# Research Papers — 2025-10 · bundle page 2 of 217

> Full-text markdown of papers #51–100 of 10843 published in 2025-10, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 10843-paper 2025-10 archive (50 papers per file).

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### DM-QPMNET: Dual-modality fusion network for cell segmentation in quantitative phase microscopy

Authors: Rajatsubhra Chakraborty, Ana Espinosa-Momox, Riley Haskin, Depeng Xu, Rosario Porras-Aguilar
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00218v1

Cell segmentation in single-shot quantitative phase microscopy (ssQPM) faces challenges from traditional thresholding methods that are sensitive to noise and cell density, while deep learning approaches using simple channel concatenation fail to exploit the complementary nature of polarized intensity images and phase maps. We introduce DM-QPMNet, a dual-encoder network that treats these as distinct modalities with separate encoding streams. Our architecture fuses modality-specific features at intermediate depth via multi-head attention, enabling polarized edge and texture representations to selectively integrate complementary phase information. This content-aware fusion preserves training stability while adding principled multi-modal integration through dual-source skip connections and per-modality normalization at minimal overhead. Our approach demonstrates substantial improvements over monolithic concatenation and single-modality baselines, showing that modality-specific encoding with learnable fusion effectively exploits ssQPM's simultaneous capture of complementary illumination and phase cues for robust cell segmentation.

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### Gradient Boosted Mixed Models: Flexible Estimation of Mean and Variance Components for Clustered Data

Authors: Mitchell L. Prevett, Francis K. C. Hui, Zhi Yang Tho, A. H. Welsh, Anton H. Westveld
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, stat.CO, stat.ME
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00217v3

We introduce a novel way to combine gradient boosting with mixed effects models, whereby the mean and variance components are learned jointly as functions of covariates via likelihood-based gradients. Gradient Boosted Mixed Models (GBMixed) estimates a nonparametric fixed effects function characterizing the overall mean of the response, while also allowing the random effects covariance matrix along with the residual variance to depend on covariates in a flexible manner. We demonstrate how GBMixed facilitates covariate-dependent random effect predictions, and subsequently point predictions and prediction intervals for individual treatment effects, that can adapt between population-level and cluster-level information. Experiments and applications to two real-world datasets show that GBMixed can accurately recover complex nonlinear fixed effect functions and covariate-dependent covariances in a linear mixed model, while also improving point and probabilistic predictive performance compared with several existing approaches such as parametric linear mixed models, Natural Gradient Boosting, and Gaussian Process Boosting. In simulations where the variance components are designed to vary as a function of covariates, GBMixed reduces the mean squared error in recovering the random effects variance function by a factor of eight relative to linear mixed models and Gaussian Process Boosting.

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### An Efficient and Generalizable Transfer Learning Method for Weather Condition Detection on Ground Terminals

Authors: Wenxuan Zhang, Peng Hu
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, eess.IV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00211v1

The increasing adoption of satellite Internet with low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites in mega-constellations allows ubiquitous connectivity to rural and remote areas. However, weather events have a significant impact on the performance and reliability of satellite Internet. Adverse weather events such as snow and rain can disturb the performance and operations of satellite Internet's essential ground terminal components, such as satellite antennas, significantly disrupting the space-ground link conditions between LEO satellites and ground stations. This challenge calls for not only region-based weather forecasts but also fine-grained detection capability on ground terminal components of fine-grained weather conditions. Such a capability can assist in fault diagnostics and mitigation for reliable satellite Internet, but its solutions are lacking, not to mention the effectiveness and generalization that are essential in real-world deployments. This paper discusses an efficient transfer learning (TL) method that can enable a ground component to locally detect representative weather-related conditions. The proposed method can detect snow, wet, and other conditions resulting from adverse and typical weather events and shows superior performance compared to the typical deep learning methods, such as YOLOv7, YOLOv9, Faster R-CNN, and R-YOLO. Our TL method also shows the advantage of being generalizable to various scenarios.

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### Diffusion Models at the Drug Discovery Frontier: A Review on Generating Small Molecules versus Therapeutic Peptides

Authors: Yiquan Wang, Yahui Ma, Yuhan Chang, Jiayao Yan, Jialin Zhang, Minnuo Cai, Kai Wei
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, q-bio.BM, q-bio.QM
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00209v2

Diffusion models have emerged as a leading framework in generative modeling, poised to transform the traditionally slow and costly process of drug discovery. This review provides a systematic comparison of their application in designing two principal therapeutic modalities: small molecules and therapeutic peptides. We dissect how the unified framework of iterative denoising is adapted to the distinct molecular representations, chemical spaces, and design objectives of each modality. For small molecules, these models excel at structure-based design, generating novel, pocket-fitting ligands with desired physicochemical properties, yet face the critical hurdle of ensuring chemical synthesizability. Conversely, for therapeutic peptides, the focus shifts to generating functional sequences and designing de novo structures, where the primary challenges are achieving biological stability against proteolysis, ensuring proper folding, and minimizing immunogenicity. Despite these distinct challenges, both domains face shared hurdles: the scarcity of high-quality experimental data, the reliance on inaccurate scoring functions for validation, and the crucial need for experimental validation. We conclude that the full potential of diffusion models will be unlocked by bridging these modality-specific gaps and integrating them into automated, closed-loop Design-Build-Test-Learn (DBTL) platforms, thereby shifting the paradigm from mere chemical exploration to the on-demand engineering of novel~therapeutics.

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### Addressing Longstanding Challenges in Cognitive Science with Language Models

Authors: Dirk U. Wulff, Rui Mata
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00206v3

Cognitive science faces ongoing challenges in research integration, formalization, conceptual clarity, and other areas, in part due to its multifaceted and interdisciplinary nature. Recent advances in artificial intelligence, particularly the development of language models, offer tools that may help to address these longstanding issues. Specifically, they can help map fragmented literatures, formalize verbal theories, identify overlap among constructs and measures, generate predictions across tasks, and extract cultural or ecological structure from naturalistic data. However, these opportunities come with risks, including oversimplification, opacity, deskilling, and bias. Taken together, we conclude that language models could serve as tools for a more integrative and cumulative cognitive science when used judiciously to complement, rather than replace, human agency.

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### Transfer learning discovery of molecular modulators for perovskite solar cells

Authors: Haoming Yan, Xinyu Chen, Yanran Wang, Zhengchao Luo, Weizheng Huang, Hongshuai Wang, Peng Chen, Yuzhi Zhang, Weijie Sun, Jinzhuo Wang, Qihuang Gong, Rui Zhu et al.
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cond-mat.mtrl-sci, cs.LG, physics.app-ph
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00204v1

The discovery of effective molecular modulators is essential for advancing perovskite solar cells (PSCs), but the research process is hindered by the vastness of chemical space and the time-consuming and expensive trial-and-error experimental screening. Concurrently, machine learning (ML) offers significant potential for accelerating materials discovery. However, applying ML to PSCs remains a major challenge due to data scarcity and limitations of traditional quantitative structure-property relationship (QSPR) models. Here, we apply a chemical informed transfer learning framework based on pre-trained deep neural networks, which achieves high accuracy in predicting the molecular modulator's effect on the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of PSCs. This framework is established through systematical benchmarking of diverse molecular representations, enabling lowcost and high-throughput virtual screening over 79,043 commercially available molecules. Furthermore, we leverage interpretability techniques to visualize the learned chemical representation and experimentally characterize the resulting modulator-perovskite interactions. The top molecular modulators identified by the framework are subsequently validated experimentally, delivering a remarkably improved champion PCE of 26.91% in PSCs.

