# Research Papers — 2025-10 · bundle page 214 of 217

> Full-text markdown of papers #10651–10700 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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### From Seeing to Predicting: A Vision-Language Framework for Trajectory Forecasting and Controlled Video Generation

Authors: Fan Yang, Zhiyang Chen, Yousong Zhu, Xin Li, Jinqiao Wang
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00806v1

Current video generation models produce physically inconsistent motion that violates real-world dynamics. We propose TrajVLM-Gen, a two-stage framework for physics-aware image-to-video generation. First, we employ a Vision Language Model to predict coarse-grained motion trajectories that maintain consistency with real-world physics. Second, these trajectories guide video generation through attention-based mechanisms for fine-grained motion refinement. We build a trajectory prediction dataset based on video tracking data with realistic motion patterns. Experiments on UCF-101 and MSR-VTT demonstrate that TrajVLM-Gen outperforms existing methods, achieving competitive FVD scores of 545 on UCF-101 and 539 on MSR-VTT.

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### Planning-Augmented Sampling with Early Guidance for High-Reward Discovery

Authors: Rui Zhu, Yudong Zhang, Xuan Yu, Chen Zhang, Xu Wang, Yang Wang
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00805v3

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) enable structured generation with inherent diversity, but existing sampling strategies often rely on weak guided exploration, slowing early discovery of high-reward candidates. In tasks such as molecular design, rapid and consistent generation of high-reward solutions can outweigh faithful distribution matching. We propose a planning-augmented framework in which Monte Carlo Tree Search using polynomial upper confidence bounds provides online value estimates, and a controllable soft-greedy mechanism integrates these planning signals into the GFlowNets forward policy. This design fosters early exploration of high-reward trajectories and gradually shifts to policy-driven exploitation as experience accumulates. Empirical results show that our method accelerates early high-reward discovery, sustains top-quality sample generation, and preserves diversity across representative tasks. All implementations are available at https://github.com/ZRNB/PLUS.

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### Online Minimization of Polarization and Disagreement via Low-Rank Matrix Bandits

Authors: Federico Cinus, Yuko Kuroki, Atsushi Miyauchi, Francesco Bonchi
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.LG, cs.SI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00803v2

We study the problem of minimizing polarization and disagreement in the Friedkin-Johnsen opinion dynamics model under incomplete information. Unlike prior work that assumes a static setting with full knowledge of agents' innate opinions, we address the more realistic online setting where innate opinions are unknown and must be learned through sequential observations. This novel setting, which naturally mirrors periodic interventions on social media platforms, is formulated as a regret minimization problem, establishing a key connection between algorithmic interventions on social media platforms and the theory of multi-armed bandits. In our formulation, a learner observes only a scalar feedback of the overall polarization and disagreement after an intervention. For this novel bandit problem, we propose a two-stage algorithm based on low-rank matrix bandits. The algorithm first performs subspace estimation to identify an underlying low-dimensional structure, and then employs a linear bandit algorithm within the compact dimensional representation derived from the estimated subspace. We show that our algorithm achieves the cumulative regret of $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}\big(\max(\tfrac{1}κ,\sqrt{|V|})\sqrt{|V|T}\big)$ over time horizon $T$, where $V$ is the set of agents and $κ$ is a parameter dependent on the diversity of interventions. Empirical results validate that our algorithm significantly outperforms a linear bandit baseline in terms of both cumulative regret and running time.

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### Guiding Evolutionary Molecular Design: Adding Reinforcement Learning for Mutation Selection

Authors: Gaelle Milon-Harnois, Chaimaa Touhami, Nicolas Gutowski, Benoit Da Mota, Thomas Cauchy
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00802v1

The efficient exploration of chemical space remains a central challenge, as many generative models still produce unstable or non-synthesizable compounds. To address these limitations, we present EvoMol-RL, a significant extension of the EvoMol evolutionary algorithm that integrates reinforcement learning to guide molecular mutations based on local structural context. By leveraging Extended Connectivity Fingerprints (ECFPs), EvoMol-RL learns context-aware mutation policies that prioritize chemically plausible transformations. This approach significantly improves the generation of valid and realistic molecules, reducing the frequency of structural artifacts and enhancing optimization performance. The results demonstrate that EvoMol-RL consistently outperforms its baseline in molecular pre-filtering realism. These results emphasize the effectiveness of combining reinforcement learning with molecular fingerprints to generate chemically relevant molecular structures.

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### Fast, Secure, and High-Capacity Image Watermarking with Autoencoded Text Vectors

Authors: Gautier Evennou, Vivien Chappelier, Ewa Kijak
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00799v1

Most image watermarking systems focus on robustness, capacity, and imperceptibility while treating the embedded payload as meaningless bits. This bit-centric view imposes a hard ceiling on capacity and prevents watermarks from carrying useful information. We propose LatentSeal, which reframes watermarking as semantic communication: a lightweight text autoencoder maps full-sentence messages into a compact 256-dimensional unit-norm latent vector, which is robustly embedded by a finetuned watermark model and secured through a secret, invertible rotation. The resulting system hides full-sentence messages, decodes in real time, and survives valuemetric and geometric attacks. It surpasses prior state of the art in BLEU-4 and Exact Match on several benchmarks, while breaking through the long-standing 256-bit payload ceiling. It also introduces a statistically calibrated score that yields a ROC AUC score of 0.97-0.99, and practical operating points for deployment. By shifting from bit payloads to semantic latent vectors, LatentSeal enables watermarking that is not only robust and high-capacity, but also secure and interpretable, providing a concrete path toward provenance, tamper explanation, and trustworthy AI governance. Models, training and inference code, and data splits will be available upon publication.

