robustness across diverse BraTS data partitions remains largely unexplored, leaving a critical gap in reliable evaluation. To address this, we first propose a dual-resolution bi-directional Mamba (DRBD-Mamba), an efficient 3D segmentation model that captures multi-scale long-range dependencies with minimal computational overhead. We leverage a space-filling curve to preserve spatial locality during 3D-to-1D feature mapping, thereby reducing reliance on computationally expensive multi-axial feature scans. To enrich feature representation, we propose a gated fusion module that adaptively integrates forward and reverse contexts, along with a quantization block that improves robustness. We further propose five systematic folds on BraTS2023 for rigorous evaluation of segmentation techniques under diverse conditions and present analysis of common failure scenarios. On the 20% test set used by recent methods, our model achieves Dice improvements of 0.10% for whole tumor, 1.75% for tumor core, and 0.93% for enhancing tumor. Evaluations on the proposed systematic folds demonstrate that our model maintains competitive whole tumor accuracy while achieving clear average Dice gains of 1.16% for tumor core and 1.68% for enhancing tumor over existing state-of-the-art. Furthermore, our model achieves a 15x efficiency improvement while maintaining high segmentation accuracy, highlighting its robustness and computational advantage over existing methods.

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### Are My Optimized Prompts Compromised? Exploring Vulnerabilities of LLM-based Optimizers

Authors: Andrew Zhao, Reshmi Ghosh, Vitor Carvalho, Emily Lawton, Keegan Hines, Gao Huang, Jack W. Stokes
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14381v2

Large language model (LLM) systems increasingly power everyday AI applications such as chatbots, computer-use assistants, and autonomous robots, where performance often depends on manually well-crafted prompts. LLM-based prompt optimizers reduce that effort by iteratively refining prompts from scored feedback, yet the security of this optimization stage remains underexamined. We present the first systematic analysis of poisoning risks in LLM-based prompt optimization. Using HarmBench, we find systems are substantially more vulnerable to manipulated feedback than to query poisoning alone: feedback-based attacks raise attack success rate (ASR) by up to ΔASR = 0.48. We introduce a simple fake reward attack that requires no access to the reward model and significantly increases vulnerability. We also propose a lightweight highlighting defense that reduces the fake reward ΔASR from 0.23 to 0.07 without degrading utility. These results establish prompt optimization pipelines as a first-class attack surface and motivate stronger safeguards for feedback channels and optimization frameworks.

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### PluriHopRAG: Exhaustive, Recall-Sensitive QA Through Corpus-Specific Document Structure Learning

Authors: Mykolas Sveistrys, Richard Kunert
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.CL, cs.IR, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14377v2

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has been used in question answering (QA) systems to improve performance when relevant information is in one (single-hop) or multiple (multi-hop) passages. However, many real life scenarios (e.g. dealing with financial, legal, medical reports) require checking all documents for relevant information without a clear stopping condition. We term these pluri-hop questions, and formalize them by 3 conditions - recall sensitivity, exhaustiveness, and exactness. To study this setting, we introduce PluriHopWIND, a multilingual diagnostic benchmark of 48 pluri-hop questions over 191 real wind-industry reports, with high repetitiveness to reflect the challenge of distractors in real-world datasets. Naive, graph-based, and multimodal RAG methods only reach up to 40% statement-wise F1 on PluriHopWIND. Motivated by this, we propose PluriHopRAG, which learns from synthetic examples to decompose queries according to corpus-specific document structure, and employs a cross-encoder filter at the document level to minimize costly LLM reasoning. We test PluriHopRAG on PluriHopWIND and the Loong benchmark built on financial, legal and scientific reports. On PluriHopWIND, our method shows 18-52% F1 score improvement across base LLMs, while on Loong, we show 33% improvement over long-context reasoning and 52% improvement over naive RAG.

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### DOS: Directional Object Separation in Text Embeddings for Multi-Object Image Generation

Authors: Dongnam Byun, Jungwon Park, Jungmin Ko, Changin Choi, Wonjong Rhee
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14376v4

Recent progress in text-to-image (T2I) generative models has led to significant improvements in generating high-quality images aligned with text prompts. However, these models still struggle with prompts involving multiple objects, often resulting in object neglect or object mixing. Through extensive studies, we identify four problematic scenarios, Similar Shapes, Similar Textures, Dissimilar Background Biases, and Many Objects, where inter-object relationships frequently lead to such failures. Motivated by two key observations about CLIP embeddings, we propose DOS (Directional Object Separation), a method that modifies three types of CLIP text embeddings before passing them into text-to-image models. Experimental results show that DOS consistently improves the success rate of multi-object image generation and reduces object mixing. In human evaluations, DOS significantly outperforms four competing methods, receiving 26.24%-43.04% more votes across four benchmarks. These results highlight DOS as a practical and effective solution for improving multi-object image generation.

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### Spatial Preference Rewarding for MLLMs Spatial Understanding

Authors: Han Qiu, Peng Gao, Lewei Lu, Xiaoqin Zhang, Ling Shao, Shijian Lu
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14374v1

Multimodal large language models~(MLLMs) have demonstrated promising spatial understanding capabilities, such as referencing and grounding object descriptions. Despite their successes, MLLMs still fall short in fine-grained spatial perception abilities, such as generating detailed region descriptions or accurately localizing objects. Additionally, they often fail to respond to the user's requirements for desired fine-grained spatial understanding. This issue might arise because existing approaches primarily focus on tuning MLLMs to model pre-annotated instruction data to inject spatial knowledge, without direct supervision of MLLMs' actual responses. We address this issue by SPR, a Spatial Preference Rewarding~(SPR) approach that enhances MLLMs' spatial capabilities by rewarding MLLMs' detailed responses with precise object localization over vague or inaccurate responses. With randomly selected image regions and region descriptions from MLLMs, SPR introduces semantic and localization scores to comprehensively evaluate the text quality and localization quality in MLLM-generated descriptions. We also refine the MLLM descriptions with better localization accuracy and pair the best-scored refinement with the initial descriptions of the lowest score for direct preference optimization, thereby enhancing fine-grained alignment with visual input. Extensive experiments over standard referring and grounding benchmarks show that SPR improves MLLM spatial understanding capabilities effectively with minimal overhead in training. Data and code will be released at https://github.com/hanqiu-hq/SPR

