# Research Papers — 2025-10 · bundle page 186 of 217 > Full-text markdown of papers #9251–9300 of 10843 published in 2025-10, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 10843-paper 2025-10 archive (50 papers per file). Canonical page: https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-10/page/186 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-10/page/185.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-10/page/187.md) ### Read the Scene, Not the Script: Outcome-Aware Safety for LLMs Authors: Rui Wu, Yihao Quan, Zeru Shi, Zhenting Wang, Yanshu Li, Ruixiang Tang Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04320v1 Safety-aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) still show two dominant failure modes: they are easily jailbroken, or they over-refuse harmless inputs that contain sensitive surface signals. We trace both to a common cause: current models reason weakly about links between actions and outcomes and over-rely on surface-form signals, lexical or stylistic cues that do not encode consequences. We define this failure mode as Consequence-blindness. To study consequence-blindness, we build a benchmark named CB-Bench covering four risk scenarios that vary whether semantic risk aligns with outcome risk, enabling evaluation under both matched and mismatched conditions which are often ignored by existing safety benchmarks. Mainstream models consistently fail to separate these risks and exhibit consequence-blindness, indicating that consequence-blindness is widespread and systematic. To mitigate consequence-blindness, we introduce CS-Chain-4k, a consequence-reasoning dataset for safety alignment. Models fine-tuned on CS-Chain-4k show clear gains against semantic-camouflage jailbreaks and reduce over-refusal on harmless inputs, while maintaining utility and generalization on other benchmarks. These results clarify the limits of current alignment, establish consequence-aware reasoning as a core alignment goal and provide a more practical and reproducible evaluation path. --- ### Adaptive Coverage Policies in Conformal Prediction Authors: Etienne Gauthier, Francis Bach, Michael I. Jordan Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04318v2 Traditional conformal prediction methods construct prediction sets such that the true label falls within the set with a user-specified coverage level. However, poorly chosen coverage levels can result in uninformative predictions, either producing overly conservative sets when the coverage level is too high, or empty sets when it is too low. Moreover, the fixed coverage level cannot adapt to the specific characteristics of each individual example, limiting the flexibility and efficiency of these methods. In this work, we leverage recent advances in e-values and post-hoc conformal inference, which allow the use of data-dependent coverage levels while maintaining valid statistical guarantees. We propose to optimize an adaptive coverage policy by training a neural network using a leave-one-out procedure on the calibration set, allowing the coverage level and the resulting prediction set size to vary with the difficulty of each individual example. We support our approach with theoretical coverage guarantees and demonstrate its practical benefits through a series of experiments. --- ### FairAgent: Democratizing Fairness-Aware Machine Learning with LLM-Powered Agents Authors: Yucong Dai, Lu Zhang, Feng Luo, Mashrur Chowdhury, Yongkai Wu Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04317v1 Training fair and unbiased machine learning models is crucial for high-stakes applications, yet it presents significant challenges. Effective bias mitigation requires deep expertise in fairness definitions, metrics, data preprocessing, and machine learning techniques. In addition, the complex process of balancing model performance with fairness requirements while properly handling sensitive attributes makes fairness-aware model development inaccessible to many practitioners. To address these challenges, we introduce FairAgent, an LLM-powered automated system that significantly simplifies fairness-aware model development. FairAgent eliminates the need for deep technical expertise by automatically analyzing datasets for potential biases, handling data preprocessing and feature engineering, and implementing appropriate bias mitigation strategies based on user requirements. Our experiments demonstrate that FairAgent achieves significant performance improvements while significantly reducing development time and expertise requirements, making fairness-aware machine learning more accessible to practitioners. --- ### Crash Severity Prediction Using Deep Learning Approaches: A Hybrid CNN-RNN Framework Authors: Sahar Koohfar Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04316v1 Accurate and timely prediction of crash severity is crucial in mitigating the severe consequences of traffic accidents. Accurate and timely prediction of crash severity is crucial in mitigating the severe consequences of traffic accidents. In order to provide appropriate levels of medical assistance and transportation services, an intelligent transportation system relies on effective prediction methods. Deep learning models have gained popularity in this domain due to their capability to capture non-linear relationships among variables. In this research, we have implemented a hybrid CNN-RNN deep learning model for crash severity prediction and compared its performance against widely used statistical and machine learning models such as logistic regression, naïve bayes classifier, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), decision tree, and individual deep learning models: RNN and CNN. This study employs a methodology that considers the interconnected relationships between various features of traffic accidents. The study was conducted using a dataset of 15,870 accident records gathered over a period of seven years between 2015 and 2021 on Virginia highway I-64. The findings demonstrate that the proposed CNN-RNN hybrid model has outperformed all benchmark models in terms of predicting crash severity. This result illustrates the effectiveness of the hybrid model as it combines the advantages of both RNN and CNN models in order to achieve greater accuracy in the prediction process. --- ### GenAR: Next-Scale Autoregressive Generation for Spatial Gene Expression Prediction Authors: Jiarui Ouyang, Yihui Wang, Yihang Gao, Yingxue Xu, Shu Yang, Hao Chen Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04315v1 Spatial Transcriptomics (ST) offers spatially resolved gene expression but remains costly. Predicting expression directly from widely available Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) stained images presents a cost-effective alternative. However, most computational approaches (i) predict each gene independently, overlooking co-expression structure, and (ii) cast the task as continuous regression despite expression being discrete counts. This mismatch can yield biologically implausible outputs and complicate downstream analyses. We introduce GenAR, a multi-scale autoregressive framework that refines predictions from coarse to fine. GenAR clusters genes into hierarchical groups to expose cross-gene dependencies, models expression as codebook-free discrete token generation to directly predict raw counts, and conditions decoding on fused histological and spatial embeddings. From an information-theoretic perspective, the discrete formulation avoids log-induced biases and the coarse-to-fine factorization aligns with a principled conditional decomposition. Extensive experimental results on four Spatial Transcriptomics datasets across different tissue types demonstrate that GenAR achieves state-of-the-art performance, offering potential implications for precision medicine and cost-effective molecular profiling. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/oyjr/genar. --- ### CARE-PD: A Multi-Site Anonymized Clinical Dataset for Parkinson's Disease Gait Assessment Authors: Vida Adeli, Ivan Klabucar, Javad Rajabi, Benjamin Filtjens, Soroush Mehraban, Diwei Wang, Hyewon Seo, Trung-Hieu Hoang, Minh N. Do, Candice Muller, Claudia Oliveira, Daniel Boari Coelho et al. Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04312v1 Objective gait assessment in Parkinson's Disease (PD) is limited by the absence of large, diverse, and clinically annotated motion datasets. We introduce CARE-PD, the largest publicly available archive of 3D mesh gait data for PD, and the first multi-site collection spanning 9 cohorts from 8 clinical centers. All recordings (RGB video or motion capture) are converted into anonymized SMPL meshes via a harmonized preprocessing pipeline. CARE-PD supports two key benchmarks: supervised clinical score prediction (estimating Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale, UPDRS, gait scores) and unsupervised motion pretext tasks (2D-to-3D keypoint lifting and full-body 3D reconstruction). Clinical prediction is evaluated under four generalization protocols: within-dataset, cross-dataset, leave-one-dataset-out, and multi-dataset in-domain adaptation. To assess clinical relevance, we compare state-of-the-art motion encoders with a traditional gait-feature baseline, finding that encoders consistently outperform handcrafted features. Pretraining on CARE-PD reduces MPJPE (from 60.8mm to 7.5mm) and boosts PD severity macro-F1 by 17 percentage points, underscoring the value of clinically curated, diverse training data. CARE-PD and all benchmark code are released for non-commercial research at https://neurips2025.care-pd.ca/. --- ### On the Importance of Task Complexity in Evaluating LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems Authors: Bohan Tang, Huidong Liang, Keyue Jiang, Xiaowen Dong Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04311v1 Large language model multi-agent systems (LLM-MAS) offer a promising paradigm for harnessing collective intelligence to achieve more advanced forms of AI behaviour. While recent studies suggest