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### Solar PV Installation Potential Assessment on Building Facades Based on Vision and Language Foundation Models

Authors: Ruyu Liu, Dongxu Zhuang, Jianhua Zhang, Arega Getaneh Abate, Per Sieverts Nielsen, Ben Wang, Xiufeng Liu
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00797v1

Building facades represent a significant untapped resource for solar energy generation in dense urban environments, yet assessing their photovoltaic (PV) potential remains challenging due to complex geometries and semantic com ponents. This study introduces SF-SPA (Semantic Facade Solar-PV Assessment), an automated framework that transforms street-view photographs into quantitative PV deployment assessments. The approach combines com puter vision and artificial intelligence techniques to address three key challenges: perspective distortion correction, semantic understanding of facade elements, and spatial reasoning for PV layout optimization. Our four-stage pipeline processes images through geometric rectification, zero-shot semantic segmentation, Large Language Model (LLM) guided spatial reasoning, and energy simulation. Validation across 80 buildings in four countries demonstrates ro bust performance with mean area estimation errors of 6.2% ± 2.8% compared to expert annotations. The auto mated assessment requires approximately 100 seconds per building, a substantial gain in efficiency over manual methods. Simulated energy yield predictions confirm the method's reliability and applicability for regional poten tial studies, urban energy planning, and building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) deployment. Code is available at: https:github.com/CodeAXu/Solar-PV-Installation

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### MetaLogic: Robustness Evaluation of Text-to-Image Models via Logically Equivalent Prompts

Authors: Yifan Shen, Yangyang Shu, Hye-young Paik, Yulei Sui
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00796v1

Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) models, especially diffusion-based architectures, have significantly improved the visual quality of generated images. However, these models continue to struggle with a critical limitation: maintaining semantic consistency when input prompts undergo minor linguistic variations. Despite being logically equivalent, such prompt pairs often yield misaligned or semantically inconsistent images, exposing a lack of robustness in reasoning and generalisation. To address this, we propose MetaLogic, a novel evaluation framework that detects T2I misalignment without relying on ground truth images. MetaLogic leverages metamorphic testing, generating image pairs from prompts that differ grammatically but are semantically identical. By directly comparing these image pairs, the framework identifies inconsistencies that signal failures in preserving the intended meaning, effectively diagnosing robustness issues in the model's logic understanding. Unlike existing evaluation methods that compare a generated image to a single prompt, MetaLogic evaluates semantic equivalence between paired images, offering a scalable, ground-truth-free approach to identifying alignment failures. It categorises these alignment errors (e.g., entity omission, duplication, positional misalignment) and surfaces counterexamples that can be used for model debugging and refinement. We evaluate MetaLogic across multiple state-of-the-art T2I models and reveal consistent robustness failures across a range of logical constructs. We find that even the SOTA text-to-image models like Flux.dev and DALLE-3 demonstrate a 59 percent and 71 percent misalignment rate, respectively. Our results show that MetaLogic is not only efficient and scalable, but also effective in uncovering fine-grained logical inconsistencies that are overlooked by existing evaluation metrics.

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### Benchmarking Agentic Systems in Automated Scientific Information Extraction with ChemX

Authors: Anastasia Vepreva, Julia Razlivina, Maria Eremeeva, Nina Gubina, Anastasia Orlova, Aleksei Dmitrenko, Ksenya Kapranova, Susan Jyakhwo, Nikita Vasilev, Arsen Sarkisyan, Ivan Yu. Chernyshov, Vladimir Vinogradov et al.
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00795v1

The emergence of agent-based systems represents a significant advancement in artificial intelligence, with growing applications in automated data extraction. However, chemical information extraction remains a formidable challenge due to the inherent heterogeneity of chemical data. Current agent-based approaches, both general-purpose and domain-specific, exhibit limited performance in this domain. To address this gap, we present ChemX, a comprehensive collection of 10 manually curated and domain-expert-validated datasets focusing on nanomaterials and small molecules. These datasets are designed to rigorously evaluate and enhance automated extraction methodologies in chemistry. To demonstrate their utility, we conduct an extensive benchmarking study comparing existing state-of-the-art agentic systems such as ChatGPT Agent and chemical-specific data extraction agents. Additionally, we introduce our own single-agent approach that enables precise control over document preprocessing prior to extraction. We further evaluate the performance of modern baselines, such as GPT-5 and GPT-5 Thinking, to compare their capabilities with agentic approaches. Our empirical findings reveal persistent challenges in chemical information extraction, particularly in processing domain-specific terminology, complex tabular and schematic representations, and context-dependent ambiguities. The ChemX benchmark serves as a critical resource for advancing automated information extraction in chemistry, challenging the generalization capabilities of existing methods, and providing valuable insights into effective evaluation strategies.

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### Complex System Exploration with Interactive Human Guidance

Authors: Bastien Morel, Clément Moulin-Frier, Pascal Barla
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00794v1

The diversity of patterns that emerge from complex systems motivates their use for scientific or artistic purposes. When exploring these systems, the challenges faced are the size of the parameter space and the strongly non-linear mapping between parameters and emerging patterns. In addition, artists and scientists who explore complex systems do so with an expectation of particular patterns. Taking these expectations into account adds a new set of challenges, which the exploration process must address. We provide design choices and their implementation to address these challenges; enabling the maximization of the diversity of patterns discovered in the user's region of interest -- which we call the constrained diversity -- in a sample-efficient manner. The region of interest is expressed in the form of explicit constraints. These constraints are formulated by the user in a system-agnostic way, and their addition enables interactive system exploration leading to constrained diversity, while maintaining global diversity.

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### AI in data science education: experiences from the classroom

Authors: J. A. Hageman, C. F. W. Peeters
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00793v1

This study explores the integration of AI, particularly large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, into educational settings, focusing on the implications for teaching and learning. Through interviews with course coordinators from data science courses at Wageningen University, this research identifies both the benefits and challenges associated with AI in the classroom. While AI tools can streamline tasks and enhance learning, concerns arise regarding students' overreliance on these technologies, potentially hindering the development of essential cognitive and problem solving skills. The study highlights the importance of responsible AI usage, ethical considerations, and the need for adapting assessment methods to ensure educational outcomes are met. With careful integration, AI can be a valuable asset in education, provided it is used to complement rather than replace fundamental learning processes.