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### From Binary to Bilingual: How the National Weather Service is Using Artificial Intelligence to Develop a Comprehensive Translation Program

Authors: Joseph E. Trujillo-Falcon, Monica L. Bozeman, Liam E. Llewellyn, Samuel T. Halvorson, Meryl Mizell, Stuti Deshpande, Bob Manning, Chris Rohrbach, Ian Blaylock, Angel Montanez, Todd Fagin
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.HC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14369v2

To advance a Weather-Ready Nation, the National Weather Service (NWS) is developing a systematic translation program to better serve the 68.8 million people in the U.S. who do not speak English at home. This article outlines the foundation of an automated translation tool for NWS products, powered by artificial intelligence. The NWS has partnered with LILT, whose patented training process enables large language models (LLMs) to adapt neural machine translation (NMT) tools for weather terminology and messaging. Designed for scalability across Weather Forecast Offices (WFOs) and National Centers, the system is currently being developed in Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Vietnamese, and other widely spoken non-English languages. Rooted in best practices for multilingual risk communication, the system provides accurate, timely, and culturally relevant translations, significantly reducing manual translation time and easing operational workloads across the NWS. To guide the distribution of these products, GIS mapping was used to identify language needs across different NWS regions, helping prioritize resources for the communities that need them most. We also integrated ethical AI practices throughout the program's design, ensuring that transparency, fairness, and human oversight guide how automated translations are created, evaluated, and shared with the public. This work has culminated into a website featuring experimental multilingual NWS products, including translated warnings, 7-day forecasts, and educational campaigns, bringing the country one step closer to a national warning system that reaches all Americans.

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### Understanding the Ability of LLMs to Handle Character-Level Perturbation

Authors: Anyuan Zhuo, Xuefei Ning, Ningyuan Li, Jingyi Zhu, Yu Wang, Pinyan Lu
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14365v4

This work investigates the resilience of contemporary large language models (LLMs) against frequent character-level perturbations. We examine three types of character-level perturbations including introducing numerous typos within words, shuffling the characters in each word, and inserting a large number of invisible characters into the text. Surprisingly, even under severe perturbation, such as shuffling nearly all words character-wise to produce text that is almost unreadable to humans, or inserting invisible characters which are several times more than the visible ones as noise, many LLMs still maintain notable performance. We explore the underlying causes of this robustness and find that LLMs exhibit remarkable resilience to chaotic segmentation and fragmented tokenization. Furthermore, we examine the mechanisms by which LLMs remove perturbations to correctly comprehend text, including both implicit and explicit mechanisms for character-level perturbation. We hope that our findings on the low-level robustness of LLMs will unveil their inherent architectural strengths, reveal the potential risks of their misuse, and inform the reliable deployment of LLMs across diverse application scenarios.

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### AI for Service: Proactive Assistance with AI Glasses

Authors: Zichen Wen, Yiyu Wang, Chenfei Liao, Boxue Yang, Junxian Li, Weifeng Liu, Haocong He, Bolong Feng, Xuyang Liu, Yuanhuiyi Lyu, Xu Zheng, Xuming Hu et al.
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14359v1

In an era where AI is evolving from a passive tool into an active and adaptive companion, we introduce AI for Service (AI4Service), a new paradigm that enables proactive and real-time assistance in daily life. Existing AI services remain largely reactive, responding only to explicit user commands. We argue that a truly intelligent and helpful assistant should be capable of anticipating user needs and taking actions proactively when appropriate. To realize this vision, we propose Alpha-Service, a unified framework that addresses two fundamental challenges: Know When to intervene by detecting service opportunities from egocentric video streams, and Know How to provide both generalized and personalized services. Inspired by the von Neumann computer architecture and based on AI glasses, Alpha-Service consists of five key components: an Input Unit for perception, a Central Processing Unit for task scheduling, an Arithmetic Logic Unit for tool utilization, a Memory Unit for long-term personalization, and an Output Unit for natural human interaction. As an initial exploration, we implement Alpha-Service through a multi-agent system deployed on AI glasses. Case studies, including a real-time Blackjack advisor, a museum tour guide, and a shopping fit assistant, demonstrate its ability to seamlessly perceive the environment, infer user intent, and provide timely and useful assistance without explicit prompts.

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### SUM-AgriVLN: Spatial Understanding Memory for Agricultural Vision-and-Language Navigation

Authors: Xiaobei Zhao, Xingqi Lyu, Xin Chen, Xiang Li
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14357v3

Agricultural robots are emerging as powerful assistants across a wide range of agricultural tasks, nevertheless, they are still heavily relying on manual operations or fixed railways for movement. The A2A benchmark and the AgriVLN method pioneeringly extended Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) to the agricultural domain, successfully navigating agricultural robots from starting points to target positions following natural language instructions, while we observed a limitation: In practical agricultural scenarios, users often give repetitive instructions, but AgriVLN treats every instruction as an independent episode, overlooking the potential to use past spatial memories to assist present episodes. To address this limitation, we propose the SUM module, which executes spatial understanding via 3D reconstructions and saves spatial memories via 2D representations from the past, thereby assisting the decision-maker to recall the spatial characteristics of the scenes in the present. We integrate it into the AgriVLN backbone to build the SUM-AgriVLN method. When evaluated on A2A, it effectively improves SR from 0.47 to 0.54 with only slight sacrifice on NE from 2.91 m to 2.93 m, demonstrating the state-of-the-art performance in the agricultural VLN domain. Code: https://github.com/AlexTraveling/SUM-AgriVLN.

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### Leveraging Cycle-Consistent Anchor Points for Self-Supervised RGB-D Registration

Authors: Siddharth Tourani, Jayaram Reddy, Sarvesh Thakur, K Madhava Krishna, Muhammad Haris Khan, N Dinesh Reddy
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14354v1

With the rise in consumer depth cameras, a wealth of unlabeled RGB-D data has become available. This prompts the question of how to utilize this data for geometric reasoning of scenes. While many RGB-D registration meth- ods rely on geometric and feature-based similarity, we take a different approach. We use cycle-consistent keypoints as salient points to enforce spatial coherence constraints during matching, improving correspondence accuracy. Additionally, we introduce a novel pose block that combines a GRU recurrent unit with transformation synchronization, blending historical and multi-view data. Our approach surpasses previous self- supervised registration methods on ScanNet and 3DMatch, even outperforming some older supervised methods. We also integrate our components into existing methods, showing their effectiveness.