that LLM-MAS can outperform LLM single-agent systems (LLM-SAS) on certain tasks, the lack of systematic experimental designs limits the strength and generality of these conclusions. We argue that a principled understanding of task complexity, such as the degree of sequential reasoning required and the breadth of capabilities involved, is essential for assessing the effectiveness of LLM-MAS in task solving. To this end, we propose a theoretical framework characterising tasks along two dimensions: depth, representing reasoning length, and width, representing capability diversity. We theoretically examine a representative class of LLM-MAS, namely the multi-agent debate system, and empirically evaluate its performance in both discriminative and generative tasks with varying depth and width. Theoretical and empirical results show that the benefit of LLM-MAS over LLM-SAS increases with both task depth and width, and the effect is more pronounced with respect to depth. This clarifies when LLM-MAS are beneficial and provides a principled foundation for designing future LLM-MAS methods and benchmarks. --- ### Activation Steering with a Feedback Controller Authors: Dung V. Nguyen, Hieu M. Vu, Nhi Y. Pham, Lei Zhang, Tan M. Nguyen Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04309v3 Controlling the behaviors of large language models (LLM) is fundamental to their safety alignment and reliable deployment. However, existing steering methods are primarily driven by empirical insights and lack theoretical performance guarantees. In this work, we develop a control-theoretic foundation for activation steering by showing that popular steering methods correspond to the proportional (P) controllers, with the steering vector serving as the feedback signal. Building on this finding, we propose Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) Steering, a principled framework that leverages the full PID controller for activation steering in LLMs. The proportional (P) term aligns activations with target semantic directions, the integral (I) term accumulates errors to enforce persistent corrections across layers, and the derivative (D) term mitigates overshoot by counteracting rapid activation changes. This closed-loop design yields interpretable error dynamics and connects activation steering to classical stability guarantees in control theory. Moreover, PID Steering is lightweight, modular, and readily integrates with state-of-the-art steering methods. Extensive experiments across multiple LLM families and benchmarks demonstrate that PID Steering consistently outperforms existing approaches, achieving more robust and reliable behavioral control. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/dungnvnus/pid-steering --- ### Wave-PDE Nets: Trainable Wave-Equation Layers as an Alternative to Attention Authors: Harshil Vejendla Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04304v1 We introduce Wave-PDE Nets, a neural architecture whose elementary operation is a differentiable simulation of the second-order wave equation. Each layer propagates its hidden state as a continuous field through a medium with trainable spatial velocity c(x) and damping γ(x). A symplectic spectral solver based on FFTs realises this propagation in O(nlog n) time. This oscillatory, global mechanism provides a powerful alternative to attention and first-order state-space models. We prove that a single Wave-PDE layer is a universal approximator. On language and vision benchmarks, Wave-PDE Nets match or exceed Transformer performance while demonstrating superior practical efficiency, reducing wall-clock time by up to 30% and peak memory by 25%. Ablation studies confirm the critical role of symplectic integration and a spectral Laplacian for stability and performance. Visualizations of the learned physical parameters reveal that the model learns intuitive strategies for information propagation. These results position Wave-PDE Nets as a computationally efficient and robust architecture with a strong physical inductive bias. --- ### Audit the Whisper: Detecting Steganographic Collusion in Multi-Agent LLMs Authors: Om Tailor Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.MA, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04303v2 Multi-agent deployments of large language models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in market, allocation, and governance workflows, yet covert coordination among agents can silently erode trust and social welfare. Existing audits are dominated by heuristics that lack theoretical guarantees, struggle to transfer across tasks, and seldom ship with the infrastructure needed for independent replication. We introduce Audit the Whisper, a conference-grade research artifact that spans theory, benchmark design, detection, and reproducibility. Our contributions are: (i) a channel-capacity analysis showing how interventions such as paraphrase, rate limiting, and role permutation impose quantifiable capacity penalties-operationalised via paired-run Kullback--Leibler diagnostics-that tighten mutual-information thresholds with finite-sample guarantees and full proofs; (ii) ColludeBench-v0, covering pricing, first-price auctions, peer review, and hosted Gemini/Groq APIs with configurable covert schemes, deterministic manifests, and reward instrumentation; and (iii) a calibrated auditing pipeline that fuses cross-run mutual information, permutation invariance, watermark variance, and fairness-aware acceptance bias, each tuned to a $10^{-3}$ false-positive budget and validated by 10k honest runs plus an e-value martingale. Across ColludeBench and external suites including Secret Collusion, CASE, Perfect Collusion Benchmark, and SentinelAgent, the union meta-test attains state-of-the-art power at fixed FPR while ablations surface price-of-auditing trade-offs and fairness-driven colluders invisible to MI alone. We release regeneration scripts, anonymized manifests, and documentation so that external auditors can reproduce every figure, satisfy double-blind requirements, and extend the framework with minimal effort. --- ### When Guessing is Rewarded: Rethinking Language Model Evaluation with Distributional Uncertainty Scoring Authors: Thomas F Burns Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04302v2 Standard language model evaluation assigns scores to single predicted answers, rewarding high-confidence responses regardless of how residual probability mass is distributed over alternative options. This creates a systematic pressure toward overconfident guessing: under accuracy-based schemes, a model maximises its expected score by always committing to an answer rather than abstaining, even when its uncertainty is high. While penalty-based approaches partially address this by raising the confidence threshold for strategic guessing, they still treat all sub-threshold responses identically, ignoring a fundamental distinction in how models can express uncertainty - for example between hedging toward incorrect answers versus hedging toward "I don't know" responses. This paper introduces a novel evaluation metric to solve this problem of not considering a model's entire probability distribution over answer choices. The metric naturally distinguishes between harmful overconfidence in wrong answers and uncertainty expressed through abstention, providing scores in an interpretable default range. Through theoretical analysis and illustrative examples, the metric is shown to offer a more nuanced and aligned evaluation paradigm that incentivises models to express genuine uncertainty rather than guessing. Adapting 12 existing evaluation benchmarks to the metric's variants and measuring performance on six language models shows that for half of the tested benchmarks scores are negative across all tested models, indicating significant tendencies towards hallucination. --- ### Hypernetwork-Driven Low-Rank Adaptation Across Attention Heads Authors: Nghiem T. Diep, Dung Le, Tuan Truong, Tan Dinh, Huy Nguyen, Nhat Ho Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04295v2 Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for adapting large-scale pre-trained models to downstream tasks with minimal additional parameters. Among PEFT methods, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) stands out for its effectiveness by inserting trainable low-rank matrices into weight updates to enable efficient adaptation. However, when applied to multi-head self-attention, existing LoRA-based methods typically fine-tune each attention head independently, overlooking potential interactions and shared structure among heads. To address this limitation, we propose Hypernetwork-Driven Low-rank Adaptation (HyRA) that employs a hypernetwork to generate joint low-rank matrices for all attention heads within a layer. The shared generator promotes cross-head information sharing, helping low-rank modules avoid the redundant feature learning seen in traditional LoRA methods. Theoretically, our method achieves significantly better sample efficiency compared to standard LoRA. Empirically, we evaluate HyRA on a comprehensive suite of language and vision benchmarks. Our approach consistently outperforms existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) baselines across a wide range of tasks. Notably, in low-data regimes, HyRA achieves substantial improvements over LoRA, underscoring its practical sample efficiency and effectiveness in data-scarce scenarios. --- ### Equipping Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models with Document Structure Awareness Authors: Lingnan Xu, Chong Feng, Kaiyuan Zhang, Liu Zhengyong, Wenqiang Xu, Fanqing Meng Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04293v1 While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities, their reliance on parametric knowledge often leads to factual inaccuracies. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates this by leveraging external documents, yet existing approaches treat retrieved passages as isolated chunks, ignoring valuable structure that is crucial for document organization. Motivated by this gap, we propose Retrieve-DocumentRoute-Read (RDR2), a novel framework that explicitly incorporates structural information throughout the RAG process. RDR2 employs an LLM-based router to dynamically navigate document structure trees, jointly evaluating content relevance and hierarchical relationships to assemble optimal evidence. Our key innovation lies in formulating document routing as a trainable task, with automatic action curation and structure-aware passage selection inspired by human reading strategies. Through comprehensive evaluation on five challenging datasets, RDR2 achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating that explicit structural awareness significantly enhances RAG systems' ability to acquire and utilize knowledge, particularly in complex scenarios requiring multi-document synthesis. --- ### PABSA: Hybrid Framework for Persian Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis Authors: Mehrzad Tareh, Aydin Mohandesi, Ebrahim Ansari Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04291v1 Sentiment analysis is a key task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), enabling the extraction of meaningful insights from user opinions across various domains. However, performing sentiment analysis in Persian remains challenging due to the scarcity of labeled datasets, limited preprocessing tools, and the lack of high-quality embeddings and feature extraction methods. To address these limitations, we propose a hybrid approach that integrates machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques for Persian aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA). In particular, we utilize polarity scores from multilingual BERT as additional features and incorporate them into a decision tree classifier, achieving an accuracy of 93.34%-surpassing existing benchmarks on the Pars-ABSA dataset. Additionally, we introduce a Persian synonym and entity dictionary, a novel linguistic resource that supports text augmentation through synonym and named entity replacement. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of hybrid modeling and feature augmentation in advancing sentiment analysis for low-resource languages such as Persian. --- ### ChronoEdit: Towards Temporal Reasoning for Image Editing and World Simulation Authors: Jay Zhangjie Wu, Xuanchi Ren, Tianchang Shen, Tianshi Cao, Kai He, Yifan Lu, Ruiyuan Gao, Enze Xie, Shiyi Lan, Jose M. Alvarez, Jun Gao, Sanja Fidler et al. Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04290v2 Recent advances in large generative models have greatly enhanced both image editing and in-context image generation, yet a critical gap remains in ensuring physical consistency, where edited objects must remain coherent. This capability is especially vital for world simulation related tasks. In this paper, we present ChronoEdit, a framework that reframes image editing as a video generation problem. First, ChronoEdit treats the input and edited images as the first and last frames of a video, allowing it to leverage large pretrained video generative models that capture not only object appearance but also the implicit physics of motion and interaction through learned temporal consistency. Second, ChronoEdit introduces a temporal reasoning stage that explicitly performs editing at inference time. Under this setting, target frame is jointly denoised with reasoning tokens to imagine a plausible editing trajectory that constrains the solution space to physically viable transformations. The reasoning tokens are then dropped after a few steps to avoid the high computational cost of rendering a full video. To validate ChronoEdit, we introduce PBench-Edit, a new benchmark of image-prompt pairs for contexts that require physical consistency, and demonstrate that ChronoEdit surpasses state-of-the-art baselines in both visual fidelity and physical plausibility. Project page for code and models: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/toronto-ai/chronoedit --- ### SliceMoE: Routing Embedding Slices Instead of Tokens for Fine-Grained and Balanced Transformer Scaling Authors: Harshil Vejendla Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04286v1 Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layers scale transformers by routing tokens to a sparse subset of feed-forward experts. Token-level routing, however, assigns an entire semantic spectrum to each expert, creating capacity bottlenecks, load-balancing pathologies, and limited specialization. We introduce SliceMoE, an architecture that routes contiguous slices of a token's hidden vector. A d-dimensional embedding is partitioned into S slices, and for each slice, a lightweight shared router predicts the top-k experts. Experts operate on their assigned slices independently, and outputs are reassembled, maintaining per-token FLOP efficiency. Because slices from different tokens interleave within an expert, utilization is naturally smoother. We propose a slice-level capacity loss, cross-slice dropout, and efficient fused batched GEMM kernels. Experiments on WikiText-103 language modeling, WMT En-De translation, and three text-classification datasets show SliceMoE attains up to 1.7x faster inference than dense baselines, 12 to 18 percent lower perplexity than parameter-matched token-MoE, and improved expert balance, with interpretable expertise over syntactic versus semantic subspaces. --- ### Probing Geometry of Next Token Prediction Using Cumulant Expansion of the Softmax Entropy Authors: Karthik Viswanathan, Sang Eon Park Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.CL, cond-mat.stat-mech, cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04285v1 We introduce a cumulant-expansion framework for quantifying how large language models (LLMs) internalize higher-order statistical structure during next-token prediction. By treating the softmax entropy of each layer's logit distribution as a perturbation around its "center" distribution, we derive closed-form cumulant observables that isolate successively higher-order correlations. Empirically, we track these cumulants in GPT-2 and Pythia models on Pile-10K prompts. (i) Structured prompts exhibit a characteristic rise-and-plateau profile across layers, whereas token-shuffled prompts remain flat, revealing the dependence of the cumulant profile on meaningful context. (ii) During training, all cumulants increase monotonically before saturating, directly visualizing the model's progression from capturing variance to learning skew, kurtosis, and higher-order statistical structures. (iii) Mathematical prompts show distinct cumulant signatures compared to general text, quantifying how models employ fundamentally different processing mechanisms for mathematical versus linguistic content. Together, these results establish cumulant analysis as a lightweight, mathematically grounded probe of feature-learning dynamics in high-dimensional neural networks. --- ### Doctor-R1: Mastering Clinical Inquiry with Experiential Agentic Reinforcement Learning Authors: Yunghwei Lai, Kaiming Liu, Ziyue Wang, Weizhi Ma, Yang Liu Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04284v3 The professionalism of a human doctor in outpatient service depends on two core abilities: the ability to make accurate medical decisions and the medical consultation skill to conduct strategic, empathetic patient inquiry. Existing Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable accuracy on medical decision-making benchmarks. However, they often lack the ability to conduct the strategic and empathetic consultation, which is essential for real-world clinical scenarios. To address this gap, we propose Doctor-R1, an AI doctor agent trained to master both of the capabilities by ask high-yield questions and conduct strategic multi-turn inquiry to guide decision-making. Our framework introduces three key components: a multi-agent interactive environment, a two-tiered reward architecture that separately optimizes clinical decision-making and communicative inquiry skills, and an experience repository to ground policy learning in high-quality prior trajectories. We evaluate Doctor-R1 on OpenAI's HealthBench and MAQuE, assessed across multi-facet metrics, such as communication quality, user experience, and task accuracy. Remarkably, Doctor-R1 surpasses state-of-the-art open-source specialized LLMs by a substantial margin with higher parameter efficiency and outperforms powerful proprietary models. Furthermore, the human expert evaluations show that Doctor-R1 achieves superior clinical capability and patient-centric performance, demonstrating the effectiveness of the framework. --- ### Flexible and Efficient Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Sequential Visual Place Recognition Authors: Yu Kiu, Lau, Chao Chen, Ge Jin, Chen Feng Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04282v2 Sequential Visual Place Recognition (Seq-VPR) leverages transformers to capture spatio-temporal features effectively. In practice, a transformer-based Seq-VPR model should be flexible to the number of frames per sequence (seq- length), deliver fast inference, and have low memory usage to meet real-time constraints. However, existing approaches prioritize performance at the expense of flexibility and effi- ciency. To address this gap, we propose Adapt-STformer, a Seq-VPR method built around our novel Recurrent Deformable Transformer Encoder (Recurrent-DTE), which uses an iterative recurrent mechanism to fuse information from multiple sequen- tial frames. This design naturally supports variable seq-lengths, fast inference, and low memory usage. Experiments on the Nordland, Oxford, and NuScenes datasets show that Adapt- STformer boosts recall by up to 17% while reducing sequence extraction time by 36% and lowering memory usage by 35% relative to our best comparable baseline. Our code is released at https://ai4ce.github.io/Adapt-STFormer/. --- ### RetiBridge: Bridging Quantitative Retinal Biomarkers and Qualitative Diagnosis with a Knowledge-Guided Multimodal Large Language Model Authors: Zhuangzhi Gao, Hongyi Qin, He Zhao, Qinkai Yu, Feixiang Zhou, Fu Wang, Jinru Ding, Eduard Shantsila, Uazman Alam, Alena Shantsila, Wahbi El-Bouri, Gregory Y. H. Lip et al. Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04281v2 Retinal biomarkers captured by color fundus photography and optical coherence tomography provide clinically valuable evidence for both ocular and systemic diseases. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promise for retinal image interpretation, yet existing ophthalmic models rarely quantify these clinically relevant biomarkers or explicitly translate their measurements into qualitative, evidence-grounded diagnostic conclusions. To address this gap, we introduce RetiBridge, a knowledge-guided multimodal large language model that jointly analyzes color fundus photography (CFP), optical coherence tomography (OCT), and text, explicitly bridging quantitative retinal biomarkers to qualitative clinical sub-inferences and coherent diagnostic conclusions. RetiBridge combines knowledge-guided instruction generation, OCT-biomarker alignment, and supervised multimodal instruction tuning to learn a biomarker-grounded quantitative-to-qualitative diagnostic pathway. Using 15,611 paired CFP-OCT samples from UK Biobank with 31 OCT and 6 CFP biomarkers, we construct the Grounded Ophthalmic Understanding benchmark to evaluate diagnostic classification, report generation quality, and fine-grained clinical quality. Despite using only LoRA-based fine-tuning of a 7B-parameter Qwen2 backbone, RetiBridge outperforms all evaluated open-source 7B and 32B baselines, achieving the highest quantitative accuracy, evidence grounding, coverage completeness, and BERTScore, while surpassing OpenAI o3 on these key biomarker-grounded metrics. Our code and data are released in the RetiBridge repository. --- ### A KL-regularization Framework for Learning to Plan with Adaptive Priors Authors: Álvaro Serra-Gomez, Daniel Jarne Ornia, Dhruva Tirumala, Thomas Moerland Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04280v2 Effective exploration remains a central challenge in model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL), particularly in high-dimensional continuous control tasks where sample efficiency is crucial. A prominent line of recent work leverages learned policies as proposal distributions for Model-Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) planning. Initial approaches update the sampling policy independently of the planner distribution, typically maximizing a learned value function with deterministic policy gradient and entropy regularization. However, because the states encountered during training depend on the MPPI planner, aligning the sampling policy with the planner improves the accuracy of value estimation and long-term performance. To this end, recent methods update the sampling policy by minimizing KL divergence to the planner distribution or by introducing planner-guided regularization into the policy update. In this work, we unify these MPPI-based reinforcement learning methods under a single framework by introducing Policy Optimization-Model Predictive Control (PO-MPC), a family of KL-regularized MBRL methods that integrate the planner's action distribution as a prior in policy optimization. By aligning the learned policy with the planner's behavior, PO-MPC allows more flexibility in the policy updates to trade off Return maximization and KL divergence minimization. We clarify how prior approaches emerge as special cases of this family, and we explore previously unstudied variations. Our experiments show that these extended configurations yield significant performance improvements, advancing the state of the art in MPPI-based RL. --- ### Relative Information Gain and Gaussian Process Regression Authors: Hamish Flynn Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04277v2 The sample complexity of estimating or maximising an unknown function in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space is known to be linked to both the effective dimension and the information gain associated with the kernel. While the information gain has an attractive information-theoretic interpretation, the effective dimension typically results in better rates. We introduce a new quantity called the relative information gain, which measures the sensitivity of the information gain with respect to the observation noise. We show that the relative information gain smoothly interpolates between the effective dimension and the information gain, and that the relative information gain has the same growth rate as the effective dimension. In the second half of the paper, we prove a new PAC-Bayesian excess risk bound for Gaussian process regression. The relative information gain arises naturally from the complexity term in this PAC-Bayesian bound. We prove bounds on the relative information gain that depend on the spectral properties of the kernel. When these upper bounds are combined with our excess risk bound, we obtain minimax-optimal rates of convergence. --- ### Scalable Causal Discovery from Recursive Nonlinear Data via Truncated Basis Function Scores and Tests Authors: Joseph Ramsey, Bryan Andrews, Peter Spirtes Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: stat.ML, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04276v2 Learning graphical conditional independence structures from nonlinear, continuous or mixed data is a central challenge in machine learning and the sciences, and many existing methods struggle to scale to thousands of samples or hundreds of variables. We introduce two basis-expansion tools for scalable causal discovery. First, the Basis Function BIC (BF-BIC) score uses truncated additive expansions to approximate nonlinear dependencies. BF-BIC is theoretically consistent under additive models and extends to post-nonlinear (PNL) models via an invertible reparameterization. It remains robust under moderate interactions and supports mixed data through a degenerate-Gaussian embedding for discrete variables. In simulations with fully nonlinear neural causal models (NCMs), BF-BIC outperforms kernel- and constraint-based methods (e.g., KCI, RFCI) in both accuracy and runtime. Second, the Basis Function Likelihood Ratio Test (BF-LRT) provides an approximate conditional independence test that is substantially faster than kernel tests while retaining competitive accuracy. Extensive simulations and a real-data application to Canadian wildfire risk show that, when integrated into hybrid searches, BF-based methods enable interpretable and scalable causal discovery. Implementations are available in Python, R, and Java. --- ### Influence branching for learning to solve mixed-integer programs online Authors: Paul Strang, Zacharie Alès, Côme Bissuel, Olivier Juan, Safia Kedad-Sidhoum, Emmanuel Rachelson Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04273v1 On the occasion of the 20th Mixed Integer Program Workshop's computational competition, this work introduces a new approach for learning to solve MIPs online. Influence branching, a new graph-oriented variable selection strategy, is applied throughout the first iterations of the branch and bound algorithm. This branching heuristic is optimized online with Thompson sampling, which ranks the best graph representations of MIP's structure according to computational speed up over SCIP. We achieve results comparable to state of the art online learning methods. Moreover, our results indicate that our method generalizes well to more general online frameworks, where variations in constraint matrix, constraint vector and objective coefficients can all occur and where more samples are available. --- ### Closing the Loop: Coordinating Inventory and Recommendation via Deep Reinforcement Learning on Multiple Timescales Authors: Jinyang Jiang, Jinhui Han, Yijie Peng, Ying Zhang Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04272v1 Effective cross-functional coordination is essential for enhancing firm-wide profitability, particularly in the face of growing organizational complexity and scale. Recent advances in artificial intelligence, especially in reinforcement learning (RL), offer promising avenues to address this fundamental challenge. This paper proposes a unified multi-agent RL framework tailored for joint optimization across distinct functional modules, exemplified via coordinating inventory replenishment and personalized product recommendation. We first develop an integrated theoretical model to capture the intricate interplay between these functions and derive analytical benchmarks that characterize optimal coordination. The analysis reveals synchronized adjustment patterns across products and over time, highlighting the importance of coordinated decision-making. Leveraging these insights, we design a novel multi-timescale multi-agent RL architecture that decomposes policy components according to departmental functions and assigns distinct learning speeds based on task complexity and responsiveness. Our model-free multi-agent design improves scalability and deployment flexibility, while multi-timescale updates enhance convergence stability and adaptability across heterogeneous decisions. We further establish the asymptotic convergence of the proposed algorithm. Extensive simulation experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly improves profitability relative to siloed decision-making frameworks, while the behaviors of the trained RL agents align closely with the managerial insights from our theoretical model. Taken together, this work provides a scalable, interpretable RL-based solution to enable effective cross-functional coordination in complex business settings. --- ### LongTail-Swap: benchmarking language models' abilities on rare words Authors: Robin Algayres, Charles-Éric Saint-James, Mahi Luthra, Jiayi Shen, Dongyan Lin, Youssef Benchekroun, Rashel Moritz, Juan Pino, Emmanuel Dupoux Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04268v1 Children learn to