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### Diffusion LLMs are Natural Adversaries for any LLM

Authors: David Lüdke, Tom Wollschläger, Paul Ungermann, Stephan Günnemann, Leo Schwinn
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00203v1

We introduce a novel framework that transforms the resource-intensive (adversarial) prompt optimization problem into an \emph{efficient, amortized inference task}. Our core insight is that pretrained, non-autoregressive generative LLMs, such as Diffusion LLMs, which model the joint distribution over prompt-response pairs, can serve as powerful surrogates for prompt search. This approach enables the direct conditional generation of prompts, effectively replacing costly, per-instance discrete optimization with a small number of parallelizable samples. We provide a probabilistic analysis demonstrating that under mild fidelity assumptions, only a few conditional samples are required to recover high-reward (harmful) prompts. Empirically, we find that the generated prompts are low-perplexity, diverse jailbreaks that exhibit strong transferability to a wide range of black-box target models, including robustly trained and proprietary LLMs. Beyond adversarial prompting, our framework opens new directions for red teaming, automated prompt optimization, and leveraging emerging Flow- and Diffusion-based LLMs.

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### Position: Vibe Coding Needs Vibe Reasoning: Improving Vibe Coding with Formal Verification

Authors: Jacqueline Mitchell, Yasser Shaaban
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.SE, cs.LG, cs.LO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00202v1

``Vibe coding'' -- the practice of developing software through iteratively conversing with a large language model (LLM) -- has exploded in popularity within the last year. However, developers report key limitations including the accumulation of technical debt, security issues, and code churn to achieve satisfactory results. We argue that these pitfalls result from LLMs' inability to reconcile accumulating human-imposed constraints during vibe coding, with developers inadvertently failing to resolve contradictions because LLMs prioritize user commands over code consistency. Given LLMs' receptiveness to verification-based feedback, we argue that formal methods can mitigate these pitfalls, making vibe coding more reliable. However, we posit that integrating formal methods must transcend existing approaches that combine formal methods and LLMs. We advocate for a side-car system throughout the vibe coding process which: (1) \emph{Autoformalizes} specifications (2) Validates against targets, (3) Delivers \emph{actionable} feedback to the LLM, and (4) Allows intuitive developer influence on specifications.

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### Training LLMs Beyond Next Token Prediction - Filling the Mutual Information Gap

Authors: Chun-Hao Yang, Bo-Han Feng, Tzu-Yuan Lai, Yan-Yu Chen, Yin-Kai Dean Huang, Shou-De Lin
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00198v2

Autoregressive language models are usually trained with next-token prediction under a fixed left-to-right target order. This paper studies target-token organization as a training-time design choice across arithmetic reasoning, multi-label text classification, and text generation. Controlled order studies show that the default NTP order can be far from the best-performing tested organization, while fixed hand-crafted orders such as reverse order do not generalize across tasks. To address this, Max(MI(S;t)) is introduced as a deterministic mutual-information-based heuristic that prioritizes information-rich target tokens. For fixed-length outputs, it constructs task-specific prediction orders; for open-vocabulary text generation, the same principle is applied through lightweight prefix augmentation. Experiments with GPT-style models and pretrained Llama/Qwen variants show that Max(MI(S;t)) often improves over standard NTP and simple baselines such as reverse order, TF-IDF, and conditional-probability selection, without changing model architecture or autoregressive decoding.

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### Understanding Code Agent Behaviour: An Empirical Study of Success and Failure Trajectories

Authors: Oorja Majgaonkar, Zhiwei Fei, Xiang Li, Federica Sarro, He Ye
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00197v1

The increasing deployment of Large Language Model (LLM) agents for complex software engineering tasks has created a need to understand their problem-solving behaviours beyond simple success metrics. While these agents demonstrate impressive capabilities in automated issue resolution, their decision-making processes remain largely opaque. This paper presents an empirical study of agent trajectories, namely the execution traces capturing the steps agents take when attempting to resolve software issues. We analyse trajectories from three state-of-the-art code agents (OpenHands, SWE-agent, and Prometheus) on the SWE-Bench benchmark, examining both successful and failed attempts. Our investigation reveals several key insights into agent behaviour. First, we identify how distinct problem-solving strategies, such as defensive programming and context gathering, enable success in different scenarios. Second, we find that failed trajectories are consistently longer and exhibit higher variance than successful ones, with failure patterns differing significantly between agents. Third, our fault localisation analysis shows that while most trajectories correctly identify problematic files (72-81\% even in failures), success depends more on achieving approximate rather than exact code modifications. These and other findings unveiled by our study, provide a foundation for understanding agent behaviour through trajectory analysis, contributing to the development of more robust and interpretable autonomous software engineering systems.

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### Incremental Selection of Most-Filtering Conjectures and Proofs of the Selected Conjectures

Authors: Jovial Cheukam Ngouonou, Ramiz Gindullin, Claude-Guy Quimper, Nicolas Beldiceanu, Remi Douence
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00194v1

We present an improved incremental selection algorithm of the selection algorithm presented in (1) and prove all the selected conjectures.

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### Reducing Robotic Upper-Limb Assessment Time While Maintaining Precision: A Time Series Foundation Model Approach

Authors: Faranak Akbarifar, Nooshin Maghsoodi, Sean P Dukelow, Stephen Scott, Parvin Mousavi
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00193v1

Purpose: Visually Guided Reaching (VGR) on the Kinarm robot yields sensitive kinematic biomarkers but requires 40-64 reaches, imposing time and fatigue burdens. We evaluate whether time-series foundation models can replace unrecorded trials from an early subset of reaches while preserving the reliability of standard Kinarm parameters. Methods: We analyzed VGR speed signals from 461 stroke and 599 control participants across 4- and 8-target reaching protocols. We withheld all but the first 8 or 16 reaching trials and used ARIMA, MOMENT, and Chronos models, fine-tuned on 70 percent of subjects, to forecast synthetic trials. We recomputed four kinematic features of reaching (reaction time, movement time, posture speed, maximum speed) on combined recorded plus forecasted trials and compared them to full-length references using ICC(2,1). Results: Chronos forecasts restored ICC &gt;= 0.90 for all parameters with only 8 recorded trials plus forecasts, matching the reliability of 24-28 recorded reaches (Delta ICC &lt;= 0.07). MOMENT yielded intermediate gains, while ARIMA improvements were minimal. Across cohorts and protocols, synthetic trials replaced reaches without materially compromising feature reliability. Conclusion: Foundation-model forecasting can greatly shorten Kinarm VGR assessment time. For the most impaired stroke survivors, sessions drop from 4-5 minutes to about 1 minute while preserving kinematic precision. This forecast-augmented paradigm promises efficient robotic evaluations for assessing motor impairments following stroke.

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### EL-MIA: Quantifying Membership Inference Risks of Sensitive Entities in LLMs

Authors: Ali Satvaty, Suzan Verberne, Fatih Turkmen
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00192v1

Membership inference attacks (MIA) aim to infer whether a particular data point is part of the training dataset of a model. In this paper, we propose a new task in the context of LLM privacy: entity-level discovery of membership risk focused on sensitive information (PII, credit card numbers, etc). Existing methods for MIA can detect the presence of entire prompts or documents in the LLM training data, but they fail to capture risks at a finer granularity. We propose the ``EL-MIA'' framework for auditing entity-level membership risks in LLMs. We construct a benchmark dataset for the evaluation of MIA methods on this task. Using this benchmark, we conduct a systematic comparison of existing MIA techniques as well as two newly proposed methods. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the results, trying to explain the relation of the entity level MIA susceptability with the model scale, training epochs, and other surface level factors. Our findings reveal that existing MIA methods are limited when it comes to entity-level membership inference of the sensitive attributes, while this susceptibility can be outlined with relatively straightforward methods, highlighting the need for stronger adversaries to stress test the provided threat model.

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### A Retrospect to Multi-prompt Learning across Vision and Language

Authors: Ziliang Chen, Xin Huang, Quanlong Guan, Liang Lin, Weiqi Luo
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00191v1

The vision community is undergoing the unprecedented progress with the emergence of Vision-Language Pretraining Models (VLMs). Prompt learning plays as the holy grail of accessing VLMs since it enables their fast adaptation to downstream tasks with limited resources. Whereas existing researches milling around single-prompt paradigms, rarely investigate the technical potential behind their multi-prompt learning counterparts. This paper aims to provide a principled retrospect for vision-language multi-prompt learning. We extend the recent constant modality gap phenomenon to learnable prompts and then, justify the superiority of vision-language transfer with multi-prompt augmentation, empirically and theoretically. In terms of this observation, we propose an Energy-based Multi-prompt Learning (EMPL) to generate multiple prompt embeddings by drawing instances from an energy-based distribution, which is implicitly defined by VLMs. So our EMPL is not only parameter-efficient but also rigorously lead to the balance between in-domain and out-of-domain open-vocabulary generalization. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted to justify our claims and the excellence of EMPL.