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### CURE: Confidence-driven Unified Reasoning Ensemble Framework for Medical Question Answering

Authors: Ziad Elshaer, Essam A. Rashed
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, physics.med-ph
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14353v1

High-performing medical Large Language Models (LLMs) typically require extensive fine-tuning with substantial computational resources, limiting accessibility for resource-constrained healthcare institutions. This study introduces a confidence-driven multi-model framework that leverages model diversity to enhance medical question answering without fine-tuning. Our framework employs a two-stage architecture: a confidence detection module assesses the primary model's certainty, and an adaptive routing mechanism directs low-confidence queries to Helper models with complementary knowledge for collaborative reasoning. We evaluate our approach using Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct, Phi-4 14B, and Gemma 2 12B across three medical benchmarks; MedQA, MedMCQA, and PubMedQA. Result demonstrate that our framework achieves competitive performance, with particularly strong results in PubMedQA (95.0\%) and MedMCQA (78.0\%). Ablation studies confirm that confidence-aware routing combined with multi-model collaboration substantially outperforms single-model approaches and uniform reasoning strategies. This work establishes that strategic model collaboration offers a practical, computationally efficient pathway to improve medical AI systems, with significant implications for democratizing access to advanced medical AI in resource-limited settings.

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### Beyond One World: Benchmarking Super Heros in Role-Playing Across Multiversal Contexts

Authors: Perapard Ngokpol, Kun Kerdthaisong, Pasin Buakhaw, Pitikorn Khlaisamniang, Supasate Vorathammathorn, Piyalitt Ittichaiwong, Nutchanon Yongsatianchot
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14351v2

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as role-playing agents, yet their capacity to faithfully and consistently portray version-specific characters -- for example, superheroes across comic and cinematic universes -- remains underexplored. Superhero canons such as Marvel and DC provide a rich testbed: decades of storytelling yield multiple incarnations of the same character with distinct histories, values, and moral codes. To study this problem, we introduce Beyond One World, a benchmark for character-grounded roleplay spanning 30 iconic heroes and 90 canon-specific versions. The benchmark comprises two tasks: (i) Canon Events, which probes factual recall of pivotal life stages, and (ii) Moral Dilemmas, which confronts models with ethically charged scenarios. We score responses for canonical accuracy and reasoning fidelity under a framework that separates internal deliberation ("thinking") from outward decisions ("acting"). We further propose Think-Act Matching, a metric that quantifies alignment between reasons and actions and serves as a proxy for model trustworthiness. Experiments across reasoning- and non-reasoning-oriented models yield three findings: (1) chain-of-thought prompting improves narrative coherence in weaker models but can reduce canonical accuracy in stronger ones; (2) cross-version generalization within a character remains a major obstacle; and (3) models often excel at either thinking or acting, but rarely both. Beyond One World exposes critical gaps in multiversal consistency and reasoning alignment, offering a challenging evaluation for role-playing LLMs.

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### Vision-Centric Activation and Coordination for Multimodal Large Language Models

Authors: Yunnan Wang, Fan Lu, Kecheng Zheng, Ziyuan Huang, Ziqiang Li, Wenjun Zeng, Xin Jin
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14349v3

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) integrate image features from visual encoders with LLMs, demonstrating advanced comprehension capabilities. However, mainstream MLLMs are solely supervised by the next-token prediction of textual tokens, neglecting critical vision-centric information essential for analytical abilities. To track this dilemma, we introduce VaCo, which optimizes MLLM representations through Vision-Centric activation and Coordination from multiple vision foundation models (VFMs). VaCo introduces visual discriminative alignment to integrate task-aware perceptual features extracted from VFMs, thereby unifying the optimization of both textual and visual outputs in MLLMs. Specifically, we incorporate the learnable Modular Task Queries (MTQs) and Visual Alignment Layers (VALs) into MLLMs, activating specific visual signals under the supervision of diverse VFMs. To coordinate representation conflicts across VFMs, the crafted Token Gateway Mask (TGM) restricts the information flow among multiple groups of MTQs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VaCo significantly improves the performance of different MLLMs on various benchmarks, showcasing its superior capabilities in visual comprehension.

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### BinCtx: Multi-Modal Representation Learning for Robust Android App Behavior Detection

Authors: Zichen Liu, Shao Yang, Xusheng Xiao
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14344v1

Mobile app markets host millions of apps, yet undesired behaviors (e.g., disruptive ads, illegal redirection, payment deception) remain hard to catch because they often do not rely on permission-protected APIs and can be easily camouflaged via UI or metadata edits. We present BINCTX, a learning approach that builds multi-modal representations of an app from (i) a global bytecode-as-image view that captures code-level semantics and family-style patterns, (ii) a contextual view (manifested actions, components, declared permissions, URL/IP constants) indicating how behaviors are triggered, and (iii) a third-party-library usage view summarizing invocation frequencies along inter-component call paths. The three views are embedded and fused to train a contextual-aware classifier. On real-world malware and benign apps, BINCTX attains a macro F1 of 94.73%, outperforming strong baselines by at least 14.92%. It remains robust under commercial obfuscation (F1 84% post-obfuscation) and is more resistant to adversarial samples than state-of-the-art bytecode-only systems.