speak with a low amount of data and can be taught new words on a few-shot basis, making them particularly data-efficient learners. The BabyLM challenge aims at exploring language model (LM) training in the low-data regime but uses metrics that concentrate on the head of the word distribution. Here, we introduce LongTail-Swap (LT-Swap), a benchmark that focuses on the tail of the distribution, i.e., measures the ability of LMs to learn new words with very little exposure, like infants do. LT-Swap is a pretraining corpus-specific test set of acceptable versus unacceptable sentence pairs that isolate semantic and syntactic usage of rare words. Models are evaluated in a zero-shot fashion by computing the average log probabilities over the two members of each pair. We built two such test sets associated with the 10M words and 100M words BabyLM training sets, respectively, and evaluated 16 models from the BabyLM leaderboard. Our results not only highlight the poor performance of language models on rare words but also reveal that performance differences across LM architectures are much more pronounced in the long tail than in the head. This offers new insights into which architectures are better at handling rare word generalization. We've also made the code publicly avail --- ### Don't Pass@k: A Bayesian Framework for Large Language Model Evaluation Authors: Mohsen Hariri, Amirhossein Samandar, Michael Hinczewski, Vipin Chaudhary Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, math.ST, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04265v4 Pass$@k$ is widely used to report the reasoning performance of LLMs, but it often produces unstable and potentially misleading rankings, especially when the number of trials (samples) is limited and computational resources are constrained. We present a principled Bayesian evaluation framework that replaces Pass$@k$ and average accuracy over $N$ trials (avg$@N$) with posterior estimates of a model's underlying success probability and credible intervals, yielding stable rankings and a transparent decision rule for differences. Evaluation outcomes are modeled as categorical (not just 0/1) with a Dirichlet prior, giving closed-form expressions for the posterior mean and uncertainty of any weighted rubric and enabling the use of prior evidence when appropriate. Theoretically, under a uniform prior, the Bayesian posterior mean is order-equivalent to average accuracy (Pass$@1$), explaining its empirical robustness while adding principled uncertainty. Empirically, in simulations with known ground-truth success rates and on AIME'24/'25, HMMT'25, and BrUMO'25, the posterior-based procedure achieves faster convergence and greater rank stability than Pass$@k$ and recent variants, enabling reliable comparisons at far smaller sample counts. The framework clarifies when observed gaps are statistically meaningful (non-overlapping credible intervals) versus noise, and it naturally extends to graded, rubric-based evaluations. Together, these results recommend replacing Pass$@k$ for LLM evaluation and ranking with a posterior-based, compute-efficient protocol that unifies binary and non-binary evaluation while making uncertainty explicit. Source code is available at https://github.com/mohsenhariri/scorio --- ### Efficient Latent Variable Causal Discovery: Combining Score Search and Targeted Testing Authors: Joseph Ramsey, Bryan Andrews, Peter Spirtes Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04263v3 Learning causal structure from observational data is especially challenging when latent variables or selection bias are present. The Fast Causal Inference (FCI) algorithm addresses this setting but performs exhaustive conditional independence tests across many subsets, often leading to spurious independences, missing or extra edges, and unreliable orientations. We present a family of score-guided mixed-strategy causal search algorithms that extend this framework. First, we introduce BOSS-FCI and GRaSP-FCI, variants of GFCI (Greedy Fast Causal Inference) that substitute BOSS (Best Order Score Search) or GRaSP (Greedy Relaxations of Sparsest Permutation) for FGES (Fast Greedy Equivalence Search), preserving correctness while trading off scalability and conservativeness. Second, we develop FCI Targeted-Testing (FCIT), a novel hybrid method that replaces exhaustive testing with targeted, score-informed tests guided by BOSS. FCIT guarantees well-formed PAGs and achieves higher precision and efficiency across sample sizes. Finally, we propose a lightweight heuristic, LV-Dumb (Latent Variable "Dumb"), which returns the PAG of the BOSS DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph). Though not strictly sound for latent confounding, LV-Dumb often matches FCIT's accuracy while running substantially faster. Simulations and real-data analyses show that BOSS-FCI and GRaSP-FCI provide robust baselines, FCIT yields the best balance of precision and reliability, and LV-Dumb offers a fast, near-equivalent alternative. Together, these methods demonstrate that targeted and score-guided strategies can dramatically improve the efficiency and correctness of latent-variable causal discovery. --- ### AgentTypo: Adaptive Typographic Prompt Injection Attacks against Black-box Multimodal Agents Authors: Yanjie Li, Yiming Cao, Dong Wang, Bin Xiao Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04257v1 Multimodal agents built on large vision-language models (LVLMs) are increasingly deployed in open-world settings but remain highly vulnerable to prompt injection, especially through visual inputs. We introduce AgentTypo, a black-box red-teaming framework that mounts adaptive typographic prompt injection by embedding optimized text into webpage images. Our automatic typographic prompt injection (ATPI) algorithm maximizes prompt reconstruction by substituting captioners while minimizing human detectability via a stealth loss, with a Tree-structured Parzen Estimator guiding black-box optimization over text placement, size, and color. To further enhance attack strength, we develop AgentTypo-pro, a multi-LLM system that iteratively refines injection prompts using evaluation feedback and retrieves successful past examples for continual learning. Effective prompts are abstracted into generalizable strategies and stored in a strategy repository, enabling progressive knowledge accumulation and reuse in future attacks. Experiments on the VWA-Adv benchmark across Classifieds, Shopping, and Reddit scenarios show that AgentTypo significantly outperforms the latest image-based attacks such as AgentAttack. On GPT-4o agents, our image-only attack raises the success rate from 0.23 to 0.45, with consistent results across GPT-4V, GPT-4o-mini, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Claude 3 Opus. In image+text settings, AgentTypo achieves 0.68 ASR, also outperforming the latest baselines. Our findings reveal that AgentTypo poses a practical and potent threat to multimodal agents and highlight the urgent need for effective defense. --- ### ContextVLA: Vision-Language-Action Model with Amortized Multi-Frame Context Authors: Huiwon Jang, Sihyun Yu, Heeseung Kwon, Hojin Jeon, Younggyo Seo, Jinwoo Shin Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04246v1 Leveraging temporal context is crucial for success in partially observable robotic tasks. However, prior work in behavior cloning has demonstrated inconsistent performance gains when using multi-frame observations. In this paper, we introduce ContextVLA, a policy model that robustly improves robotic task performance by effectively leveraging multi-frame observations. Our approach is motivated by the key observation that Vision-Language-Action models (VLA), i.e., policy models built upon a Vision-Language Model (VLM), more effectively utilize multi-frame observations for action generation. This suggests that VLMs' inherent temporal understanding capability enables them to extract more meaningful context from multi-frame observations. However, the high dimensionality of video inputs introduces significant computational overhead, making VLA training and inference inefficient. To address this, ContextVLA compresses past observations into a single context token, allowing the policy to efficiently leverage temporal context for action generation. Our experiments show that ContextVLA consistently improves over single-frame VLAs and achieves the benefits of full multi-frame training but with reduced training and inference times. --- ### Concept-Based Masking: A Patch-Agnostic Defense Against Adversarial Patch Attacks Authors: Ayushi Mehrotra, Derek Peng, Dipkamal Bhusal, Nidhi Rastogi Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04245v1 Adversarial patch attacks pose a practical threat to deep learning models by forcing targeted misclassifications through localized perturbations, often realized in the physical world. Existing defenses typically assume prior knowledge of patch size or location, limiting their applicability. In this work, we propose a patch-agnostic defense that leverages concept-based explanations to identify and suppress the most influential concept activation vectors, thereby neutralizing patch effects without explicit detection. Evaluated on Imagenette with a ResNet-50, our method achieves higher robust and clean accuracy than the state-of-the-art PatchCleanser, while maintaining strong performance across varying patch sizes and locations. Our results highlight the promise of combining interpretability with robustness and suggest concept-driven defenses as a scalable strategy for securing machine learning models against adversarial patch attacks. --- ### The 1st Solution for CARE Liver Task Challenge 2025: Contrast-Aware Semi-Supervised Segmentation with Domain Generalization and Test-Time Adaptation Authors: Jincan Lou, Jingkun Chen, Haoquan Li, Hang Li, Wenjian Huang, Weihua Chen, Fan Wang, Jianguo Zhang Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04243v2 Accurate liver segmentation from contrast-enhanced MRI is essential for diagnosis, treatment