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### Deep reinforcement learning for optimal trading with partial information

Authors: Andrea Macrì, Sebastian Jaimungal, Fabrizio Lillo
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: q-fin.TR, q-fin.CP, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00190v2

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has attracted increasing interest in financial applications, including optimal trading and execution. However, the use of RL for optimal trading strategies that exploit latent information in the market has been, to the best of our knowledge, subject to little attention. In this paper, we consider an optimal trading problem in which the trading signal follows an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process with regime switching parameters. The problem is naturally formulated as a partially observable Markov decision problem, requiring a trader to infer latent information directly from the history of the observable process. We combine recurrent neural networks (RNN) with RL to address both the filtering and trading components of the problem. More specifically, we propose three distinct RL-based approaches, on top of which we incorporate RNN to filter the latent state of the environment where the agent is trading. The first, a one-step approach, directly encodes hidden states from the GRU into the RL trader. The second and third are two-step methods: one that uses posterior regime probability estimates for the mean reverting regimes, while the other relies on forecasts of the next signal value. Through extensive simulations with increasingly complex Markovian regime dynamics for the trading signal's parameters, as well as an empirical application to equity pairs trading, we find that feeding posterior probability estimates on the latent long-run mean reversion regime achieves superior cumulative rewards and exhibits more interpretable strategies, in contrast with the other two approaches. Overall, our results show that the quality and structure of the information supplied to the agent are important for trading performance and policy interpretability.

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### SHAP values through General Fourier Representations: Theory and Applications

Authors: Roberto Morales
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: math.OC, math.AP, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00185v1

This article establishes a rigorous spectral framework for the mathematical analysis of SHAP values. We show that any predictive model defined on a discrete or multi-valued input space admits a generalized Fourier expansion with respect to an orthonormalisation tensor-product basis constructed under a product probability measure. Within this setting, each SHAP attribution can be represented as a linear functional of the model's Fourier coefficients. Two complementary regimes are studied. In the deterministic regime, we derive quantitative stability estimates for SHAP values under Fourier truncation, showing that the attribution map is Lipschitz continuous with respect to the distance between predictors. In the probabilistic regime, we consider neural networks in their infinite-width limit and prove convergence of SHAP values toward those induced by the corresponding Gaussian process prior, with explicit error bounds in expectation and with high probability based on concentration inequalities. We also provide a numerical experiment on a clinical unbalanced dataset to validate the theoretical findings.

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### PDE-SHARP: PDE Solver Hybrids through Analysis and Refinement Passes

Authors: Shaghayegh Fazliani, Madeleine Udell
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00183v2

Current LLM-driven approaches using test-time computing to generate PDE solvers execute a large number of solver samples to identify high-accuracy solvers. These paradigms are especially costly for complex PDEs requiring substantial computational resources for numerical evaluation. We introduce PDE-SHARP, a framework to reduce computational costs by replacing expensive scientific computation by cheaper LLM inference that achieves superior solver accuracy with 60-75% fewer computational evaluations. PDE-SHARP employs three stages: (1) Analysis: mathematical chain-of-thought analysis including PDE classification, solution type detection, and stability analysis; (2) Genesis: solver generation based on mathematical insights from the previous stage; and (3) Synthesis: collaborative selection-hybridization tournaments in which LLM judges iteratively refine implementations through flexible performance feedback. To generate high-quality solvers, PDE-SHARP requires fewer than 13 solver evaluations on average compared to 30+ for baseline methods, improving accuracy uniformly across tested PDEs by $4\times$ on average, and demonstrates robust performance across LLM architectures, from general-purpose to specialized reasoning models.

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### From Evidence to Verdict: An Agent-Based Forensic Framework for AI-Generated Image Detection

Authors: Mengfei Liang, Yiting Qu, Yukun Jiang, Michael Backes, Yang Zhang
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.CV, cs.CR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00181v2

The rapid evolution of AI-generated images poses growing challenges to information integrity and media authenticity. Existing detection approaches face limitations in robustness, interpretability, and generalization across diverse generative models, particularly when relying on a single source of visual evidence. We introduce AIFo (Agent-based Image Forensics), a training-free framework that formulates AI-generated image detection as a multi-stage forensic analysis process through multi-agent collaboration. The framework integrates a set of forensic tools, including reverse image search, metadata extraction, pre-trained classifiers, and vision-language model analysis, and resolves insufficient or conflicting evidence through a structured multi-agent debate mechanism. An optional memory-augmented module further enables the framework to incorporate information from historical cases. We evaluate AIFo on a benchmark of 6,000 images spanning controlled laboratory settings and challenging real-world scenarios, where it achieves 97.05% accuracy and consistently outperforms traditional classifiers and strong vision-language model baselines. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of agent-based procedural reasoning for AI-generated image detection.

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### ParaScopes: What do Language Models Activations Encode About Future Text?

Authors: Nicky Pochinkov, Yulia Volkova, Anna Vasileva, Sai V R Chereddy
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00180v1

Interpretability studies in language models often investigate forward-looking representations of activations. However, as language models become capable of doing ever longer time horizon tasks, methods for understanding activations often remain limited to testing specific concepts or tokens. We develop a framework of Residual Stream Decoders as a method of probing model activations for paragraph-scale and document-scale plans. We test several methods and find information can be decoded equivalent to 5+ tokens of future context in small models. These results lay the groundwork for better monitoring of language models and better understanding how they might encode longer-term planning information.

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### Generative Modeling Enables Molecular Structure Retrieval from Coulomb Explosion Imaging

Authors: Xiang Li, Till Jahnke, Rebecca Boll, Jiaqi Han, Minkai Xu, Michael Meyer, Maria Novella Piancastelli, Daniel Rolles, Artem Rudenko, Florian Trinter, Thomas J. A. Wolf, Jana B. Thayer et al.
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: physics.chem-ph, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00179v2

Capturing the structural changes that molecules undergo during chemical reactions in real space and time is a long-standing dream and an essential prerequisite for understanding and ultimately controlling femtochemistry. A key approach to tackle this challenging task is Coulomb explosion imaging, which benefited decisively from recently emerging high-repetition-rate X-ray free-electron laser sources. With this technique, information on the molecular structure is inferred from the momentum distributions of the ions produced by the rapid Coulomb explosion of molecules. Retrieving molecular structures from these distributions poses a highly non-linear inverse problem that remains unsolved for molecules consisting of more than a few atoms. Here, we address this challenge using a diffusion-based Transformer neural network. We show that the network reconstructs unknown molecular geometries from ion-momentum distributions with a mean absolute error below one Bohr radius, which is half the length of a typical chemical bond.

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### Can SAEs reveal and mitigate racial biases of LLMs in healthcare?

Authors: Hiba Ahsan, Byron C. Wallace
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00177v2

LLMs are increasingly being used in healthcare. This promises to free physicians from drudgery, enabling better care to be delivered at scale. But the use of LLMs in this space also brings risks; for example, such models may worsen existing biases. How can we spot when LLMs are (spuriously) relying on patient race to inform predictions? In this work we assess the degree to which Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) can reveal (and control) associations the model has made between race and stigmatizing concepts. We first identify SAE latents in Gemma-2 models which appear to correlate with Black individuals. We find that this latent activates on reasonable input sequences (e.g., "African American") but also problematic words like "incarceration". We then show that we can use this latent to steer models to generate outputs about Black patients, and further that this can induce problematic associations in model outputs as a result. For example, activating the Black latent increases the risk assigned to the probability that a patient will become "belligerent". We evaluate the degree to which such steering via latents might be useful for mitigating bias. We find that this offers improvements in simple settings, but is less successful for more realistic and complex clinical tasks. Overall, our results suggest that: SAEs may offer a useful tool in clinical applications of LLMs to identify problematic reliance on demographics but mitigating bias via SAE steering appears to be of marginal utility for realistic tasks.