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### Jet Functors and Weil Algebras in Automatic Differentiation: A Geometric Analysis

Authors: Amandip Sangha
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.LG, math.DG, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14342v2

We present a differential-geometric formulation of automatic differentiation (AD) based on jet functors and Weil algebras. In this framework, forward- and reverse-mode differentiation arise naturally as pushforward and cotangent pullback, while higher-order differentiation corresponds to evaluation in a Weil algebra. This construction provides a unified, coordinate-free view of derivative propagation and clarifies the algebraic structure underlying AD. All results are realized in modern JAX code, where the Weil-mode formulation computes all mixed derivatives in a single forward pass with cost linear in the algebra dimension. The resulting implementation achieves algebraically exact and numerically stable differentiation with predictable scaling, demonstrating that geometric abstraction can yield more efficient and transparent computational differentiation systems. Code is available at https://git.nilu.no/geometric-ad/jet-weil-ad

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### A Density-Informed Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Framework for Improving Breast Cancer Detection Across All Breast Densities

Authors: Siva Teja Kakileti, Bharath Govindaraju, Sudhakar Sampangi, Geetha Manjunath
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: eess.IV, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14340v1

Mammography, the current standard for breast cancer screening, has reduced sensitivity in women with dense breast tissue, contributing to missed or delayed diagnoses. Thermalytix, an AI-based thermal imaging modality, captures functional vascular and metabolic cues that may complement mammographic structural data. This study investigates whether a breast density-informed multi-modal AI framework can improve cancer detection by dynamically selecting the appropriate imaging modality based on breast tissue composition. A total of 324 women underwent both mammography and thermal imaging. Mammography images were analyzed using a multi-view deep learning model, while Thermalytix assessed thermal images through vascular and thermal radiomics. The proposed framework utilized Mammography AI for fatty breasts and Thermalytix AI for dense breasts, optimizing predictions based on tissue type. This multi-modal AI framework achieved a sensitivity of 94.55% (95% CI: 88.54-100) and specificity of 79.93% (95% CI: 75.14-84.71), outperforming standalone mammography AI (sensitivity 81.82%, specificity 86.25%) and Thermalytix AI (sensitivity 92.73%, specificity 75.46%). Importantly, the sensitivity of Mammography dropped significantly in dense breasts (67.86%) versus fatty breasts (96.30%), whereas Thermalytix AI maintained high and consistent sensitivity in both (92.59% and 92.86%, respectively). This demonstrates that a density-informed multi-modal AI framework can overcome key limitations of unimodal screening and deliver high performance across diverse breast compositions. The proposed framework is interpretable, low-cost, and easily deployable, offering a practical path to improving breast cancer screening outcomes in both high-resource and resource-limited settings.

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### Stop-RAG: Value-Based Retrieval Control for Iterative RAG

Authors: Jaewan Park, Solbee Cho, Jay-Yoon Lee
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14337v1

Iterative retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables large language models to answer complex multi-hop questions, but each additional loop increases latency, costs, and the risk of introducing distracting evidence, motivating the need for an efficient stopping strategy. Existing methods either use a predetermined number of iterations or rely on confidence proxies that poorly reflect whether more retrieval will actually help. We cast iterative RAG as a finite-horizon Markov decision process and introduce Stop-RAG, a value-based controller that adaptively decides when to stop retrieving. Trained with full-width forward-view Q($λ$) targets from complete trajectories, Stop-RAG learns effective stopping policies while remaining compatible with black-box APIs and existing pipelines. On multi-hop question-answering benchmarks, Stop-RAG consistently outperforms both fixed-iteration baselines and prompting-based stopping with LLMs. These results highlight adaptive stopping as a key missing component in current agentic systems, and demonstrate that value-based control can improve the accuracy of RAG systems.

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### DARTS-GT: Differentiable Architecture Search for Graph Transformers with Quantifiable Instance-Specific Interpretability Analysis

Authors: Shruti Sarika Chakraborty, Peter Minary
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14336v2

Graph Transformers (GTs) have emerged as powerful architectures for graph-structured data, yet remain constrained by rigid designs and lack quantifiable interpretability. Current state-of-the-art GTs commit to fixed GNN types across all layers, missing potential benefits of depth-specific component selection, while their complex architectures become opaque where performance gains cannot be distinguished between meaningful patterns and spurious correlations. We redesign GT attention through asymmetry, decoupling structural encoding from feature representation: queries derive from node features while keys and values come from GNN transformations. Within this framework, we use Differentiable ARchiTecture Search (DARTS) to select optimal GNN operators at each layer, enabling depth-wise heterogeneity inside transformer attention itself (DARTS-GT). To understand discovered architectures, we develop the first quantitative interpretability framework for GTs through causal ablation. Our metrics (Head-deviation, Specialization, and Focus), identify which heads and nodes drive predictions while enabling model comparison. Experiments across eight benchmarks show DARTS-GT achieves state-of-the-art on four datasets while remaining competitive on others, with discovered architectures revealing dataset-specific patterns. Our interpretability analysis reveals that visual attention salience and causal importance do not always correlate, indicating widely used visualization approaches may miss components that actually matter. Crucially, heterogeneous architectures found by DARTS-GT consistently produced more interpretable models than baselines, establishing that Graph Transformers need not choose between performance and interpretability.

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### A Robust Classification Method using Hybrid Word Embedding for Early Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease

Authors: Yangyang Li
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG, eess.AS
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14332v1

Early detection of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is greatly beneficial to AD patients, leading to early treatments that lessen symptoms and alleviating financial burden of health care. As one of the leading signs of AD, language capability changes can be used for early diagnosis of AD. In this paper, I develop a robust classification method using hybrid word embedding and fine-tuned hyperparameters to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy in the early detection of AD. Specifically, we create a hybrid word embedding based on word vectors from Doc2Vec and ELMo to obtain perplexity scores of the sentences. The scores identify whether a sentence is fluent or not and capture semantic context of the sentences. I enrich the word embedding by adding linguistic features to analyze syntax and semantics. Further, we input an embedded feature vector into logistic regression and fine tune hyperparameters throughout the pipeline. By tuning hyperparameters of the machine learning pipeline (e.g., model regularization parameter, learning rate and vector size of Doc2Vec, and vector size of ELMo), I achieve 91% classification accuracy and an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 97% in distinguishing early AD from healthy subjects. Based on my knowledge, my model with 91% accuracy and 97% AUC outperforms the best existing NLP model for AD diagnosis with an accuracy of 88% (32). I study the model stability through repeated experiments and find that the model is stable even though the training data is split randomly (standard deviation of accuracy = 0.0403; standard deviation of AUC = 0.0174). This affirms our proposed method is accurate and stable. This model can be used as a large-scale screening method for AD, as well as a complementary examination for doctors to detect AD.