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### DIA: The Adversarial Exposure of Deterministic Inversion in Diffusion Models

Authors: Seunghoo Hong, Geonho Son, Juhun Lee, Simon S. Woo
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00778v1

Diffusion models have shown to be strong representation learners, showcasing state-of-the-art performance across multiple domains. Aside from accelerated sampling, DDIM also enables the inversion of real images back to their latent codes. A direct inheriting application of this inversion operation is real image editing, where the inversion yields latent trajectories to be utilized during the synthesis of the edited image. Unfortunately, this practical tool has enabled malicious users to freely synthesize misinformative or deepfake contents with greater ease, which promotes the spread of unethical and abusive, as well as privacy-, and copyright-infringing contents. While defensive algorithms such as AdvDM and Photoguard have been shown to disrupt the diffusion process on these images, the misalignment between their objectives and the iterative denoising trajectory at test time results in weak disruptive performance.In this work, we present the DDIM Inversion Attack (DIA) that attacks the integrated DDIM trajectory path. Our results support the effective disruption, surpassing previous defensive methods across various editing methods. We believe that our frameworks and results can provide practical defense methods against the malicious use of AI for both the industry and the research community. Our code is available here: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DIA-13419/.

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### In-Place Feedback: Reliable Refinement for Multi-Turn Expert-LLM Collaboration

Authors: Youngbin Choi, Minjong Lee, Saemi Moon, Seunghyuk Cho, Chaehyeon Chung, MoonJeong Park, Dongwoo Kim
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00777v2

LLM-generated drafts often contain subtle factual or logical errors, yet prior work shows that models struggle to reliably integrate multi-turn feedback aimed at fixing them. We propose in-place feedback, an interaction paradigm in which the user directly edits the model's previous response and the model continues generation from the edited context. In-place feedback consistently outperforms standard multi-turn feedback across five reasoning-intensive benchmarks while requiring fewer tokens, and our fine-grained analysis shows that it applies corrections more reliably and propagates them to subsequent reasoning. A user study with domain experts refining LLM-generated summaries corroborates these findings: participants report higher final-output satisfaction and substantially lower fatigue with in-place feedback, and a mixed strategy combining in-place and multi-turn feedback scores highest on every measured dimension. These results suggest that editing errors directly is a more effective paradigm for expert-LLM collaboration.

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### GeoGraph: Geometric and Graph-based Ensemble Descriptors for Intrinsically Disordered Proteins

Authors: Eoin Quinn, Marco Carobene, Jean Quentin, Sebastien Boyer, Miguel Arbesú, Oliver Bent
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: q-bio.BM, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00774v2

While deep learning has revolutionized the prediction of rigid protein structures, modelling the conformational ensembles of Intrinsically Disordered Proteins (IDPs) remains a key frontier. Current AI paradigms present a trade-off: Protein Language Models (PLMs) capture evolutionary statistics but lack explicit physical grounding, while generative models trained to model full ensembles are computationally expensive. In this work we critically assess these limits and propose a path forward. We introduce GeoGraph, a simulation-informed surrogate trained to predict ensemble-averaged statistics of residue-residue contact-map topology directly from sequence. By featurizing coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations into residue- and sequence-level graph descriptors, we create a robust and information-rich learning target. Our evaluation demonstrates that this approach yields representations that are more predictive of key biophysical properties than existing methods.

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### Uncertainty-Aware Concept Bottleneck Models with Enhanced Interpretability

Authors: Haifei Zhang, Patrick Barry, Eduardo Brandao
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00773v1

In the context of image classification, Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) first embed images into a set of human-understandable concepts, followed by an intrinsically interpretable classifier that predicts labels based on these intermediate representations. While CBMs offer a semantically meaningful and interpretable classification pipeline, they often sacrifice predictive performance compared to end-to-end convolutional neural networks. Moreover, the propagation of uncertainty from concept predictions to final label decisions remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel uncertainty-aware and interpretable classifier for the second stage of CBMs. Our method learns a set of binary class-level concept prototypes and uses the distances between predicted concept vectors and each class prototype as both a classification score and a measure of uncertainty. These prototypes also serve as interpretable classification rules, indicating which concepts should be present in an image to justify a specific class prediction. The proposed framework enhances both interpretability and robustness by enabling conformal prediction for uncertain or outlier inputs based on their deviation from the learned binary class-level concept prototypes.

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### UniverSR: Unified and Versatile Audio Super-Resolution via Vocoder-Free Flow Matching

Authors: Woongjib Choi, Sangmin Lee, Hyungseob Lim, Hong-Goo Kang
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: eess.AS, cs.AI, cs.SD, eess.SP
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00771v2

In this paper, we present a vocoder-free framework for audio super-resolution that employs a flow matching generative model to capture the conditional distribution of complex-valued spectral coefficients. Unlike conventional two-stage diffusion-based approaches that predict a mel-spectrogram and then rely on a pre-trained neural vocoder to synthesize waveforms, our method directly reconstructs waveforms via the inverse Short-Time Fourier Transform (iSTFT), thereby eliminating the dependence on a separate vocoder. This design not only simplifies end-to-end optimization but also overcomes a critical bottleneck of two-stage pipelines, where the final audio quality is fundamentally constrained by vocoder performance. Experiments show that our model consistently produces high-fidelity 48 kHz audio across diverse upsampling factors, achieving state-of-the-art performance on both speech and general audio datasets.

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### ZQBA: Zero Query Black-box Adversarial Attack

Authors: Joana C. Costa, Tiago Roxo, Hugo Proença, Pedro R. M. Inácio
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00769v2

Current black-box adversarial attacks either require multiple queries or diffusion models to produce adversarial samples that can impair the target model performance. However, these methods require training a surrogate loss or diffusion models to produce adversarial samples, which limits their applicability in real-world settings. Thus, we propose a Zero Query Black-box Adversarial (ZQBA) attack that exploits the representations of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to fool other networks. Instead of requiring thousands of queries to produce deceiving adversarial samples, we use the feature maps obtained from a DNN and add them to clean images to impair the classification of a target model. The results suggest that ZQBA can transfer the adversarial samples to different models and across various datasets, namely CIFAR and Tiny ImageNet. The experiments also show that ZQBA is more effective than state-of-the-art black-box attacks with a single query, while maintaining the imperceptibility of perturbations, evaluated both quantitatively (SSIM) and qualitatively, emphasizing the vulnerabilities of employing DNNs in real-world contexts. All the source code is available at https://github.com/Joana-Cabral/ZQBA.