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### Effectiveness of LLMs in Temporal User Profiling for Recommendation

Authors: Milad Sabouri, Masoud Mansoury, Kun Lin, Bamshad Mobasher
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00176v1

Effectively modeling the dynamic nature of user preferences is crucial for enhancing recommendation accuracy and fostering transparency in recommender systems. Traditional user profiling often overlooks the distinction between transitory short-term interests and stable long-term preferences. This paper examines the capability of leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to capture these temporal dynamics, generating richer user representations through distinct short-term and long-term textual summaries of interaction histories. Our observations suggest that while LLMs tend to improve recommendation quality in domains with more active user engagement, their benefits appear less pronounced in sparser environments. This disparity likely stems from the varying distinguishability of short-term and long-term preferences across domains; the approach shows greater utility where these temporal interests are more clearly separable (e.g., Movies\&amp;TV) compared to domains with more stable user profiles (e.g., Video Games). This highlights a critical trade-off between enhanced performance and computational costs, suggesting context-dependent LLM application. Beyond predictive capability, this LLM-driven approach inherently provides an intrinsic potential for interpretability through its natural language profiles and attention weights. This work contributes insights into the practical capability and inherent interpretability of LLM-driven temporal user profiling, outlining new research directions for developing adaptive and transparent recommender systems.

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### CompAgent: An Agentic Framework for Visual Compliance Verification

Authors: Rahul Ghosh, Baishali Chaudhury, Hari Prasanna Das, Meghana Ashok, Ryan Razkenari, Long Chen, Sungmin Hong, Chun-Hao Liu
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00171v3

Visual compliance verification is a critical yet underexplored problem in computer vision, especially in domains such as media, entertainment, and advertising where content must adhere to complex and evolving policy rules. Existing methods often rely on task-specific deep learning models trained on manually labeled datasets, which are costly to build and limited in generalizability. While recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer broad real-world knowledge and policy understanding, they struggle to reason over fine-grained visual details and apply structured compliance rules effectively on their own. In this paper, we propose CompAgent, the first agentic framework for visual compliance verification. CompAgent augments MLLMs with a suite of visual tools-such as object detectors, face analyzers, NSFW detectors, and captioning models-and introduces a planning agent that dynamically selects appropriate tools based on the compliance policy. A compliance verification agent then integrates image, tool outputs, and policy context to perform multimodal reasoning. Experiments on public benchmarks show that CompAgent outperforms specialized classifiers, direct MLLM prompting, and curated routing baselines, achieving up to 76% F1 score and a 10% improvement over the state-of-the-art on the UnsafeBench dataset. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of agentic planning and robust tool-augmented reasoning for scalable, accurate, and adaptable visual compliance verification.

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### Study on Supply Chain Finance Decision-Making Model and Enterprise Economic Performance Prediction Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Shiman Zhang, Jinghan Zhou, Zhoufan Yu, Ningai Leng
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00166v1

To improve decision-making and planning efficiency in back-end centralized redundant supply chains, this paper proposes a decision model integrating deep learning with intelligent particle swarm optimization. A distributed node deployment model and optimal planning path are constructed for the supply chain network. Deep learning such as convolutional neural networks extracts features from historical data, and linear programming captures high-order statistical features. The model is optimized using fuzzy association rule scheduling and deep reinforcement learning, while neural networks fit dynamic changes. A hybrid mechanism of "deep learning feature extraction - intelligent particle swarm optimization" guides global optimization and selects optimal decisions for adaptive control. Simulations show reduced resource consumption, enhanced spatial planning, and in dynamic environments improved real-time decision adjustment, distribution path optimization, and robust intelligent control.

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### ARC-GEN: A Mimetic Procedural Benchmark Generator for the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus

Authors: Michael D. Moffitt
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00162v2

The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus remains one of the most compelling and challenging benchmarks for tracking progress toward achieving Artificial General Intelligence. In contrast to other evaluation datasets designed to assess an agent's task-specific skills or accumulated knowledge, the ARC-AGI suite is specifically targeted at measuring skill acquisition efficiency, a trait that has (so far) been lacking in even the most sophisticated machine learning systems. For algorithms that require extensive intra-task exemplars, a significant constraint imposed by ARC-AGI is the modest cardinality of its demonstration set, comprising a small number of $\langle$ input, output $\rangle$ grids per task specifying the corresponding transformation. To embellish the space of viable sample pairs, this paper introduces ARC-GEN, an open-source procedural generator aimed at extending the original ARC-AGI training dataset as faithfully as possible. Unlike prior efforts, our generator is both exhaustive (covering all four-hundred tasks) and mimetic (more closely honoring the distributional properties and characteristics embodied in the initial ARC-AGI-1 release). We also discuss the use of this generator in establishing a static benchmark suite to verify the correctness of programs submitted to the 2025 Google Code Golf Championship.

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### What a diff makes: automating code migration with large language models

Authors: Katherine A. Rosenfeld, Cliff C. Kerr, Jessica Lundin
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00160v1

Modern software programs are built on stacks that are often undergoing changes that introduce updates and improvements, but may also break any project that depends upon them. In this paper we explore the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for code migration, specifically the problem of maintaining compatibility with a dependency as it undergoes major and minor semantic version changes. We demonstrate, using metrics such as test coverage and change comparisons, that contexts containing diffs can significantly improve performance against out of the box LLMs and, in some cases, perform better than using code. We provide a dataset to assist in further development of this problem area, as well as an open-source Python package, AIMigrate, that can be used to assist with migrating code bases. In a real-world migration of TYPHOIDSIM between STARSIM versions, AIMigrate correctly identified 65% of required changes in a single run, increasing to 80% with multiple runs, with 47% of changes generated perfectly.

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### BlurGuard: A Simple Approach for Robustifying Image Protection Against AI-Powered Editing

Authors: Jinsu Kim, Yunhun Nam, Minseon Kim, Sangpil Kim, Jongheon Jeong
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00143v1

Recent advances in text-to-image models have increased the exposure of powerful image editing techniques as a tool, raising concerns about their potential for malicious use. An emerging line of research to address such threats focuses on implanting "protective" adversarial noise into images before their public release, so future attempts to edit them using text-to-image models can be impeded. However, subsequent works have shown that these adversarial noises are often easily "reversed," e.g., with techniques as simple as JPEG compression, casting doubt on the practicality of the approach. In this paper, we argue that adversarial noise for image protection should not only be imperceptible, as has been a primary focus of prior work, but also irreversible, viz., it should be difficult to detect as noise provided that the original image is hidden. We propose a surprisingly simple method to enhance the robustness of image protection methods against noise reversal techniques. Specifically, it applies an adaptive per-region Gaussian blur on the noise to adjust the overall frequency spectrum. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method consistently improves the per-sample worst-case protection performance of existing methods against a wide range of reversal techniques on diverse image editing scenarios, while also reducing quality degradation due to noise in terms of perceptual metrics. Code is available at https://github.com/jsu-kim/BlurGuard.

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### FLoC: Facility Location-Based Efficient Visual Token Compression for Long Video Understanding

Authors: Janghoon Cho, Jungsoo Lee, Munawar Hayat, Kyuwoong Hwang, Fatih Porikli, Sungha Choi
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00141v2

Recent studies in long video understanding have harnessed the advanced visual-language reasoning capabilities of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), driving the evolution of video-LMMs specialized for processing extended video sequences. However, the scalability of these models is severely limited by the overwhelming volume of visual tokens generated from extended video sequences. To address this challenge, we propose FLoC, an efficient visual token compression framework based on the facility location function, a principled approach that swiftly selects a compact yet highly representative and diverse subset of visual tokens within a predefined budget on the number of visual tokens. By integrating the lazy greedy algorithm, our method achieves remarkable efficiency gains by swiftly selecting a compact subset of tokens, drastically reducing the number of visual tokens while guaranteeing near-optimal performance. Notably, our approach is training-free, model-agnostic, and query-agnostic, providing a versatile solution that seamlessly integrates with diverse video-LLMs and existing workflows. Extensive evaluations on large-scale benchmarks, such as Video-MME, MLVU, LongVideoBench, and EgoSchema, show that our framework consistently surpasses recent compression techniques, highlighting its effectiveness and robustness in addressing the challenges of long video understanding as well as its processing efficiency.