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### LLM Priors for ERM over Programs

Authors: Shivam Singhal, Priyadarsi Mishra, Eran Malach, Tomer Galanti
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14331v3

We study program-learning methods that are efficient in both samples and computation. Classical learning theory suggests that when the target admits a short program description, for example a short piece of ``Python code'', it can be learned from few examples by ERM over the program class. However, this approach relies on enumerating candidate programs, which is typically exponential in the description length; gradient-based training avoids this explicit search but, for some families of short programs, can require exponentially many samples to succeed. We propose \textsc{LLM-PV}, a propose-and-verify recipe that enables ERM-style selection over a discrete program class without exhaustive enumeration: a pretrained LLM induces a proposal distribution over candidate programs, each proposal is executed and scored on a held-out validation set, and the best program is selected, with no gradient updates or validation feedback used to adapt the sampling distribution. Across algorithmic tasks including parity variants, pattern matching, and primality testing, \textsc{LLM-PV} often recovers the exact underlying rule from a small labeled set and generalizes far beyond the training sequence lengths, while SGD-trained transformers, fine-tuning, in-context learning, and classical ML baselines can fit the training data yet fail to generalize reliably. Together, these results suggest that pretrained LLM priors can serve as effective search biases for ERM, narrowing the gap between statistical and computational efficiency.

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### Metacognitive Self-Correction for Multi-Agent System via Prototype-Guided Next-Execution Reconstruction

Authors: Xu Shen, Qi Zhang, Song Wang, Zhen Tan, Xinyu Zhao, Laura Yao, Vaishnav Tadiparthi, Hossein Nourkhiz Mahjoub, Ehsan Moradi Pari, Kwonjoon Lee, Tianlong Chen
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14319v2

Large Language Model based multi-agent systems (MAS) excel at collaborative problem solving but remain brittle to cascading errors: a single faulty step can propagate across agents and disrupt the trajectory. In this paper, we present MASC, a metacognitive framework that endows MAS with real-time, unsupervised, step-level error detection and self-correction. MASC rethinks detection as history-conditioned anomaly scoring via two complementary designs: (1) Next-Execution Reconstruction, which predicts the embedding of the next step from the query and interaction history to capture causal consistency, and (2) Prototype-Guided Enhancement, which learns a prototype prior over normal-step embeddings and uses it to stabilize reconstruction and anomaly scoring under sparse context (e.g., early steps). When an anomaly step is flagged, MASC triggers a correction agent to revise the acting agent's output before information flows downstream. On the Who&amp;When benchmark, MASC consistently outperforms all baselines, improving step-level error detection by up to 8.47% AUC-ROC ; When plugged into diverse MAS frameworks, it delivers consistent end-to-end gains across architectures, confirming that our metacognitive monitoring and targeted correction can mitigate error propagation with minimal overhead.

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### Evaluating &amp; Reducing Deceptive Dialogue From Language Models with Multi-turn RL

Authors: Marwa Abdulhai, Ryan Cheng, Aryansh Shrivastava, Natasha Jaques, Yarin Gal, Sergey Levine
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14318v1

Large Language Models (LLMs) interact with millions of people worldwide in applications such as customer support, education and healthcare. However, their ability to produce deceptive outputs, whether intentionally or inadvertently, poses significant safety concerns. The unpredictable nature of LLM behavior, combined with insufficient safeguards against hallucination, misinformation, and user manipulation, makes their misuse a serious, real-world risk. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which LLMs engage in deception within dialogue, and propose the belief misalignment metric to quantify deception. We evaluate deception across four distinct dialogue scenarios, using five established deception detection metrics and our proposed metric. Our findings reveal this novel deception measure correlates more closely with human judgments than any existing metrics we test. Additionally, our benchmarking of eight state-of-the-art models indicates that LLMs naturally exhibit deceptive behavior in approximately 26% of dialogue turns, even when prompted with seemingly benign objectives. When prompted to deceive, LLMs are capable of increasing deceptiveness by as much as 31% relative to baselines. Unexpectedly, models trained with RLHF, the predominant approach for ensuring the safety of widely-deployed LLMs, still exhibit deception at a rate of 43% on average. Given that deception in dialogue is a behavior that develops over an interaction history, its effective evaluation and mitigation necessitates moving beyond single-utterance analyses. We introduce a multi-turn reinforcement learning methodology to fine-tune LLMs to reduce deceptive behaviors, leading to a 77.6% reduction compared to other instruction-tuned models.

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### Column Generation with Domain-Independent Dynamic Programming

Authors: Ryo Kuroiwa, Edward Lam
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: math.OC, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14317v2

Column generation and branch-and-price (B&amp;P) are leading mathematical optimization methods for large-scale exact optimization, iterating between solving a master problem and a pricing problem. Due to the difficulty of discrete optimization, high-performance column generation often relies on a custom pricing algorithm built specifically to exploit the problem's structure. This bespoke nature of the pricing solver makes column generation a problem-specific method and hinders the use of generic implementations across a wide range of problems. We show that domain-independent dynamic programming (DIDP), a model-based paradigm for dynamic programming, can be used as a generic pricing solver. We develop new modeling features and a solving algorithm for DIDP to achieve better performance in typical pricing problems. We demonstrate that in four problem classes, our implementations of B&amp;P, with pricing by DIDP, empirically outperform an existing automated B&amp;P solver and B&amp;P with pricing by mixed-integer programming or constraint programming.

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### Active Measuring in Reinforcement Learning With Delayed Negative Effects

Authors: Daiqi Gao, Ziping Xu, Aseel Rawashdeh, Predrag Klasnja, Susan A. Murphy
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14315v1

Measuring states in reinforcement learning (RL) can be costly in real-world settings and may negatively influence future outcomes. We introduce the Actively Observable Markov Decision Process (AOMDP), where an agent not only selects control actions but also decides whether to measure the latent state. The measurement action reveals the true latent state but may have a negative delayed effect on the environment. We show that this reduced uncertainty may provably improve sample efficiency and increase the value of the optimal policy despite these costs. We formulate an AOMDP as a periodic partially observable MDP and propose an online RL algorithm based on belief states. To approximate the belief states, we further propose a sequential Monte Carlo method to jointly approximate the posterior of unknown static environment parameters and unobserved latent states. We evaluate the proposed algorithm in a digital health application, where the agent decides when to deliver digital interventions and when to assess users' health status through surveys.