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### Are Large Vision-Language Models Ready to Guide Blind and Low-Vision Individuals?

Authors: Eunki Kim, Na Min An, Wan Ju Kang, Sangryul Kim, James Thorne, Hyunjung Shim
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00766v2

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) demonstrate a promising direction for assisting individuals with blindness or low-vision (BLV). Yet, measuring their true utility in real-world scenarios is challenging because evaluating whether their descriptions are BLV-informative requires a fundamentally different approach from assessing standard scene descriptions. While the "VLM-as-a-metric" or "LVLM-as-a-judge" paradigm has emerged, existing evaluators still fall short of capturing the unique requirements of BLV-centric evaluation, lacking at least one of the following key properties: (1) High correlation with human judgments, (2) Long instruction understanding, (3) Score generation efficiency, and (4) Multi-dimensional assessment. To this end, we propose a unified framework to bridge the gap between automated evaluation and actual BLV needs. First, we conduct an in-depth user study with BLV participants to understand and quantify their navigational preferences, curating VL-GUIDEDATA, a large-scale BLV user-simulated preference dataset containing image-request-response-score pairs. We then leverage the dataset to develop an accessibility-aware evaluator, VL-GUIDE-S, which outperforms existing (L)VLM judges in both human alignment and inference efficiency. Notably, its effectiveness extends beyond a single domain, demonstrating strong performance across multiple fine-grained, BLV-critical dimensions. We hope our work lays as a foundation for automatic AI judges that advance safe, barrier-free navigation for BLV users.

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### Downgrade to Upgrade: Optimizer Simplification Enhances Robustness in LLM Unlearning

Authors: Yicheng Lang, Yihua Zhang, Chongyu Fan, Changsheng Wang, Jinghan Jia, Sijia Liu
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00761v5

Large language model (LLM) unlearning aims to surgically remove the influence of undesired data or knowledge from an existing model while preserving its utility on unrelated tasks. This paradigm has shown promise in addressing privacy and safety concerns. However, recent findings reveal that unlearning effects are often fragile: post-unlearning manipulations such as weight quantization or fine-tuning can quickly neutralize the intended forgetting. Prior efforts to improve robustness primarily reformulate unlearning objectives by explicitly assuming the role of vulnerability sources. In this work, we take a different perspective by investigating the role of the optimizer, independent of unlearning objectives and formulations, in shaping unlearning robustness. We show that the 'grade' of the optimizer, defined by the level of information it exploits, ranging from zeroth-order (gradient-free) to first-order (gradient-based) to second-order (Hessian-based), is tightly linked to the resilience of unlearning. Surprisingly, we find that downgrading the optimizer, such as using zeroth-order methods or compressed-gradient variants (e.g., gradient sign-based optimizers), often leads to stronger robustness. While these optimizers produce noisier and less precise updates, they encourage convergence to harder-to-disturb basins in the loss landscape, thereby resisting post-training perturbations. By connecting zeroth-order methods with randomized smoothing, we further highlight their natural advantage for robust unlearning. Motivated by these insights, we propose a hybrid optimizer that combines first-order and zeroth-order updates, preserving unlearning efficacy while enhancing robustness. Extensive experiments on the MUSE and WMDP benchmarks, across multiple LLM unlearning algorithms, validate that our approach achieves more resilient forgetting without sacrificing unlearning quality.

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### LEAP: Local ECT-Based Learnable Positional Encodings for Graphs

Authors: Juan Amboage, Ernst Röell, Patrick Schnider, Bastian Rieck
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00757v3

Graph neural networks (GNNs) largely rely on the message-passing paradigm, where nodes iteratively aggregate information from their neighbors. Yet, standard message passing neural networks (MPNNs) face well-documented theoretical and practical limitations. Graph positional encoding (PE) has emerged as a promising direction to address these limitations. The Euler Characteristic Transform (ECT) is an efficiently computable geometric-topological invariant that characterizes shapes and graphs. In this work, we combine the differentiable approximation of the ECT (DECT) and its local variant ($\ell$-ECT) to propose LEAP, a new end-to-end trainable local structural PE for graphs. We evaluate our approach on multiple real-world datasets as well as on a synthetic task designed to test its ability to extract topological features. Our results underline the potential of LEAP-based encodings as a powerful component for graph representation learning pipelines.

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### Defect Segmentation in OCT scans of ceramic parts for non-destructive inspection using deep learning

Authors: Andrés Laveda-Martínez, Natalia P. García-de-la-Puente, Fernando García-Torres, Niels Møller Israelsen, Ole Bang, Dominik Brouczek, Niels Benson, Adrián Colomer, Valery Naranjo
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00745v1

Non-destructive testing (NDT) is essential in ceramic manufacturing to ensure the quality of components without compromising their integrity. In this context, Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) enables high-resolution internal imaging, revealing defects such as pores, delaminations, or inclusions. This paper presents an automatic defect detection system based on Deep Learning (DL), trained on OCT images with manually segmented annotations. A neural network based on the U-Net architecture is developed, evaluating multiple experimental configurations to enhance its performance. Post-processing techniques enable both quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the predictions. The system shows an accurate behavior of 0.979 Dice Score, outperforming comparable studies. The inference time of 18.98 seconds per volume supports its viability for detecting inclusions, enabling more efficient, reliable, and automated quality control.