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### End-to-End Dexterous Arm-Hand VLA Policies via Shared Autonomy: VR Teleoperation Augmented by Autonomous Hand VLA Policy for Efficient Data Collection

Authors: Yu Cui, Yujian Zhang, Lina Tao, Yang Li, Xinyu Yi, Zhibin Li
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00139v2

Achieving human-like dexterous manipulation remains a major challenge for general-purpose robots. While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models show potential in learning skills from demonstrations, their scalability is limited by scarce high-quality training data. Existing data collection methods face inherent constraints: manual teleoperation overloads human operators, while automated planning often produces unnatural motions. We propose a Shared Autonomy framework that divides control between macro and micro motions. A human operator guides the robot's arm pose through intuitive VR teleoperation, while an autonomous DexGrasp-VLA policy handles fine-grained hand control using real-time tactile and visual feedback. This division significantly reduces cognitive load and enables efficient collection of high-quality coordinated arm-hand demonstrations. Using this data, we train an end-to-end VLA policy enhanced with our novel Arm-Hand Feature Enhancement module, which captures both distinct and shared representations of macro and micro movements for more natural coordination. Our Corrective Teleoperation system enables continuous policy improvement through human-in-the-loop failure recovery. Experiments demonstrate that our framework generates high-quality data with minimal manpower and achieves a 90% success rate across diverse objects, including unseen instances. Comprehensive evaluations validate the system's effectiveness in developing dexterous manipulation capabilities.

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### A Dual Large Language Models Architecture with Herald Guided Prompts for Parallel Fine Grained Traffic Signal Control

Authors: Qing Guo, Xinhang Li, Junyu Chen, Zheng Guo, Xiaocong Li, Lin Zhang, Lei Li
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00136v1

Leveraging large language models (LLMs) in traffic signal control (TSC) improves optimization efficiency and interpretability compared to traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods. However, existing LLM-based approaches are limited by fixed time signal durations and are prone to hallucination errors, while RL methods lack robustness in signal timing decisions and suffer from poor generalization. To address these challenges, this paper proposes HeraldLight, a dual LLMs architecture enhanced by Herald guided prompts. The Herald Module extracts contextual information and forecasts queue lengths for each traffic phase based on real-time conditions. The first LLM, LLM-Agent, uses these forecasts to make fine grained traffic signal control, while the second LLM, LLM-Critic, refines LLM-Agent's outputs, correcting errors and hallucinations. These refined outputs are used for score-based fine-tuning to improve accuracy and robustness. Simulation experiments using CityFlow on real world datasets covering 224 intersections in Jinan (12), Hangzhou (16), and New York (196) demonstrate that HeraldLight outperforms state of the art baselines, achieving a 20.03% reduction in average travel time across all scenarios and a 10.74% reduction in average queue length on the Jinan and Hangzhou scenarios. The source code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/BUPT-ANTlab/HeraldLight.

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### Physiologically Active Vegetation Reverses Its Cooling Effect in Humid Urban Climates

Authors: Angana Borah, Adrija Datta, Ashish S. Kumar, Raviraj Dave, Udit Bhatia
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00134v1

Efforts to green cities for cooling are succeeding unevenly because the same vegetation that cools surfaces can also intensify how hot the air feels. Previous studies have identified humid heat as a growing urban hazard, yet how physiologically active vegetation governs this trade-off between cooling and moisture accumulation remains poorly understood, leaving mitigation policy and design largely unguided. Here we quantify how vegetation structure and function influence the Heat Index (HI), a combined measure of temperature and humidity in 138 Indian cities spanning tropical savanna, semi-arid steppe, and humid subtropical climates, and across dense urban cores and semi-urban rings. Using an extreme-aware, one kilometre reconstruction of HI and an interpretable machine-learning framework that integrates SHapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) and Accumulated Local Effects (ALE), we isolate vegetation-climate interactions. Cooling generally strengthens for EVI &gt;= 0.4 and LAI &gt;= 0.05, but joint-high regimes begin to reverse toward warming when EVI &gt;= 0.5, LAI &gt;= 0.2, and fPAR &gt;= 0.5,with an earlier onset for fPAR &gt;= 0.25 in humid, dense cores. In such environments, highly physiologically active vegetation elevates near-surface humidity faster than it removes heat, reversing its cooling effect and amplifying perceived heat stress. These findings establish the climatic limits of vegetation-driven cooling and provide quantitative thresholds for climate-specific greening strategies that promote equitable and heat-resilient cities.

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### Feature Importance Guided Random Forest Learning with Simulated Annealing Based Hyperparameter Tuning

Authors: Kowshik Balasubramanian, Andre Williams, Ismail Butun
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.ET, cs.IT
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00133v1

This paper introduces a novel framework for enhancing Random Forest classifiers by integrating probabilistic feature sampling and hyperparameter tuning via Simulated Annealing. The proposed framework exhibits substantial advancements in predictive accuracy and generalization, adeptly tackling the multifaceted challenges of robust classification across diverse domains, including credit risk evaluation, anomaly detection in IoT ecosystems, early-stage medical diagnostics, and high-dimensional biological data analysis. To overcome the limitations of conventional Random Forests, we present an approach that places stronger emphasis on capturing the most relevant signals from data while enabling adaptive hyperparameter configuration. The model is guided towards features that contribute more meaningfully to classification and optimizing this with dynamic parameter tuning. The results demonstrate consistent accuracy improvements and meaningful insights into feature relevance, showcasing the efficacy of combining importance aware sampling and metaheuristic optimization.

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### A Comparative Analysis of LLM Adaptation: SFT, LoRA, and ICL in Data-Scarce Scenarios

Authors: Bernd Bohnet, Rumen Dangovski, Kevin Swersky, Sherry Moore, Arslan Chaudhry, Kathleen Kenealy, Noah Fiedel
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00130v2

The remarkable capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) often need to be tailored for specific applications, requiring the integration of new knowledge or the acquisition of new skills. While full fine-tuning is a powerful adaptation method, it is computationally expensive and can lead to a degradation of general reasoning abilities, a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting. A range of alternative techniques exists, each with its own trade-offs. In-Context Learning (ICL) is fast but limited by context length, while Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) offer a middle ground by minimizing parameter changes. However, the challenge of catastrophic forgetting persists, raising questions about the best adaptation strategy for a given task. This paper presents a comparative analysis of Supervised Finetuning (SFT), LoRA, and ICL in data-scarce scenarios. We find that LoRA provides the most effective balance, successfully instilling new skills with minimal impact on the base model's general knowledge. In contrast, while SFT excels at skill acquisition, it is highly susceptible to catastrophic forgetting. ICL is effective for incorporating factual knowledge but struggles with complex skills. Our findings offer a practical framework for selecting an LLM adaptation strategy. We highlight the critical distinction between skill acquisition and knowledge integration, clarify the trade-offs between task-specific performance and the preservation of general capabilities.