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### A Multi-domain Image Translative Diffusion StyleGAN for Iris Presentation Attack Detection

Authors: Shivangi Yadav, Arun Ross
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14314v1

An iris biometric system can be compromised by presentation attacks (PAs) where artifacts such as artificial eyes, printed eye images, or cosmetic contact lenses are presented to the system. To counteract this, several presentation attack detection (PAD) methods have been developed. However, there is a scarcity of datasets for training and evaluating iris PAD techniques due to the implicit difficulties in constructing and imaging PAs. To address this, we introduce the Multi-domain Image Translative Diffusion StyleGAN (MID-StyleGAN), a new framework for generating synthetic ocular images that captures the PA and bonafide characteristics in multiple domains such as bonafide, printed eyes and cosmetic contact lens. MID-StyleGAN combines the strengths of diffusion models and generative adversarial networks (GANs) to produce realistic and diverse synthetic data. Our approach utilizes a multi-domain architecture that enables the translation between bonafide ocular images and different PA domains. The model employs an adaptive loss function tailored for ocular data to maintain domain consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MID-StyleGAN outperforms existing methods in generating high-quality synthetic ocular images. The generated data was used to significantly enhance the performance of PAD systems, providing a scalable solution to the data scarcity problem in iris and ocular biometrics. For example, on the LivDet2020 dataset, the true detect rate at 1% false detect rate improved from 93.41% to 98.72%, showcasing the impact of the proposed method.

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### Terrarium: Revisiting the Blackboard for Multi-Agent Safety, Privacy, and Security Studies

Authors: Mason Nakamura, Abhinav Kumar, Saaduddin Mahmud, Sahar Abdelnabi, Shlomo Zilberstein, Eugene Bagdasarian
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14312v1

A multi-agent system (MAS) powered by large language models (LLMs) can automate tedious user tasks such as meeting scheduling that requires inter-agent collaboration. LLMs enable nuanced protocols that account for unstructured private data, user constraints, and preferences. However, this design introduces new risks, including misalignment and attacks by malicious parties that compromise agents or steal user data. In this paper, we propose the Terrarium framework for fine-grained study on safety, privacy, and security in LLM-based MAS. We repurpose the blackboard design, an early approach in multi-agent systems, to create a modular, configurable testbed for multi-agent collaboration. We identify key attack vectors such as misalignment, malicious agents, compromised communication, and data poisoning. We implement three collaborative MAS scenarios with four representative attacks to demonstrate the framework's flexibility. By providing tools to rapidly prototype, evaluate, and iterate on defenses and designs, Terrarium aims to accelerate progress toward trustworthy multi-agent systems.

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### MERLIN: A Testbed for Multilingual Multimodal Entity Recognition and Linking

Authors: Sathyanarayanan Ramamoorthy, Vishwa Shah, Simran Khanuja, Zaid Sheikh, Shan Jie, Ann Chia, Shearman Chua, Graham Neubig
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14307v1

This paper introduces MERLIN, a novel testbed system for the task of Multilingual Multimodal Entity Linking. The created dataset includes BBC news article titles, paired with corresponding images, in five languages: Hindi, Japanese, Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Tamil, featuring over 7,000 named entity mentions linked to 2,500 unique Wikidata entities. We also include several benchmarks using multilingual and multimodal entity linking methods exploring different language models like LLaMa-2 and Aya-23. Our findings indicate that incorporating visual data improves the accuracy of entity linking, especially for entities where the textual context is ambiguous or insufficient, and particularly for models that do not have strong multilingual abilities. For the work, the dataset, methods are available here at https://github.com/rsathya4802/merlin

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### MathMist: A Parallel Multilingual Benchmark Dataset for Mathematical Problem Solving and Reasoning

Authors: Mahbub E Sobhani, Md. Faiyaz Abdullah Sayeedi, Tasnim Mohiuddin, Md Mofijul Islam, Swakkhar Shatabda
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14305v2

Mathematical reasoning remains one of the most challenging domains for large language models (LLMs), requiring not only linguistic understanding but also structured logical deduction and numerical precision. While recent LLMs demonstrate strong general-purpose reasoning abilities, their mathematical competence across diverse languages remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on English or a narrow subset of high-resource languages, leaving significant gaps in assessing multilingual and cross-lingual mathematical reasoning. To address this, we introduce MATHMIST, a parallel multilingual benchmark for mathematical problem solving and reasoning. MATHMIST encompasses 2,890 parallel Bangla-English gold standard artifacts, totaling approximately 30K aligned question--answer pairs across thirteen languages, representing an extensive coverage of high-, medium-, and low-resource linguistic settings. The dataset captures linguistic variety, multiple types of problem settings, and solution synthesizing capabilities. We systematically evaluate a diverse suite of models, including open-source small and medium LLMs, proprietary systems, and multilingual-reasoning-focused models under zero-shot, chain-of-thought (CoT), perturbated reasoning, and code-switched reasoning paradigms. Our results reveal persistent deficiencies in LLMs' ability to perform consistent and interpretable mathematical reasoning across languages, with pronounced degradation in low-resource settings. All the codes and data are available at GitHub: https://github.com/mahbubhimel/MathMist

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### Watermarking for Factuality: Guiding Vision-Language Models Toward Truth via Tri-layer Contrastive Decoding

Authors: Kyungryul Back, Seongbeom Park, Milim Kim, Mincheol Kwon, SangHyeok Lee, Hyunyoung Lee, Junhee Cho, Seunghyun Park, Jinkyu Kim
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14304v1

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have recently shown promising results on various multimodal tasks, even achieving human-comparable performance in certain cases. Nevertheless, LVLMs remain prone to hallucinations -- they often rely heavily on a single modality or memorize training data without properly grounding their outputs. To address this, we propose a training-free, tri-layer contrastive decoding with watermarking, which proceeds in three steps: (1) select a mature layer and an amateur layer among the decoding layers, (2) identify a pivot layer using a watermark-related question to assess whether the layer is visually well-grounded, and (3) apply tri-layer contrastive decoding to generate the final output. Experiments on public benchmarks such as POPE, MME and AMBER demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in reducing hallucinations in LVLMs and generates more visually grounded responses.