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### From Scores to Preferences: Redefining MOS Benchmarking for Speech Quality Reward Modeling

Authors: Yifei Cao, Changhao Jiang, Jiabao Zhuang, Jiajun Sun, Ming Zhang, Zhiheng Xi, Hui Li, Shihan Dou, Yuran Wang, Yunke Zhang, Tao Ji, Tao Gui et al.
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI, cs.CL, eess.AS
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00743v1

Assessing the perceptual quality of synthetic speech is crucial for guiding the development and refinement of speech generation models. However, it has traditionally relied on human subjective ratings such as the Mean Opinion Score (MOS), which depend on manual annotations and often suffer from inconsistent rating standards and poor reproducibility. To address these limitations, we introduce MOS-RMBench, a unified benchmark that reformulates diverse MOS datasets into a preference-comparison setting, enabling rigorous evaluation across different datasets. Building on MOS-RMBench, we systematically construct and evaluate three paradigms for reward modeling: scalar reward models, semi-scalar reward models, and generative reward models (GRMs). Our experiments reveal three key findings: (1) scalar models achieve the strongest overall performance, consistently exceeding 74% accuracy; (2) most models perform considerably worse on synthetic speech than on human speech; and (3) all models struggle on pairs with very small MOS differences. To improve performance on these challenging pairs, we propose a MOS-aware GRM that incorporates an MOS-difference-based reward function, enabling the model to adaptively scale rewards according to the difficulty of each sample pair. Experimental results show that the MOS-aware GRM significantly improves fine-grained quality discrimination and narrows the gap with scalar models on the most challenging cases. We hope this work will establish both a benchmark and a methodological framework to foster more rigorous and scalable research in automatic speech quality assessment.

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### How Foundational are Foundation Models for Time Series Forecasting?

Authors: Nouha Karaouli, Denis Coquenet, Elisa Fromont, Martial Mermillod, Marina Reyboz
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00742v3

Foundation Models are designed to serve as versatile embedding machines, with strong zero shot capabilities and superior generalization performance when fine-tuned on diverse downstream tasks. While this is largely true for language and vision foundation models, we argue that the inherent diversity of time series data makes them less suited for building effective foundation models. We demonstrate this using forecasting as our downstream task. We show that the zero-shot capabilities of a time series foundation model are significantly influenced and tied to the specific domains it has been pretrained on. Furthermore, when applied to unseen real-world time series data, fine-tuned foundation models do not consistently yield substantially better results, relative to their increased parameter count and memory footprint, than smaller, dedicated models tailored to the specific forecasting task at hand.

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### Discovering Communities in Continuous-Time Temporal Networks by Optimizing L-Modularity

Authors: Victor Brabant, Angela Bonifati, Rémy Cazabet
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.SI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00741v1

Community detection is a fundamental problem in network analysis, with many applications in various fields. Extending community detection to the temporal setting with exact temporal accuracy, as required by real-world dynamic data, necessitates methods specifically adapted to the temporal nature of interactions. We introduce LAGO, a novel method for uncovering dynamic communities by greedy optimization of Longitudinal Modularity, a specific adaptation of Modularity for continuous-time networks. Unlike prior approaches that rely on time discretization or assume rigid community evolution, LAGO captures the precise moments when nodes enter and exit communities. We evaluate LAGO on synthetic benchmarks and real-world datasets, demonstrating its ability to efficiently uncover temporally and topologically coherent communities.

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### TD-JEPA: Latent-predictive Representations for Zero-Shot Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Marco Bagatella, Matteo Pirotta, Ahmed Touati, Alessandro Lazaric, Andrea Tirinzoni
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00739v1

Latent prediction--where agents learn by predicting their own latents--has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training general representations in machine learning. In reinforcement learning (RL), this approach has been explored to define auxiliary losses for a variety of settings, including reward-based and unsupervised RL, behavior cloning, and world modeling. While existing methods are typically limited to single-task learning, one-step prediction, or on-policy trajectory data, we show that temporal difference (TD) learning enables learning representations predictive of long-term latent dynamics across multiple policies from offline, reward-free transitions. Building on this, we introduce TD-JEPA, which leverages TD-based latent-predictive representations into unsupervised RL. TD-JEPA trains explicit state and task encoders, a policy-conditioned multi-step predictor, and a set of parameterized policies directly in latent space. This enables zero-shot optimization of any reward function at test time. Theoretically, we show that an idealized variant of TD-JEPA avoids collapse with proper initialization, and learns encoders that capture a low-rank factorization of long-term policy dynamics, while the predictor recovers their successor features in latent space. Empirically, TD-JEPA matches or outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on locomotion, navigation, and manipulation tasks across 13 datasets in ExoRL and OGBench, especially in the challenging setting of zero-shot RL from pixels.

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### Approximation of differential entropy in Bayesian optimal experimental design

Authors: Chuntao Chen, Tapio Helin, Nuutti Hyvönen, Yuya Suzuki
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, math.NA, stat.CO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00734v2

Bayesian optimal experimental design provides a principled framework for selecting experimental configurations that maximize obtained information. In this work, we consider settings where the likelihood entropy is independent of the design or can be evaluated explicitly, which applies, e.g. to additive noise models with design-independent or explicitly computable noise entropy. This reduces the problem to maximum entropy estimation, where the nested integral defining the expected information gain collapses into a single integral. Our study is motivated by large-scale inference problems, such as inverse problems, where the computational cost is dominated by expensive likelihood evaluations. Under additive Gaussian noise model, we propose a computational approach in which the evidence density is approximated by a Monte Carlo or quasi-Monte Carlo surrogate, while the differential entropy is evaluated using standard methods without additional likelihood evaluations. We prove that this strategy achieves convergence rates that are comparable to, or better than, state-of-the-art methods for full expected information gain estimation, particularly when the cost of entropy evaluation is negligible. Our approach relies only on mild smoothness of the forward map and avoids stronger technical assumptions required in earlier work. We also present numerical experiments, which confirm some of our theoretical findings.