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### Data-Augmented Deep Learning for Downhole Depth Sensing and Validation

Authors: Si-Yu Xiao, Xin-Di Zhao, Tian-Hao Mao, Yi-Wei Wang, Yu-Qiao Chen, Hong-Yun Zhang, Jian Wang, Jun-Jie Wang, Shuang Liu, Tu-Pei Chen, Yang Liu
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, eess.SP
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00129v5

Accurate downhole depth measurement is essential for oil and gas well operations, directly influencing reservoir contact, production efficiency, and operational safety. Collar correlation using a casing collar locator (CCL) is fundamental for precise depth calibration. While neural network has achieved significant progress in collar recognition, preprocessing methods for such applications remain underdeveloped. Moreover, the limited availability of real well data poses substantial challenges for training neural network models that require extensive datasets. This paper presents a system integrated into a downhole toolstring for CCL log acquisition to facilitate dataset construction. Comprehensive preprocessing methods for data augmentation are proposed, and their effectiveness is evaluated using baseline neural network models. Through systematic experimentation across diverse configurations, the contribution of each augmentation method is analyzed. Results demonstrate that standardization, label distribution smoothing, and random cropping are fundamental prerequisites for model training, while label smoothing regularization, time scaling, and multiple sampling significantly enhance model generalization capabilities. Incorporating the proposed augmentation methods into the two baseline models results in maximum F1 score improvements of 0.027 and 0.024 for the TAN and MAN models, respectively. Furthermore, applying these techniques yields F1 score gains of up to 0.045 for the TAN model and 0.057 for the MAN model compared to prior studies. Performance evaluation on real CCL waveforms confirms the effectiveness and practical applicability of our approach. This work addresses the existing gaps in data augmentation methodologies for training casing collar recognition models under CCL data-limited conditions, and provides a technical foundation for the future automation of downhole operations.

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### Dynamic Model Selection for Trajectory Prediction via Pairwise Ranking and Meta-Features

Authors: Lu Bowen
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00126v1

Recent deep trajectory predictors (e.g., Jiang et al., 2023; Zhou et al., 2022) have achieved strong average accuracy but remain unreliable in complex long-tail driving scenarios. These limitations reveal the weakness of the prevailing "one-model-fits-all" paradigm, particularly in safety-critical urban contexts where simpler physics-based models can occasionally outperform advanced networks (Kalman, 1960). To bridge this gap, we propose a dynamic multi-expert gating framework that adaptively selects the most reliable trajectory predictor among a physics-informed LSTM, a Transformer, and a fine-tuned GameFormer on a per-sample basis. Our method leverages internal model signals (meta-features) such as stability and uncertainty (Gal and Ghahramani, 2016), which we demonstrate to be substantially more informative than geometric scene descriptors. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to formulate trajectory expert selection as a pairwise-ranking problem over internal model signals (Burges et al., 2005), directly optimizing decision quality without requiring post-hoc calibration. Evaluated on the nuPlan-mini dataset (Caesar et al., 2021) with 1,287 samples, our LLM-enhanced tri-expert gate achieves a Final Displacement Error (FDE) of 2.567 m, representing a 9.5 percent reduction over GameFormer (2.835 m), and realizes 57.8 percent of the oracle performance bound. In open-loop simulations, after trajectory horizon alignment, the same configuration reduces FDE on left-turn scenarios by approximately 10 percent, demonstrating consistent improvements across both offline validation and open-loop evaluation. These results indicate that adaptive hybrid systems enhance trajectory reliability in safety-critical autonomous driving, providing a practical pathway beyond static single-model paradigms.

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### Inferring multiple helper Dafny assertions with LLMs

Authors: Álvaro Silva, Alexandra Mendes, Ruben Martins
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.LO, cs.PL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00125v1

The Dafny verifier provides strong correctness guarantees but often requires numerous manual helper assertions, creating a significant barrier to adoption. We investigate the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically infer missing helper assertions in Dafny programs, with a primary focus on cases involving multiple missing assertions. To support this study, we extend the DafnyBench benchmark with curated datasets where one, two, or all assertions are removed, and we introduce a taxonomy of assertion types to analyze inference difficulty. Our approach refines fault localization through a hybrid method that combines LLM predictions with error-message heuristics. We implement this approach in a new tool called DAISY (Dafny Assertion Inference SYstem). While our focus is on multiple missing assertions, we also evaluate DAISY on single-assertion cases. DAISY verifies 63.4% of programs with one missing assertion and 31.7% with multiple missing assertions. Notably, many programs can be verified with fewer assertions than originally present, highlighting that proofs often admit multiple valid repair strategies and that recovering every original assertion is unnecessary. These results demonstrate that automated assertion inference can substantially reduce proof engineering effort and represent a step toward more scalable and accessible formal verification.

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### Cross-fluctuation phase transitions reveal sampling dynamics in diffusion models

Authors: Sai Niranjan Ramachandran, Manish Krishan Lal, Suvrit Sra
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.LG, cond-mat.stat-mech, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00124v1

We analyse how the sampling dynamics of distributions evolve in score-based diffusion models using cross-fluctuations, a centered-moment statistic from statistical physics. Specifically, we show that starting from an unbiased isotropic normal distribution, samples undergo sharp, discrete transitions, eventually forming distinct events of a desired distribution while progressively revealing finer structure. As this process is reversible, these transitions also occur in reverse, where intermediate states progressively merge, tracing a path back to the initial distribution. We demonstrate that these transitions can be detected as discontinuities in $n^{\text{th}}$-order cross-fluctuations. For variance-preserving SDEs, we derive a closed-form for these cross-fluctuations that is efficiently computable for the reverse trajectory. We find that detecting these transitions directly boosts sampling efficiency, accelerates class-conditional and rare-class generation, and improves two zero-shot tasks--image classification and style transfer--without expensive grid search or retraining. We also show that this viewpoint unifies classical coupling and mixing from finite Markov chains with continuous dynamics while extending to stochastic SDEs and non Markovian samplers. Our framework therefore bridges discrete Markov chain theory, phase analysis, and modern generative modeling.

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### Integrating ConvNeXt and Vision Transformers for Enhancing Facial Age Estimation

Authors: Gaby Maroun, Salah Eddine Bekhouche, Fadi Dornaika
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00123v1

Age estimation from facial images is a complex and multifaceted challenge in computer vision. In this study, we present a novel hybrid architecture that combines ConvNeXt, a state-of-the-art advancement of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), with Vision Transformers (ViT). While each model independently delivers excellent performance on a variety of tasks, their integration leverages the complementary strengths of the CNNs localized feature extraction capabilities and the Transformers global attention mechanisms. Our proposed ConvNeXt-ViT hybrid solution was thoroughly evaluated on benchmark age estimation datasets, including MORPH II, CACD, and AFAD, and achieved superior performance in terms of mean absolute error (MAE). To address computational constraints, we leverage pre-trained models and systematically explore different configurations, using linear layers and advanced regularization techniques to optimize the architecture. Comprehensive ablation studies highlight the critical role of individual components and training strategies, and in particular emphasize the importance of adapted attention mechanisms within the CNN framework to improve the model focus on age-relevant facial features. The results show that the ConvNeXt-ViT hybrid not only outperforms traditional methods, but also provides a robust foundation for future advances in age estimation and related visual tasks. This work underscores the transformative potential of hybrid architectures and represents a promising direction for the seamless integration of CNNs and transformers to address complex computer vision challenges.

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### Engineering.ai: A Platform for Teams of AI Engineers in Computational Design

Authors: Ran Xu, Yupeng Qi, Jingsen Feng, Xu Chu
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00122v1

In modern engineering practice, human engineers collaborate in specialized teams to design complex products, with each expert completing their respective tasks while communicating and exchanging results and data with one another. While this division of expertise is essential for managing multidisciplinary complexity, it demands substantial development time and cost. Recently, we introduced OpenFOAMGPT (1.0, 2.0), which functions as an autonomous AI engineer for computational fluid dynamics, and turbulence.ai, which can conduct end-to-end research in fluid mechanics draft publications and PhD theses. Building upon these foundations, we present Engineering.ai, a platform for teams of AI engineers in computational design. The framework employs a hierarchical multi-agent architecture where a Chief Engineer coordinates specialized agents consisting of Aerodynamics, Structural, Acoustic, and Optimization Engineers, each powered by LLM with domain-specific knowledge. Agent-agent collaboration is achieved through file-mediated communication for data provenance and reproducibility, while a comprehensive memory system maintains project context, execution history, and retrieval-augmented domain knowledge to ensure reliable decision-making across the workflow. The system integrates FreeCAD, Gmsh, OpenFOAM, CalculiX, and BPM acoustic analysis, enabling parallel multidisciplinary simulations while maintaining computational accuracy. The framework is validated through UAV wing optimization. This work demonstrates that agentic-AI-enabled AI engineers has the potential to perform complex engineering tasks autonomously. Remarkably, the automated workflow achieved a 100% success rate across over 400 parametric configurations, with zero mesh generation failures, solver convergence issues, or manual interventions required, validating that the framework is trustworthy.