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### Constraint-Driven Small Language Models Based on Agent and OpenAlex Knowledge Graph: Mining Conceptual Pathways and Discovering Innovation Points in Academic Papers

Authors: Ziye Xia, Sergei S. Ospichev
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14303v2

In recent years, the rapid increase in academic publications across various fields has posed severe challenges for academic paper analysis: scientists struggle to timely and comprehensively track the latest research findings and methodologies. Key concept extraction has proven to be an effective analytical paradigm, and its automation has been achieved with the widespread application of language models in industrial and scientific domains. However, existing paper databases are mostly limited to similarity matching and basic classification of key concepts, failing to deeply explore the relational networks between concepts. This paper is based on the OpenAlex opensource knowledge graph. By analyzing nearly 8,000 open-source paper data from Novosibirsk State University, we discovered a strong correlation between the distribution patterns of paper key concept paths and both innovation points and rare paths. We propose a prompt engineering-based key concept path analysis method. This method leverages small language models to achieve precise key concept extraction and innovation point identification, and constructs an agent based on a knowledge graph constraint mechanism to enhance analysis accuracy. Through fine-tuning of the Qwen and DeepSeek models, we achieved significant improvements in accuracy, with the models publicly available on the Hugging Face platform.

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### A Guardrail for Safety Preservation: When Safety-Sensitive Subspace Meets Harmful-Resistant Null-Space

Authors: Bingjie Zhang, Yibo Yang, Zhe Ren, Dandan Guo, Jindong Gu, Philip Torr, Bernard Ghanem
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14301v2

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in diverse tasks, yet their safety alignment remains fragile during adaptation. Even when fine-tuning on benign data or with low-rank adaptation, pre-trained safety behaviors are easily degraded, leading to harmful responses in the fine-tuned models. To address this challenge, we propose GuardSpace, a guardrail framework for preserving safety alignment throughout fine-tuning, composed of two key components: a safety-sensitive subspace and a harmful-resistant null space. First, we explicitly decompose pre-trained weights into safety-relevant and safety-irrelevant components using covariance-preconditioned singular value decomposition, and initialize low-rank adapters from the safety-irrelevant ones, while freezing safety-relevant components to preserve their associated safety mechanism. Second, we construct a null space projector that restricts adapter updates from altering safe outputs on harmful prompts, thereby maintaining the original refusal behavior. Experiments with various pre-trained models on multiple downstream tasks demonstrate that GuardSpace achieves superior performance over existing methods. Notably, for Llama-2-7B-Chat fine-tuned on GSM8K, GuardSpace outperforms the state-of-the-art method AsFT, reducing the average harmful score from 14.4% to 3.6%, while improving the accuracy from from 26.0% to 28.0%.

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### Expertise need not monopolize: Action-Specialized Mixture of Experts for Vision-Language-Action Learning

Authors: Weijie Shen, Yitian Liu, Yuhao Wu, Zhixuan Liang, Sijia Gu, Dehui Wang, Tian Nian, Lei Xu, Yusen Qin, Jiangmiao Pang, Xinping Guan, Xiaokang Yang et al.
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14300v1

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are experiencing rapid development and demonstrating promising capabilities in robotic manipulation tasks. However, scaling up VLA models presents several critical challenges: (1) Training new VLA models from scratch demands substantial computational resources and extensive datasets. Given the current scarcity of robot data, it becomes particularly valuable to fully leverage well-pretrained VLA model weights during the scaling process. (2) Real-time control requires carefully balancing model capacity with computational efficiency. To address these challenges, We propose AdaMoE, a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture that inherits pretrained weights from dense VLA models, and scales up the action expert by substituting the feedforward layers into sparsely activated MoE layers. AdaMoE employs a decoupling technique that decouples expert selection from expert weighting through an independent scale adapter working alongside the traditional router. This enables experts to be selected based on task relevance while contributing with independently controlled weights, allowing collaborative expert utilization rather than winner-takes-all dynamics. Our approach demonstrates that expertise need not monopolize. Instead, through collaborative expert utilization, we can achieve superior performance while maintaining computational efficiency. AdaMoE consistently outperforms the baseline model across key benchmarks, delivering performance gains of 1.8% on LIBERO and 9.3% on RoboTwin. Most importantly, a substantial 21.5% improvement in real-world experiments validates its practical effectiveness for robotic manipulation tasks.

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### TED++: Submanifold-Aware Backdoor Detection via Layerwise Tubular-Neighbourhood Screening

Authors: Nam Le, Leo Yu Zhang, Kewen Liao, Shirui Pan, Wei Luo
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14299v1

As deep neural networks power increasingly critical applications, stealthy backdoor attacks, where poisoned training inputs trigger malicious model behaviour while appearing benign, pose a severe security risk. Many existing defences are vulnerable when attackers exploit subtle distance-based anomalies or when clean examples are scarce. To meet this challenge, we introduce TED++, a submanifold-aware framework that effectively detects subtle backdoors that evade existing defences. TED++ begins by constructing a tubular neighbourhood around each class's hidden-feature manifold, estimating its local ``thickness'' from a handful of clean activations. It then applies Locally Adaptive Ranking (LAR) to detect any activation that drifts outside the admissible tube. By aggregating these LAR-adjusted ranks across all layers, TED++ captures how faithfully an input remains on the evolving class submanifolds. Based on such characteristic ``tube-constrained'' behaviour, TED++ flags inputs whose LAR-based ranking sequences deviate significantly. Extensive experiments are conducted on benchmark datasets and tasks, demonstrating that TED++ achieves state-of-the-art detection performance under both adaptive-attack and limited-data scenarios. Remarkably, even with only five held-out examples per class, TED++ still delivers near-perfect detection, achieving gains of up to 14\% in AUROC over the next-best method. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/namle-w/TEDpp.