planning, and disease monitoring. However, it remains challenging due to limited annotated data, heterogeneous enhancement protocols, and significant domain shifts across scanners and institutions. Traditional image-to-image translation frameworks have made great progress in domain generalization, but their application is not straightforward. For example, Pix2Pix requires image registration, and cycle-GAN cannot be integrated seamlessly into segmentation pipelines. Meanwhile, these methods are originally used to deal with cross-modality scenarios, and often introduce structural distortions and suffer from unstable training, which may pose drawbacks in our single-modality scenario. To address these challenges, we propose CoSSeg-TTA, a compact segmentation framework for the GED4 (Gd-EOB-DTPA enhanced hepatobiliary phase MRI) modality built upon nnU-Netv2 and enhanced with a semi-supervised mean teacher scheme to exploit large amounts of unlabeled volumes. A domain adaptation module, incorporating a randomized histogram-based style appearance transfer function and a trainable contrast-aware network, enriches domain diversity and mitigates cross-center variability. Furthermore, a continual test-time adaptation strategy is employed to improve robustness during inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms the nnU-Netv2 baseline, achieving superior Dice score and Hausdorff Distance while exhibiting strong generalization to unseen domains under low-annotation conditions. --- ### Diffusion-Assisted Distillation for Self-Supervised Graph Representation Learning with MLPs Authors: Seong Jin Ahn, Myoung-Ho Kim Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04241v1 For large-scale applications, there is growing interest in replacing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with lightweight Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) via knowledge distillation. However, distilling GNNs for self-supervised graph representation learning into MLPs is more challenging. This is because the performance of self-supervised learning is more related to the model's inductive bias than supervised learning. This motivates us to design a new distillation method to bridge a huge capacity gap between GNNs and MLPs in self-supervised graph representation learning. In this paper, we propose \textbf{D}iffusion-\textbf{A}ssisted \textbf{D}istillation for \textbf{S}elf-supervised \textbf{G}raph representation learning with \textbf{M}LPs (DAD-SGM). The proposed method employs a denoising diffusion model as a teacher assistant to better distill the knowledge from the teacher GNN into the student MLP. This approach enhances the generalizability and robustness of MLPs in self-supervised graph representation learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DAD-SGM effectively distills the knowledge of self-supervised GNNs compared to state-of-the-art GNN-to-MLP distillation methods. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/SeongJinAhn/DAD-SGM. --- ### Empowering Denoising Sequential Recommendation with Large Language Model Embeddings Authors: Tongzhou Wu, Yuhao Wang, Maolin Wang, Chi Zhang, Xiangyu Zhao Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04239v1 Sequential recommendation aims to capture user preferences by modeling sequential patterns in user-item interactions. However, these models are often influenced by noise such as accidental interactions, leading to suboptimal performance. Therefore, to reduce the effect of noise, some works propose explicitly identifying and removing noisy items. However, we find that simply relying on collaborative information may result in an over-denoising problem, especially for cold items. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel framework: Interest Alignment for Denoising Sequential Recommendation (IADSR) which integrates both collaborative and semantic information. Specifically, IADSR is comprised of two stages: in the first stage, we obtain the collaborative and semantic embeddings of each item from a traditional sequential recommendation model and an LLM, respectively. In the second stage, we align the collaborative and semantic embeddings and then identify noise in the interaction sequence based on long-term and short-term interests captured in the collaborative and semantic modalities. Our extensive experiments on four public datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and its compatibility with different sequential recommendation systems. --- ### Truncated Kernel Stochastic Gradient Descent with General Losses and Spherical Radial Basis Functions Authors: Jinhui Bai, Andreas Christmann, Lei Shi Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04237v8 In this paper, we propose a novel kernel stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm for large-scale supervised learning with general losses. Compared to traditional kernel SGD, our algorithm improves efficiency and scalability through an adaptive regularization strategy. By leveraging the infinite series expansion of spherical radial basis functions, this strategy projects the stochastic gradient onto a finite-dimensional hypothesis space, which is adaptively scaled according to the bias-variance trade-off, thereby enhancing generalization performance. To handle the gradient nonlinearity arising from general losses, we develop a new generalization framework combining an inequality-based characterization of the kernel-induced covariance operator with optimization techniques. We prove that both the last iterate and the suffix average converge at minimax-optimal rates, and we further establish optimal strong convergence in the reproducing kernel Hilbert space. Our framework accommodates a broad class of classical loss functions, including least-squares, Huber, and logistic losses. Moreover, the proposed algorithm significantly reduces computational complexity and achieves optimal storage complexity by incorporating coordinate-wise updates from linear SGD, thereby avoiding the costly pairwise operations typical of kernel SGD and enabling efficient processing of streaming data. Finally, extensive numerical experiments provide empirical support for the theoretical results and the computational advantages of our algorithm. --- ### Scaling Sequence-to-Sequence Generative Neural Rendering Authors: Shikun Liu, Kam Woh Ng, Wonbong Jang, Jiadong Guo, Junlin Han, Haozhe Liu, Yiannis Douratsos, Juan C. Pérez, Zijian Zhou, Chi Phung, Tao Xiang, Juan-Manuel Pérez-Rúa Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04236v3 We present Kaleido, a family of generative models designed for photorealistic, unified object- and scene-level neural rendering. Kaleido operates on the principle that 3D can be regarded as a specialised sub-domain of video, expressed purely as a sequence-to-sequence image synthesis task. Through a systemic study of scaling sequence-to-sequence generative neural rendering, we introduce key architectural innovations that enable our model to: i) perform generative view synthesis without explicit 3D representations; ii) generate any number of 6-DoF target views conditioned on any number of reference views via a masked autoregressive framework; and iii) seamlessly unify 3D and video modelling within a single decoder-only rectified flow transformer. Within this unified framework, Kaleido leverages large-scale video data for pre-training, which significantly improves spatial consistency and reduces reliance on scarce, camera-labelled 3D datasets -- all without any architectural modifications. Kaleido sets a new state-of-the-art on a range of view synthesis benchmarks. Its zero-shot performance substantially outperforms other generative methods in few-view settings, and, for the first time, matches the quality of per-scene optimisation methods in many-view settings. --- ### Flexible Locomotion Learning with Diffusion Model Predictive Control Authors: Runhan Huang, Haldun Balim, Heng Yang, Yilun Du Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04234v1 Legged locomotion demands controllers that are both robust and adaptable, while remaining compatible with task and safety considerations. However, model-free reinforcement learning (RL) methods often yield a fixed policy that can be difficult to adapt to new behaviors at test time. In contrast, Model Predictive Control (MPC) provides a natural approach to flexible behavior synthesis by incorporating different objectives and constraints directly into its optimization process. However, classical MPC relies on accurate dynamics models, which are often difficult to obtain in complex environments and typically require simplifying assumptions. We present Diffusion-MPC, which leverages a learned generative diffusion model as an approximate dynamics prior for planning, enabling flexible test-time adaptation through reward and constraint based optimization. Diffusion-MPC jointly predicts future states and actions; at each reverse step, we incorporate reward planning and impose constraint projection, yielding trajectories that satisfy task objectives while remaining within physical limits. To obtain a planning model that adapts beyond imitation pretraining, we introduce an interactive training algorithm for diffusion based planner: we execute our reward-and-constraint planner in environment, then filter and reweight the collected trajectories by their realized returns before updating the denoiser. Our design enables strong test-time adaptability, allowing the planner to adjust to new reward specifications without retraining. We validate Diffusion-MPC on real world, demonstrating strong locomotion and flexible adaptation. --- ### PAINET: A Principled Efficient Transformer for 3D Dynamics Modeling Authors: Kai Yang, Yuqi Huang, Junheng Tao, Wanyu Wang, Qitian Wu Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04233v2 Modeling 3D dynamics is a fundamental problem in multi-body systems across scientific and engineering domains and has important practical implications in object trajectory prediction and simulation. While recent