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### Analysis of Line Break prediction models for detecting defensive breakthrough in football

Authors: Shoma Yagi, Jun Ichikawa, Genki Ichinose
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.LG, physics.soc-ph, stat.AP
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00121v1

In football, attacking teams attempt to break through the opponent's defensive line to create scoring opportunities. This action, known as a Line Break, is a critical indicator of offensive effectiveness and tactical performance, yet previous studies have mainly focused on shots or goal opportunities rather than on how teams break the defensive line. In this study, we develop a machine learning model to predict Line Breaks using event and tracking data from the 2023 J1 League season. The model incorporates 189 features, including player positions, velocities, and spatial configurations, and employs an XGBoost classifier to estimate the probability of Line Breaks. The proposed model achieved high predictive accuracy, with an AUC of 0.982 and a Brier score of 0.015. Furthermore, SHAP analysis revealed that factors such as offensive player speed, gaps in the defensive line, and offensive players' spatial distributions significantly contribute to the occurrence of Line Breaks. Finally, we found a moderate positive correlation between the predicted probability of being Line-Broken and the number of shots and crosses conceded at the team level. These results suggest that Line Breaks are closely linked to the creation of scoring opportunities and provide a quantitative framework for understanding tactical dynamics in football.

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### VLM6D: VLM based 6Dof Pose Estimation based on RGB-D Images

Authors: Md Selim Sarowar, Sungho Kim
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00120v1

The primary challenge in computer vision is precisely calculating the pose of 6D objects, however many current approaches are still fragile and have trouble generalizing from synthetic data to real-world situations with fluctuating lighting, textureless objects, and significant occlusions. To address these limitations, VLM6D, a novel dual-stream architecture that leverages the distinct strengths of visual and geometric data from RGB-D input for robust and precise pose estimation. Our framework uniquely integrates two specialized encoders: a powerful, self-supervised Vision Transformer (DINOv2) processes the RGB modality, harnessing its rich, pre-trained understanding of visual grammar to achieve remarkable resilience against texture and lighting variations. Concurrently, a PointNet++ encoder processes the 3D point cloud derived from depth data, enabling robust geometric reasoning that excels even with the sparse, fragmented data typical of severe occlusion. These complementary feature streams are effectively fused to inform a multi task prediction head. We demonstrate through comprehensive experiments that VLM6D obtained new SOTA performance on the challenging Occluded-LineMOD, validating its superior robustness and accuracy.

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### GeneFlow: Translation of Single-cell Gene Expression to Histopathological Images via Rectified Flow

Authors: Mengbo Wang, Shourya Verma, Aditya Malusare, Luopin Wang, Yiyang Lu, Vaneet Aggarwal, Mario Sola, Ananth Grama, Nadia Atallah Lanman
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: q-bio.QM, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00119v1

Spatial transcriptomics (ST) technologies can be used to align transcriptomes with histopathological morphology, presenting exciting new opportunities for biomolecular discovery. Using ST data, we construct a novel framework, GeneFlow, to map transcriptomics onto paired cellular images. By combining an attention-based RNA encoder with a conditional UNet guided by rectified flow, we generate high-resolution images with different staining methods (e.g. H&amp;E, DAPI) to highlight various cellular/tissue structures. Rectified flow with high-order ODE solvers creates a continuous, bijective mapping between transcriptomics and image manifolds, addressing the many-to-one relationship inherent in this problem. Our method enables the generation of realistic cellular morphology features and spatially resolved intercellular interactions from observational gene expression profiles, provides potential to incorporate genetic/chemical perturbations, and enables disease diagnosis by revealing dysregulated patterns in imaging phenotypes. Our rectified flow-based method outperforms diffusion-based baseline method in all experiments. Code can be found at https://github.com/wangmengbo/GeneFlow.

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### Real-time and Zero-footprint Bag of Synthetic Syllables Algorithm for E-mail Spam Detection Using Subject Line and Short Text Fields

Authors: Stanislav Selitskiy
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.CR, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00118v1

Contemporary e-mail services have high availability expectations from the customers and are resource-strained because of the high-volume throughput and spam attacks. Deep Machine Learning architectures, which are resource hungry and require off-line processing due to the long processing times, are not acceptable at the front line filters. On the other hand, the bulk of the incoming spam is not sophisticated enough to bypass even the simplest algorithms. While the small fraction of the intelligent, highly mutable spam can be detected only by the deep architectures, the stress on them can be unloaded by the simple near real-time and near zero-footprint algorithms such as the Bag of Synthetic Syllables algorithm applied to the short texts of the e-mail subject lines and other short text fields. The proposed algorithm creates a circa 200 sparse dimensional hash or vector for each e-mail subject line that can be compared for the cosine or euclidean proximity distance to find similarities to the known spammy subjects. The algorithm does not require any persistent storage, dictionaries, additional hardware upgrades or software packages. The performance of the algorithm is presented on the one day of the real SMTP traffic.

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### DCcluster-Opt: Benchmarking Dynamic Multi-Objective Optimization for Geo-Distributed Data Center Workloads

Authors: Antonio Guillen-Perez, Avisek Naug, Vineet Gundecha, Sahand Ghorbanpour, Ricardo Luna Gutierrez, Ashwin Ramesh Babu, Munther Salim, Shubhanker Banerjee, Eoin H. Oude Essink, Damien Fay, Soumyendu Sarkar
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.MA, eess.SY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00117v1

The increasing energy demands and carbon footprint of large-scale AI require intelligent workload management in globally distributed data centers. Yet progress is limited by the absence of benchmarks that realistically capture the interplay of time-varying environmental factors (grid carbon intensity, electricity prices, weather), detailed data center physics (CPUs, GPUs, memory, HVAC energy), and geo-distributed network dynamics (latency and transmission costs). To bridge this gap, we present DCcluster-Opt: an open-source, high-fidelity simulation benchmark for sustainable, geo-temporal task scheduling. DCcluster-Opt combines curated real-world datasets, including AI workload traces, grid carbon intensity, electricity markets, weather across 20 global regions, cloud transmission costs, and empirical network delay parameters with physics-informed models of data center operations, enabling rigorous and reproducible research in sustainable computing. It presents a challenging scheduling problem where a top-level coordinating agent must dynamically reassign or defer tasks that arrive with resource and service-level agreement requirements across a configurable cluster of data centers to optimize multiple objectives. The environment also models advanced components such as heat recovery. A modular reward system enables an explicit study of trade-offs among carbon emissions, energy costs, service level agreements, and water use. It provides a Gymnasium API with baseline controllers, including reinforcement learning and rule-based strategies, to support reproducible ML research and a fair comparison of diverse algorithms. By offering a realistic, configurable, and accessible testbed, DCcluster-Opt accelerates the development and validation of next-generation sustainable computing solutions for geo-distributed data centers.

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### LC-Opt: Benchmarking Reinforcement Learning and Agentic AI for End-to-End Liquid Cooling Optimization in Data Centers

Authors: Avisek Naug, Antonio Guillen, Vineet Kumar, Scott Greenwood, Wesley Brewer, Sahand Ghorbanpour, Ashwin Ramesh Babu, Vineet Gundecha, Ricardo Luna Gutierrez, Soumyendu Sarkar
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.MA, eess.SY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00116v1

Liquid cooling is critical for thermal management in high-density data centers with the rising AI workloads. However, machine learning-based controllers are essential to unlock greater energy efficiency and reliability, promoting sustainability. We present LC-Opt, a Sustainable Liquid Cooling (LC) benchmark environment, for reinforcement learning (RL) control strategies in energy-efficient liquid cooling of high-performance computing (HPC) systems. Built on the baseline of a high-fidelity digital twin of Oak Ridge National Lab's Frontier Supercomputer cooling system, LC-Opt provides detailed Modelica-based end-to-end models spanning site-level cooling towers to data center cabinets and server blade groups. RL agents optimize critical thermal controls like liquid supply temperature, flow rate, and granular valve actuation at the IT cabinet level, as well as cooling tower (CT) setpoints through a Gymnasium interface, with dynamic changes in workloads. This environment creates a multi-objective real-time optimization challenge balancing local thermal regulation and global energy efficiency, and also supports additional components like a heat recovery unit (HRU). We benchmark centralized and decentralized multi-agent RL approaches, demonstrate policy distillation into decision and regression trees for interpretable control, and explore LLM-based methods that explain control actions in natural language through an agentic mesh architecture designed to foster user trust and simplify system management. LC-Opt democratizes access to detailed, customizable liquid cooling models, enabling the ML community, operators, and vendors to develop sustainable data center liquid cooling control solutions.