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### Rethinking Schema Linking: A Context-Aware Bidirectional Retrieval Approach for Text-to-SQL

Authors: Md Mahadi Hasan Nahid, Davood Rafiei, Weiwei Zhang, Yong Zhang
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.CL, cs.IR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14296v2

Schema linking -- the process of aligning natural language questions with database schema elements -- is a critical yet underexplored component of Text-to-SQL systems. While recent methods have focused primarily on improving SQL generation, they often neglect the retrieval of relevant schema elements, which can lead to hallucinations and execution failures. In this work, we propose a context-aware bidirectional schema retrieval framework that treats schema linking as a standalone problem. Our approach combines two complementary strategies: table-first retrieval followed by column selection, and column-first retrieval followed by table selection. It is further augmented with techniques such as question decomposition, keyword extraction, and keyphrase extraction. Through comprehensive evaluations on challenging benchmarks such as BIRD and Spider, we demonstrate that our method significantly improves schema recall while reducing false positives. Moreover, SQL generation using our retrieved schema consistently outperforms full-schema baselines and closely approaches oracle performance, all without requiring query refinement. Notably, our method narrows the performance gap between full and perfect schema settings by 50\%. Our findings highlight schema linking as a powerful lever for enhancing Text-to-SQL accuracy and efficiency.

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### Learning Human-Humanoid Coordination for Collaborative Object Carrying

Authors: Yushi Du, Yixuan Li, Baoxiong Jia, Yutang Lin, Pei Zhou, Wei Liang, Yanchao Yang, Siyuan Huang
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14293v1

Human-humanoid collaboration shows significant promise for applications in healthcare, domestic assistance, and manufacturing. While compliant robot-human collaboration has been extensively developed for robotic arms, enabling compliant human-humanoid collaboration remains largely unexplored due to humanoids' complex whole-body dynamics. In this paper, we propose a proprioception-only reinforcement learning approach, COLA, that combines leader and follower behaviors within a single policy. The model is trained in a closed-loop environment with dynamic object interactions to predict object motion patterns and human intentions implicitly, enabling compliant collaboration to maintain load balance through coordinated trajectory planning. We evaluate our approach through comprehensive simulator and real-world experiments on collaborative carrying tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness, generalization, and robustness of our model across various terrains and objects. Simulation experiments demonstrate that our model reduces human effort by 24.7%. compared to baseline approaches while maintaining object stability. Real-world experiments validate robust collaborative carrying across different object types (boxes, desks, stretchers, etc.) and movement patterns (straight-line, turning, slope climbing). Human user studies with 23 participants confirm an average improvement of 27.4% compared to baseline models. Our method enables compliant human-humanoid collaborative carrying without requiring external sensors or complex interaction models, offering a practical solution for real-world deployment.

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### Enhancing Time-Series Anomaly Detection by Integrating Spectral-Residual Bottom-Up Attention with Reservoir Computing

Authors: Hayato Nihei, Sou Nobukawa, Yusuke Sakemi, Kazuyuki Aihara
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14287v1

Reservoir computing (RC) establishes the basis for the processing of time-series data by exploiting the high-dimensional spatiotemporal response of a recurrent neural network to an input signal. In particular, RC trains only the output layer weights. This simplicity has drawn attention especially in Edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. Edge AI enables time-series anomaly detection in real time, which is important because detection delays can lead to serious incidents. However, achieving adequate anomaly-detection performance with RC alone may require an unacceptably large reservoir on resource-constrained edge devices. Without enlarging the reservoir, attention mechanisms can improve accuracy, although they may require substantial computation and undermine the learning efficiency of RC. In this study, to improve the anomaly detection performance of RC without sacrificing learning efficiency, we propose a spectral residual RC (SR-RC) that integrates the spectral residual (SR) method - a learning-free, bottom-up attention mechanism - with RC. We demonstrated that SR-RC outperformed conventional RC and logistic-regression models based on values extracted by the SR method across benchmark tasks and real-world time-series datasets. Moreover, because the SR method, similarly to RC, is well suited for hardware implementation, SR-RC suggests a practical direction for deploying RC as Edge AI for time-series anomaly detection.

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### Stable Prediction of Adverse Events in Medical Time-Series Data

Authors: Mayank Keoliya, Seewon Choi, Rajeev Alur, Mayur Naik, Eric Wong
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14286v1

Early event prediction (EEP) systems continuously estimate a patient's imminent risk to support clinical decision-making. For bedside trust, risk trajectories must be accurate and temporally stable, shifting only with new, relevant evidence. However, current benchmarks (a) ignore stability of risk scores and (b) evaluate mainly on tabular inputs, leaving trajectory behavior untested. To address this gap, we introduce CAREBench, an EEP benchmark that evaluates deployability using multi-modal inputs-tabular EHR, ECG waveforms, and clinical text-and assesses temporal stability alongside predictive accuracy. We propose a stability metric that quantifies short-term variability in per-patient risk and penalizes abrupt oscillations based on local-Lipschitz constants. CAREBench spans six prediction tasks such as sepsis onset and compares classical learners, deep sequence models, and zero-shot LLMs. Across tasks, existing methods, especially LLMs, struggle to jointly optimize accuracy and stability, with notably poor recall at high-precision operating points. These results highlight the need for models that produce evidence-aligned, stable trajectories to earn clinician trust in continuous monitoring settings. (Code: https://github.com/SeewonChoi/CAREBench.)

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### Beyond a Single Perspective: Towards a Realistic Evaluation of Website Fingerprinting Attacks

Authors: Xinhao Deng, Jingyou Chen, Linxiao Yu, Yixiang Zhang, Zhongyi Gu, Changhao Qiu, Xiyuan Zhao, Ke Xu, Qi Li
Published: 2025-10-16
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14283v1

Website Fingerprinting (WF) attacks exploit patterns in encrypted traffic to infer the websites visited by users, posing a serious threat to anonymous communication systems. Although recent WF techniques achieve over 90% accuracy in controlled experimental settings, most studies remain confined to single scenarios, overlooking the complexity of real-world environments. This paper presents the first systematic and comprehensive evaluation of existing WF attacks under diverse realistic conditions, including defense mechanisms, traffic drift, multi-tab browsing, early-stage detection, open-world settings, and few-shot scenarios. Experimental results show that many WF techniques with strong performance in isolated settings degrade significantly when facing other conditions. Since real-world environments often combine multiple challenges, current WF attacks are difficult to apply directly in practice. This study highlights the limitations of WF attacks and introduces a multidimensional evaluation framework, offering critical insights for developing more robust and practical WF attacks.

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