GNN-based approaches have achieved strong performance by enforcing geometric symmetries, encoding high-order features or incorporating neural-ODE mechanics, they typically depend on explicitly observed structures and inherently fail to capture the unobserved interactions that are crucial to complex physical behaviors and dynamics mechanism. In this paper, we propose PAINET, a principled SE(3)-equivariant transformer for learning all-pair interactions in multi-body systems. The model comprises: (1) a novel physics-inspired attention network derived from the minimization trajectory of an energy function, and (2) a parallel decoder that preserves equivariance while enabling efficient inference. Empirical results on diverse real-world benchmarks, including human motion capture, molecular dynamics, and large-scale protein simulations, show that PAINET consistently outperforms recently proposed models, yielding 4.7% to 41.5% error reductions in 3D dynamics prediction with comparable computation costs in terms of time and memory. Our codes, baseline models and datasets are available at https://github.com/Icarus1411/PAINET. --- ### Detection of retinal diseases using an accelerated reused convolutional network Authors: Amin Ahmadi Kasani, Hedieh Sajedi Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04232v1 Convolutional neural networks are continually evolving, with some efforts aimed at improving accuracy, others at increasing speed, and some at enhancing accessibility. Improving accessibility broadens the application of neural networks across a wider range of tasks, including the detection of eye diseases. Early diagnosis of eye diseases and consulting an ophthalmologist can prevent many vision disorders. Given the importance of this issue, various datasets have been collected from the cornea to facilitate the process of making neural network models. However, most of the methods introduced in the past are computationally complex. In this study, we tried to increase the accessibility of deep neural network models. We did this at the most fundamental level, specifically by redesigning and optimizing the convolutional layers. By doing so, we created a new general model that incorporates our novel convolutional layer named ArConv layers. Thanks to the efficient performance of this new layer, the model has suitable complexity for use in mobile phones and can perform the task of diagnosing the presence of disease with high accuracy. The final model we present contains only 1.3 million parameters. In comparison to the MobileNetV2 model, which has 2.2 million parameters, our model demonstrated better accuracy when trained and evaluated on the RfMiD dataset under identical conditions, achieving an accuracy of 0.9328 versus 0.9266 on the RfMiD test set. --- ### A Recursive Pyramidal Algorithm for Solving the Image Registration Problem Authors: Stefan Dirnstorfer Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04231v1 The problem of image registration is finding a transformation that aligns two images, such that the corresponding points are in the same location. This paper introduces a simple, end-to-end trainable algorithm that is implementable in a few lines of Python code. The approach is shown to work with very little training data and training time, while achieving accurate results in some settings. An example application to stereo vision was trained from 74 images on a 19x15 input window. With just a dozen lines of Python code this algorithm excels in brevity and may serve as a good start in related scenarios with limitations to training data, training time or code complexity. --- ### Pushing on Multilingual Reasoning Models with Language-Mixed Chain-of-Thought Authors: Guijin Son, Donghun Yang, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Amit Agarwal, Hyunwoo Ko, Chanuk Lim, Srikant Panda, Minhyuk Kim, Nikunj Drolia, Dasol Choi, Kyong-Ha Lee, Youngjae Yu Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04230v2 Recent frontier models employ long chain-of-thought reasoning to explore solution spaces in context and achieve stonger performance. While many works study distillation to build smaller yet capable models, most focus on English and little is known about language-specific reasoning. To bridge this gap, we first introduct **Language-Mixed CoT**, a reasoning schema that switches between English and a target language, using English as an anchor to excel in reasoning while minimizing translation artificats. As a Korean case study, we curate **Yi-Sang**: 5.79M native-Korean prompts from web Q&A, exams, STEM, and code; 3.7M long reasoning traces generated from Qwen3-32B; and a targeted 260k high-yield subset. We train ninve models (4B-35B) across six families (Qwen2.5, Llama-3.1, Gemma-3, etc). Our best model, **KO-REAson-35B**, achieves state-of-the-art performance, with the highest overall average score (64.0 \pm 25), ranking first on 5/9 benchmarks and second on the remainder. Samller and mid-sized models also benefit substantially, with an average improvement of +18.6 points across teh evaluated nine benchmarks. Ablations show **Language-Mixed CoT** is more effective than monolingual CoT, also resulting in cross-lingual and mult-modal performance gains. We release our data-curation pipeline, evaluation system, datasets, and models to advance research on language-specific reasoning. Data and model collection: https://huggingface.co/KOREAson. --- ### When AI Gets Persuaded, Humans Follow: Inducing the Conformity Effect in Persuasive Dialogue Authors: Rikuo Sasaki, Michimasa Inaba Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04229v2 Recent advancements in AI have highlighted its application in captology, the field of using computers as persuasive technologies. We hypothesized that the "conformity effect," where individuals align with others' actions, also occurs with AI agents. This study verifies this hypothesis by introducing a "Persuadee Agent" that is persuaded alongside a human participant in a three-party persuasive dialogue with a Persuader Agent. We conducted a text-based dialogue experiment with human participants. We compared four conditions manipulating the Persuadee Agent's behavior (persuasion acceptance vs. non-acceptance) and the presence of an icebreaker session. Results showed that when the Persuadee Agent accepted persuasion, both perceived persuasiveness and actual attitude change significantly improved. Attitude change was greatest when an icebreaker was also used, whereas an unpersuaded AI agent suppressed attitude change. Additionally, it was confirmed that the persuasion acceptance of participants increased at the moment the Persuadee Agent was persuaded. These results suggest that appropriately designing a Persuadee Agent can improve persuasion through the conformity effect. --- ### A Universal Deep Learning Force Field for Molecular Dynamic Simulation and Vibrational Spectra Prediction Authors: Shengjiao Ji, Yujin Zhang, Zihan Zou, Bin Jiang, Jun Jiang, Yi Luo, Wei Hu Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: physics.chem-ph, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04227v1 Accurate and efficient simulation of infrared (IR) and Raman spectra is essential for molecular identification and structural analysis. Traditional quantum chemistry methods based on the harmonic approximation neglect anharmonicity and nuclear quantum effects, while ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) remains computationally expensive. Here, we integrate our deep equivariant tensor attention network (DetaNet) with a velocity-Verlet integrator to enable fast and accurate machine learning molecular dynamics (MLMD) simulations for spectral prediction. Trained on the QMe14S dataset containing energies, forces, dipole moments, and polarizabilities for 186,102 small organic molecules, DetaNet yields a universal and transferable force field with high-order tensor prediction capability. Using time-correlation functions derived from MLMD and ring-polymer molecular dynamics (RPMD) trajectories, we computed IR and Raman spectra that accurately reproduce anharmonic and nuclear quantum effects. Benchmark tests on isolated molecules, including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, demonstrate that the DetaNet-based MD approach achieves near-experimental spectral accuracy with speedups up to three orders of magnitude over AIMD. Furthermore, the framework extends seamlessly to molecular and inorganic crystals, molecular aggregates, and biological macromolecules such as polypeptides with minimal fine-tuning. In all systems, DetaNet maintains high accuracy while significantly reducing computational cost. Overall, this work establishes a universal machine learning force field and tensor-aware MLMD framework that enable fast, accurate, and broadly applicable dynamic simulations and IR/Raman spectral predictions across diverse molecular and material systems. --- ### What and Whose Knowledge? Measuring Epistemic Diversity in Large Language Models Authors: Dustin Wright, Sarah Masud, Jared Moore, Srishti Yadav, Maria Antoniak, Peter Ebert Christensen, Chan Young Park, Isabelle Augenstein Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.IR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04226v7 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as primary knowledge sources, yet their epistemic diversity - defined as the diversity of real-world claims in their outputs - has never been measured. Low epistemic diversity would pose a risk of knowledge collapse as homogeneous LLMs mediate a shrinking in the range of accessible information over time. The dominant paradigm is that overall LLM diversity is low, but this is always with respect to a single point in time, with no reference baseline or consideration for variation across countries. We address this gap in knowledge by performing the first systematic study of epistemic diversity in LLMs across time and cultural context, testing 27 LLMs on 155 topics covering 12 countries, resulting in 1.7M responses and 70M individual