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### Neural Diffusion Processes for Physically Interpretable Survival Prediction

Authors: Alessio Cristofoletto, Cesare Rollo, Giovanni Birolo, Piero Fariselli
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, q-bio.QM
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00733v3

We introduce DeepFHT, a survival-analysis framework that couples deep neural networks with first hitting time (FHT) distributions from stochastic process theory. Time to event is represented as the first passage of a latent diffusion process to an absorbing boundary. A neural network maps input variables to physically meaningful parameters including initial condition, drift, and diffusion, within a chosen FHT process such as Brownian motion, both with drift and driftless. This yields closed- form survival and hazard functions and captures time-varying risk without assuming proportional- hazards. We compare DeepFHT with Cox regression using synthetic and real-world datasets. The method achieves predictive accuracy on par with the state-of-the-art approach, while maintaining a physics- based interpretable parameterization that elucidates the relation between input features and risk. This combination of stochastic process theory and deep learning provides a principled avenue for modeling survival phenomena in complex systems

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### EvolProver: Advancing Automated Theorem Proving by Evolving Formalized Problems via Symmetry and Difficulty

Authors: Yuchen Tian, Ruiyuan Huang, Xuanwu Wang, Jing Ma, Zengfeng Huang, Ziyang Luo, Hongzhan Lin, Da Zheng, Lun Du
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00732v1

Large Language Models (LLMs) for formal theorem proving have shown significant promise, yet they often lack generalizability and are fragile to even minor transformations of problem statements. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel data augmentation pipeline designed to enhance model robustness from two perspectives: symmetry and difficulty. From the symmetry perspective, we propose two complementary methods: EvolAST, an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) based approach that targets syntactic symmetry to generate semantically equivalent problem variants, and EvolDomain, which leverages LLMs to address semantic symmetry by translating theorems across mathematical domains. From the difficulty perspective, we propose EvolDifficulty, which uses carefully designed evolutionary instructions to guide LLMs in generating new theorems with a wider range of difficulty. We then use the evolved data to train EvolProver, a 7B-parameter non-reasoning theorem prover. EvolProver establishes a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) on FormalMATH-Lite with a 53.8% pass@32 rate, surpassing all models of comparable size, including reasoning-based models. It also sets new SOTA records for non-reasoning models on MiniF2F-Test (69.8% pass@32), Ineq-Comp-Seed (52.2% pass@32), and Ineq-Comp-Transformed (34.0% pass@32). Ablation studies further confirm our data augmentation pipeline's effectiveness across multiple benchmarks.

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### Extreme Blind Image Restoration via Prompt-Conditioned Information Bottleneck

Authors: Hongeun Kim, Bryan Sangwoo Kim, Jong Chul Ye
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00728v1

Blind Image Restoration (BIR) methods have achieved remarkable success but falter when faced with Extreme Blind Image Restoration (EBIR), where inputs suffer from severe, compounded degradations beyond their training scope. Directly learning a mapping from extremely low-quality (ELQ) to high-quality (HQ) images is challenging due to the massive domain gap, often leading to unnatural artifacts and loss of detail. To address this, we propose a novel framework that decomposes the intractable ELQ-to-HQ restoration process. We first learn a projector that maps an ELQ image onto an intermediate, less-degraded LQ manifold. This intermediate image is then restored to HQ using a frozen, off-the-shelf BIR model. Our approach is grounded in information theory; we provide a novel perspective of image restoration as an Information Bottleneck problem and derive a theoretically-driven objective to train our projector. This loss function effectively stabilizes training by balancing a low-quality reconstruction term with a high-quality prior-matching term. Our framework enables Look Forward Once (LFO) for inference-time prompt refinement, and supports plug-and-play strengthening of existing image restoration models without need for finetuning. Extensive experiments under severe degradation regimes provide a thorough analysis of the effectiveness of our work.

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### CroSTAta: Cross-State Transition Attention Transformer for Robotic Manipulation

Authors: Giovanni Minelli, Giulio Turrisi, Victor Barasuol, Claudio Semini
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00726v2

Learning robotic manipulation policies through supervised learning from demonstrations remains challenging when policies encounter execution variations not explicitly covered during training. While incorporating historical context through attention mechanisms can improve robustness, standard approaches process all past states in a sequence without explicitly modeling the temporal structure that demonstrations may include, such as failure and recovery patterns. We propose a Cross-State Transition Attention Transformer that employs a novel State Transition Attention (STA) mechanism to modulate standard attention weights based on learned state evolution patterns, enabling policies to better adapt their behavior based on execution history. Our approach combines this structured attention with temporal masking during training, where visual information is randomly removed from recent timesteps to encourage temporal reasoning from historical context. Evaluation in simulation shows that STA consistently outperforms standard attention approach and temporal modeling methods like TCN and LSTM networks, achieving more than 2x improvement over cross-attention on precision-critical tasks. The source code and data can be accessed at https://github.com/iit-DLSLab/croSTAta

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### DEAP DIVE: Dataset Investigation with Vision transformers for EEG evaluation

Authors: Annemarie Hoffsommer, Helen Schneider, Svetlana Pavlitska, J. Marius Zöllner
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00725v1

Accurately predicting emotions from brain signals has the potential to achieve goals such as improving mental health, human-computer interaction, and affective computing. Emotion prediction through neural signals offers a promising alternative to traditional methods, such as self-assessment and facial expression analysis, which can be subjective or ambiguous. Measurements of the brain activity via electroencephalogram (EEG) provides a more direct and unbiased data source. However, conducting a full EEG is a complex, resource-intensive process, leading to the rise of low-cost EEG devices with simplified measurement capabilities. This work examines how subsets of EEG channels from the DEAP dataset can be used for sufficiently accurate emotion prediction with low-cost EEG devices, rather than fully equipped EEG-measurements. Using Continuous Wavelet Transformation to convert EEG data into scaleograms, we trained a vision transformer (ViT) model for emotion classification. The model achieved over 91,57% accuracy in predicting 4 quadrants (high/low per arousal and valence) with only 12 measuring points (also referred to as channels). Our work shows clearly, that a significant reduction of input channels yields high results compared to state-of-the-art results of 96,9% with 32 channels. Training scripts to reproduce our code can be found here: https://gitlab.kit.edu/kit/aifb/ATKS/public/AutoSMiLeS/DEAP-DIVE.