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### Cognitive Alignment in Personality Reasoning: Leveraging Prototype Theory for MBTI Inference

Authors: Haoyuan Li, Yuanbo Tong, Yuchen Li, Zirui Wang, Chunhou Liu, Jiamou Liu
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00115v2

Personality recognition from text is typically cast as hard-label classification, which obscures the graded, prototype-like nature of human personality judgments. We present ProtoMBTI, a cognitively aligned framework for MBTI inference that operationalizes prototype theory within an LLM-based pipeline. First, we construct a balanced, quality-controlled corpus via LLM-guided multi-dimensional augmentation (semantic, linguistic, sentiment). Next, we LoRA-fine-tune a lightweight (&lt;=2B) encoder to learn discriminative embeddings and to standardize a bank of personality prototypes. At inference, we retrieve top-k prototypes for a query post and perform a retrieve--reuse--revise--retain cycle: the model aggregates prototype evidence via prompt-based voting, revises when inconsistencies arise, and, upon correct prediction, retains the sample to continually enrich the prototype library. Across Kaggle and Pandora benchmarks, ProtoMBTI improves over baselines on both the four MBTI dichotomies and the full 16-type task, and exhibits robust cross-dataset generalization. Our results indicate that aligning the inference process with psychological prototype reasoning yields gains in accuracy, interpretability, and transfer for text-based personality modeling.

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### End-to-End Framework Integrating Generative AI and Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Ultrasound Scanning

Authors: Hanae Elmekki, Amanda Spilkin, Ehsan Zakeri, Antonela Mariel Zanuttini, Ahmed Alagha, Hani Sami, Jamal Bentahar, Lyes Kadem, Wen-Fang Xie, Philippe Pibarot, Rabeb Mizouni, Hadi Otrok et al.
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00114v1

Cardiac ultrasound (US) is among the most widely used diagnostic tools in cardiology for assessing heart health, but its effectiveness is limited by operator dependence, time constraints, and human error. The shortage of trained professionals, especially in remote areas, further restricts access. These issues underscore the need for automated solutions that can ensure consistent, and accessible cardiac imaging regardless of operator skill or location. Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI), especially in deep reinforcement learning (DRL), has gained attention for enabling autonomous decision-making. However, existing DRL-based approaches to cardiac US scanning lack reproducibility, rely on proprietary data, and use simplified models. Motivated by these gaps, we present the first end-to-end framework that integrates generative AI and DRL to enable autonomous and reproducible cardiac US scanning. The framework comprises two components: (i) a conditional generative simulator combining Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), that models the cardiac US environment producing realistic action-conditioned images; and (ii) a DRL module that leverages this simulator to learn autonomous, accurate scanning policies. The proposed framework delivers AI-driven guidance through expert-validated models that classify image type and assess quality, supports conditional generation of realistic US images, and establishes a reproducible foundation extendable to other organs. To ensure reproducibility, a publicly available dataset of real cardiac US scans is released. The solution is validated through several experiments. The VAE-GAN is benchmarked against existing GAN variants, with performance assessed using qualitative and quantitative approaches, while the DRL-based scanning system is evaluated under varying configurations to demonstrate effectiveness.

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### LifWavNet: Lifting Wavelet-based Network for Non-contact ECG Reconstruction from Radar

Authors: Soumitra Kundu, Gargi Panda, Saumik Bhattacharya, Aurobinda Routray, Rajlakshmi Guha
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.27692v1

Non-contact electrocardiogram (ECG) reconstruction from radar signals offers a promising approach for unobtrusive cardiac monitoring. We present LifWavNet, a lifting wavelet network based on a multi-resolution analysis and synthesis (MRAS) model for radar-to-ECG reconstruction. Unlike prior models that use fixed wavelet approaches, LifWavNet employs learnable lifting wavelets with lifting and inverse lifting units to adaptively capture radar signal features and synthesize physiologically meaningful ECG waveforms. To improve reconstruction fidelity, we introduce a multi-resolution short-time Fourier transform (STFT) loss, that enforces consistency with the ground-truth ECG in both temporal and spectral domains. Evaluations on two public datasets demonstrate that LifWavNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods in ECG reconstruction and downstream vital sign estimation (heart rate and heart rate variability). Furthermore, intermediate feature visualization highlights the interpretability of multi-resolution decomposition and synthesis in radar-to-ECG reconstruction. These results establish LifWavNet as a robust framework for radar-based non-contact ECG measurement.

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### Continuous Autoregressive Language Models

Authors: Chenze Shao, Darren Li, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.27688v1

The efficiency of large language models (LLMs) is fundamentally limited by their sequential, token-by-token generation process. We argue that overcoming this bottleneck requires a new design axis for LLM scaling: increasing the semantic bandwidth of each generative step. To this end, we introduce Continuous Autoregressive Language Models (CALM), a paradigm shift from discrete next-token prediction to continuous next-vector prediction. CALM uses a high-fidelity autoencoder to compress a chunk of K tokens into a single continuous vector, from which the original tokens can be reconstructed with over 99.9\% accuracy. This allows us to model language as a sequence of continuous vectors instead of discrete tokens, which reduces the number of generative steps by a factor of K. The paradigm shift necessitates a new modeling toolkit; therefore, we develop a comprehensive likelihood-free framework that enables robust training, evaluation, and controllable sampling in the continuous domain. Experiments show that CALM significantly improves the performance-compute trade-off, achieving the performance of strong discrete baselines at a significantly lower computational cost. More importantly, these findings establish next-vector prediction as a powerful and scalable pathway towards ultra-efficient language models. Code: https://github.com/shaochenze/calm. Project: https://shaochenze.github.io/blog/2025/CALM.

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### Phased DMD: Few-step Distribution Matching Distillation via Score Matching within Subintervals

Authors: Xiangyu Fan, Zesong Qiu, Zhuguanyu Wu, Fanzhou Wang, Zhiqian Lin, Tianxiang Ren, Dahua Lin, Ruihao Gong, Lei Yang
Published: 2025-10-31
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.27684v3

Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) distills score-based generative models into efficient one-step generators, without requiring a one-to-one correspondence with the sampling trajectories of their teachers. Yet, the limited capacity of one-step distilled models compromises generative diversity and degrades performance in complex generative tasks, e.g., generating intricate object motions in text-to-video task. Directly extending DMD to multi-step distillation increases memory usage and computational depth, leading to instability and reduced efficiency. While prior works propose stochastic gradient truncation as a potential solution, we observe that it substantially reduces the generative diversity in text-to-image generation and slows motion dynamics in video generation, reducing performance to the level of one-step models. To address these limitations, we propose Phased DMD, a multi-step distillation framework that bridges the idea of phase-wise distillation with Mixture-of-Experts (MoE), reducing learning difficulty while enhancing model capacity. Phased DMD incorporates two key ideas: progressive distribution matching and score matching within subintervals. First, our model divides the SNR range into subintervals, progressively refining the model to higher SNR levels, to better capture complex distributions. Next, to ensure accurate training within each subinterval, we derive rigorous mathematical formulations for the objective. We validate Phased DMD by distilling state-of-the-art image and video generation models, including Qwen-Image-20B and Wan2.2-28B. Experiments demonstrate that Phased DMD enhances motion dynamics, improves visual fidelity in video generation, and increases output diversity in image generation. Our code and models are available at https://x-niper.github.io/projects/Phased-DMD/.

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