claims. We find that epistemic diversity has increased substantially over the past three years, a positive counter to recent diversity pessimism. However, despite progress, we find that every system is less diverse than a search baseline. This gap is not uniform: RAG can improve diversity, while large models are counterintuitively less diverse than smaller ones. Moreover, LLM parametric knowledge systematically reflects English over local-language knowledge for country specific topics. Together, these results demonstrate that while progress on epistemic diversity is tangible, it is insufficient and unevenly distributed. --- ### Locate-Then-Examine: Grounded Region Reasoning Improves Detection of AI-Generated Images Authors: Yikun Ji, Yan Hong, Bowen Deng, Jun Lan, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Liqing Zhang, Jianfu Zhang Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04225v2 The rapid growth of AI-generated imagery has blurred the boundary between real and synthetic content, raising practical concerns for digital integrity. Vision-language models (VLMs) can provide natural language explanations, but standard one-pass classifiers often miss subtle artifacts in high-quality synthetic images and offer limited grounding in the pixels. We propose Locate-Then-Examine (LTE), a two-stage VLM-based forensic framework that first localizes suspicious regions and then re-examines these crops together with the full image to refine the real vs. AI-generated verdict and its explanation. LTE explicitly links each decision to localized visual evidence through region proposals and region-aware reasoning. To support training and evaluation, we introduce TRACE, a dataset of 20,000 real and high-quality synthetic images with region-level annotations and automatically generated forensic explanations, constructed by a VLM-based pipeline with additional consistency checks and quality control. Across TRACE and multiple external benchmarks, LTE achieves competitive accuracy and improved robustness while providing human-understandable, region-grounded explanations suitable for forensic deployment. --- ### MASC: Boosting Autoregressive Image Generation with a Manifold-Aligned Semantic Clustering Authors: Lixuan He, Shikang Zheng, Linfeng Zhang Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04220v1 Autoregressive (AR) models have shown great promise in image generation, yet they face a fundamental inefficiency stemming from their core component: a vast, unstructured vocabulary of visual tokens. This conventional approach treats tokens as a flat vocabulary, disregarding the intrinsic structure of the token embedding space where proximity often correlates with semantic similarity. This oversight results in a highly complex prediction task, which hinders training efficiency and limits final generation quality. To resolve this, we propose Manifold-Aligned Semantic Clustering (MASC), a principled framework that constructs a hierarchical semantic tree directly from the codebook's intrinsic structure. MASC employs a novel geometry-aware distance metric and a density-driven agglomerative construction to model the underlying manifold of the token embeddings. By transforming the flat, high-dimensional prediction task into a structured, hierarchical one, MASC introduces a beneficial inductive bias that significantly simplifies the learning problem for the AR model. MASC is designed as a plug-and-play module, and our extensive experiments validate its effectiveness: it accelerates training by up to 57% and significantly improves generation quality, reducing the FID of LlamaGen-XL from 2.87 to 2.58. MASC elevates existing AR frameworks to be highly competitive with state-of-the-art methods, establishing that structuring the prediction space is as crucial as architectural innovation for scalable generative modeling. --- ### MLLMEraser: Achieving Test-Time Unlearning in Multimodal Large Language Models through Activation Steering Authors: Chenlu Ding, Jiancan Wu, Leheng Sheng, Fan Zhang, Yancheng Yuan, Xiang Wang, Xiangnan He Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04217v3 Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across vision-language tasks, yet their large-scale deployment raises pressing concerns about memorized private data, outdated knowledge, and harmful content. Existing unlearning approaches for MLLMs typically adapt training-based strategies such as gradient ascent or preference optimization, but these methods are computationally expensive, irreversible, and often distort retained knowledge. In this work, we propose MLLMEraser, an input-aware, training-free framework for test-time unlearning. Our approach leverages activation steering to enable dynamic knowledge erasure without parameter updates. Specifically, we construct a multimodal erasure direction by contrasting adversarially perturbed, knowledge-recall image-text pairs with knowledge-erasure counterparts, capturing both textual and visual discrepancies. To prevent unnecessary interference, we further design an input-aware steering mechanism that adaptively determines when and how the erasure direction should be applied, preserving utility on retained knowledge while enforcing forgetting on designated content. Experiments on LLaVA-1.5 and Qwen-2.5-VL demonstrate that MLLMEraser consistently outperforms state-of-the-art MLLM unlearning baselines, achieving stronger forgetting performance with lower computational cost and minimal utility degradation. --- ### Teaching LLM to be Persuasive: Reward-Enhanced Policy Optimization for Alignment from Heterogeneous Rewards Authors: Xia Zeng, Yihan Chen, Luhui Liu, Chao Luo, Ye Chen, Zhuoran Zhuang Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04214v3 We deploy large language models (LLMs) as business development (BD) agents for persuasive price negotiation in online travel agencies (OTAs). The agent must follow a multi-stage Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) and strict guardrails (no over-promising and no hallucinations), while remaining human-like and effective over long, multi-turn dialogues. We propose Reward-Enhanced Policy Optimization (REPO), a reinforcement learning post-training method that combines heterogeneous rewards: a preference-trained reward model (RM), an LLM-as-a-judge (RJ) for nuanced behaviors (e.g., emotional value and SOP compliance), and rule-based reward functions (RF) (mainly regex-based) for deterministic checks on numerics, formatting, and guardrails. In expert consensus evaluation (three human experts; 30 online conversations and 45 curated bad cases), REPO improves average dialogue rating to 4.63 (+0.33 over GRPO) and raises the share of conversations with at least one excellent response to 66.67% (+23.34 pp over GRPO), while achieving a 93.33% bad-case fix rate with 75.56% clean fixes. In a production A/B test on 9,653 real customer conversations (vs. an intent-driven dialogue system), REPO improves response rate by +12.14 pp and task success rate by +5.94 pp (p<0.001). --- ### Why Low-Precision Transformer Training Fails: An Analysis on Flash Attention Authors: Haiquan Qiu, Quanming Yao Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04212v4 The pursuit of computational efficiency has driven the adoption of low-precision formats for training transformer models. However, this progress is often hindered by notorious training instabilities. This paper provides the first mechanistic explanation for a long-standing and unresolved failure case where training with flash attention in low-precision settings leads to catastrophic loss explosion. Our in-depth analysis reveals that the failure is not a random artifact but caused by two intertwined phenomena: the emergence of similar low-rank representations within the attention mechanism and the compounding effect of biased rounding errors inherent in low-precision arithmetic. We demonstrate how these factors create a vicious cycle of error accumulation that corrupts weight updates, ultimately derailing the training dynamics. To validate our findings, we introduce a minimal modification to the flash attention that mitigates the bias in rounding errors. This simple change stabilizes the training process, confirming our analysis and offering a practical solution to this persistent problem. Code is available at https://github.com/ucker/why-low-precision-training-fails. --- ### AgentRL: Scaling Agentic Reinforcement Learning with a Multi-Turn, Multi-Task Framework Authors: Hanchen Zhang, Xiao Liu, Bowen Lv, Xueqiao Sun, Bohao Jing, Iat Long Iong, Zhenyu Hou, Zehan Qi, Hanyu Lai, Yifan Xu, Rui Lu, Hongning Wang et al. Published: 2025-10-05 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04206v1 Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in building generalist agents that can learn through online interactions. However, applying reinforcement learning (RL) to train LLM agents in multi-turn, multi-task settings remains challenging due to lack of scalable infrastructure and stable training algorithms. In this work, we present the AgentRL framework for scalable multi-turn, multi-task agentic RL training. On the infrastructure side, AgentRL features a fully-asynchronous generation-training pipeline for efficient multi-turn RL. To support heterogeneous environment development in multi-task RL, we design a unified function-call based API interface, containerized environment development, and a centralized controller. On the algorithm side, we propose cross-policy sampling to encourage model exploration in multi-turn settings and task advantage normalization to stabilize multi-task training. Experiments show that AgentRL, trained on open LLMs across five agentic tasks, significantly outperforms GPT-5, Clause-Sonnet-4, DeepSeek-R1, and other open-source LLM agents. Multi-task training with AgentRL matches the best results among all task-specific models. AgentRL is open-sourced at https://github.com/THUDM/AgentRL. The algorithm and framework are adopted in building \textsc{\href{https://autoglm.zhipuai.cn}{AutoGLM}}. ---