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### Deep learning motion correction of quantitative stress perfusion cardiovascular magnetic resonance

Authors: Noortje I. P. Schueler, Nathan C. K. Wong, Richard J. Crawley, Josien P. W. Pluim, Amedeo Chiribiri, Cian M. Scannell
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00723v1

Background: Quantitative stress perfusion cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) is a powerful tool for assessing myocardial ischemia. Motion correction is essential for accurate pixel-wise mapping but traditional registration-based methods are slow and sensitive to acquisition variability, limiting robustness and scalability. Methods: We developed an unsupervised deep learning-based motion correction pipeline that replaces iterative registration with efficient one-shot estimation. The method corrects motion in three steps and uses robust principal component analysis to reduce contrast-related effects. It aligns the perfusion series and auxiliary images (arterial input function and proton density-weighted series). Models were trained and validated on multivendor data from 201 patients, with 38 held out for testing. Performance was assessed via temporal alignment and quantitative perfusion values, compared to a previously published registration-based method. Results: The deep learning approach significantly improved temporal smoothness of time-intensity curves (p<0.001). Myocardial alignment (Dice = 0.92 (0.04) and 0.91 (0.05)) was comparable to the baseline and superior to before registration (Dice = 0.80 (0.09), p<0.001). Perfusion maps showed reduced motion, with lower standard deviation in the myocardium (0.52 (0.39) ml/min/g) compared to baseline (0.55 (0.44) ml/min/g). Processing time was reduced 15-fold. Conclusion: This deep learning pipeline enables fast, robust motion correction for stress perfusion CMR, improving accuracy across dynamic and auxiliary images. Trained on multivendor data, it generalizes across sequences and may facilitate broader clinical adoption of quantitative perfusion imaging.

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### Comparison of Machine Learning Models to Classify Documents on Digital Development

Authors: Uvini Ranaweera, Bawun Mawitagama, Sanduni Liyanage, Sandupa Keshan, Tiloka de Silva, Supun Hewawalpita
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00720v2

Automated document classification is a trending topic in Natural Language Processing (NLP) due to the extensive growth in digital databases. However, a model that fits well for a specific classification task might perform weakly for another dataset due to differences in the context. Thus, training and evaluating several models is necessary to optimise the results. This study employs a publicly available document database on worldwide digital development interventions categorised under twelve areas. Since digital interventions are still emerging, utilising NLP in the field is relatively new. Given the exponential growth of digital interventions, this research has a vast scope for improving how digital-development-oriented organisations report their work. The paper examines the classification performance of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms, including Decision Trees, k-Nearest Neighbors, Support Vector Machine, AdaBoost, Stochastic Gradient Descent, Naive Bayes, and Logistic Regression. Accuracy, precision, recall and F1-score are utilised to evaluate the performance of these models, while oversampling is used to address the class-imbalanced nature of the dataset. Deviating from the traditional approach of fitting a single model for multiclass classification, this paper investigates the One vs Rest approach to build a combined model that optimises the performance. The study concludes that the amount of data is not the sole factor affecting the performance; features like similarity within classes and dissimilarity among classes are also crucial.

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### AttentionDep: Domain-Aware Attention for Explainable Depression Severity Assessment

Authors: Yusif Ibrahimov, Tarique Anwar, Tommy Yuan, Turan Mutallimov, Elgun Hasanov
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.AI, cs.IR, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00706v1

In today's interconnected society, social media platforms provide a window into individuals' thoughts, emotions, and mental states. This paper explores the use of platforms like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and Reddit for depression severity detection. We propose AttentionDep, a domain-aware attention model that drives explainable depression severity estimation by fusing contextual and domain knowledge. Posts are encoded hierarchically using unigrams and bigrams, with attention mechanisms highlighting clinically relevant tokens. Domain knowledge from a curated mental health knowledge graph is incorporated through a cross-attention mechanism, enriching the contextual features. Finally, depression severity is predicted using an ordinal regression framework that respects the clinical-relevance and natural ordering of severity levels. Our experiments demonstrate that AttentionDep outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by over 5% in graded F1 score across datasets, while providing interpretable insights into its predictions. This work advances the development of trustworthy and transparent AI systems for mental health assessment from social media.

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### Training-free Uncertainty Guidance for Complex Visual Tasks with MLLMs

Authors: Sanghwan Kim, Rui Xiao, Stephan Alaniz, Yongqin Xian, Zeynep Akata
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00705v3

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often struggle with fine-grained perception, such as identifying small objects in high-resolution images or detecting key moments in long videos. Existing methods typically rely on complex, task-specific fine-tuning, which reduces generalizability and increases system complexity. In this work, we propose an effective, training-free framework that uses an MLLM's intrinsic uncertainty as proactive guidance. Our core insight is that a model's uncertainty decreases when provided with relevant visual information. We introduce a unified mechanism that scores candidate visual inputs by response uncertainty, enabling the model to autonomously focus on the most informative data. We apply this simple principle to three challenging visual tasks: Visual Search, Long Video Understanding, and Temporal Grounding, allowing off-the-shelf MLLMs to achieve performance competitive with specialized, fine-tuned systems. Our results demonstrate that leveraging intrinsic uncertainty is a powerful strategy for improving fine-grained multimodal performance.

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### Graph Integrated Multimodal Concept Bottleneck Model

Authors: Jiakai Lin, Jinchang Zhang, Guoyu Lu
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00701v1

With growing demand for interpretability in deep learning, especially in high stakes domains, Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) address this by inserting human understandable concepts into the prediction pipeline, but they are generally single modal and ignore structured concept relationships. To overcome these limitations, we present MoE-SGT, a reasoning driven framework that augments CBMs with a structure injecting Graph Transformer and a Mixture of Experts (MoE) module. We construct answer-concept and answer-question graphs for multimodal inputs to explicitly model the structured relationships among concepts. Subsequently, we integrate Graph Transformer to capture multi level dependencies, addressing the limitations of traditional Concept Bottleneck Models in modeling concept interactions. However, it still encounters bottlenecks in adapting to complex concept patterns. Therefore, we replace the feed forward layers with a Mixture of Experts (MoE) module, enabling the model to have greater capacity in learning diverse concept relationships while dynamically allocating reasoning tasks to different sub experts, thereby significantly enhancing the model's adaptability to complex concept reasoning. MoE-SGT achieves higher accuracy than other concept bottleneck networks on multiple datasets by modeling structured relationships among concepts and utilizing a dynamic expert selection mechanism.

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### Physics-Informed Extreme Learning Machine (PIELM) for Tunnelling-Induced Soil-Pile Interactions

Authors: Fu-Chen Guo, Pei-Zhi Zhuang, Fei Ren, Hong-Ya Yue, He Yang
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.LG, cs.NE, physics.comp-ph, physics.geo-ph
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00698v1

Physics-informed machine learning has been a promising data-driven and physics-informed approach in geotechnical engineering. This study proposes a physics-informed extreme learning machine (PIELM) framework for analyzing tunneling-induced soil-pile interactions. The pile foundation is modeled as an Euler-Bernoulli beam, and the surrounding soil is modeled as a Pasternak foundation. The soil-pile interaction is formulated into a fourth-order ordinary differential equation (ODE) that constitutes the physics-informed component, while measured data are incorporated into PIELM as the data-driven component. Combining physics and data yields a loss vector of the extreme learning machine (ELM) network, which is trained within 1 second by the least squares method. After validating the PIELM approach by the boundary element method (BEM) and finite difference method (FDM), parametric studies are carried out to examine the effects of ELM network architecture, data monitoring locations and numbers on the performance of PIELM. The results indicate that monitored data should be placed at positions where the gradients of pile deflections are significant, such as at the pile tip/top and near tunneling zones. Two application examples highlight the critical role of physics-informed and data-driven approach for tunnelling-induced soil-pile interactions. The proposed approach shows great potential for real-time monitoring and safety assessment of pile foundations, and benefits for intelligent early-warning systems in geotechnical engineering.

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### HAMLET: Switch your Vision-Language-Action Model into a History-Aware Policy

Authors: Myungkyu Koo, Daewon Choi, Taeyoung Kim, Kyungmin Lee, Changyeon Kim, Younggyo Seo, Jinwoo Shin
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00695v3

Inherently, robotic manipulation tasks are history-dependent: leveraging past context could be beneficial. However, most existing Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) have been designed without considering this aspect, i.e., they rely solely on the current observation, ignoring preceding context. In this paper, we propose HAMLET, a scalable framework to adapt VLAs to attend to the historical context during action prediction. Specifically, we introduce moment tokens that compactly encode perceptual information at each timestep. Their representations are initialized with time-contrastive learning, allowing them to better capture temporally distinctive aspects. Next, we employ a lightweight memory module that integrates the moment tokens across past timesteps into memory features, which are then leveraged for action prediction. Through empirical evaluation, we show that HAMLET successfully transforms a state-of-the-art VLA into a history-aware policy, especially demonstrating significant improvements on long-horizon tasks that require historical context. In particular, on top of GR00T N1.5, HAMLET achieves an average success rate of 76.4% on history-dependent real-world tasks, surpassing the baseline performance by 47.2%. Furthermore, HAMLET pushes prior art performance from 64.1% to 66.4% on RoboCasa Kitchen (100-demo setup) and from 95.6% to 97.7% on LIBERO, highlighting its effectiveness even under generic robot-manipulation benchmarks.

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### ALARB: An Arabic Legal Argument Reasoning Benchmark

Authors: Harethah Abu Shairah, Somayah AlHarbi, Abdulaziz AlHussein, Sameer Alsabea, Omar Shaqaqi, Hebah AlShamlan, Omar Knio, George Turkiyyah
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.IR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00694v1

We introduce ALARB, a dataset and suite of tasks designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) within the Arabic legal domain. While existing Arabic benchmarks cover some knowledge-intensive tasks such as retrieval and understanding, substantial datasets focusing specifically on multistep reasoning for Arabic LLMs, especially in open-ended contexts, are lacking. The dataset comprises over 13K commercial court cases from Saudi Arabia, with each case including the facts presented, the reasoning of the court, the verdict, as well as the cited clauses extracted from the regulatory documents. We define a set of challenging tasks leveraging this dataset and reflecting the complexity of real-world legal reasoning, including verdict prediction, completion of reasoning chains in multistep legal arguments, and identification of relevant regulations based on case facts. We benchmark a representative selection of current open and closed Arabic LLMs on these tasks and demonstrate the dataset's utility for instruction tuning. Notably, we show that instruction-tuning a modest 12B parameter model using ALARB significantly enhances its performance in verdict prediction and Arabic verdict generation, reaching a level comparable to that of GPT-4o.

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### Inclusive Easy-to-Read Generation for Individuals with Cognitive Impairments

Authors: François Ledoyen, Gaël Dias, Alexis Lechervy, Jeremie Pantin, Fabrice Maurel, Youssef Chahir, Elisa Gouzonnat, Mélanie Berthelot, Stanislas Moravac, Armony Altinier, Amy Khairalla
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00691v1

Ensuring accessibility for individuals with cognitive impairments is essential for autonomy, self-determination, and full citizenship. However, manual Easy-to-Read (ETR) text adaptations are slow, costly, and difficult to scale, limiting access to crucial information in healthcare, education, and civic life. AI-driven ETR generation offers a scalable solution but faces key challenges, including dataset scarcity, domain adaptation, and balancing lightweight learning of Large Language Models (LLMs). In this paper, we introduce ETR-fr, the first dataset for ETR text generation fully compliant with European ETR guidelines. We implement parameter-efficient fine-tuning on PLMs and LLMs to establish generative baselines. To ensure high-quality and accessible outputs, we introduce an evaluation framework based on automatic metrics supplemented by human assessments. The latter is conducted using a 36-question evaluation form that is aligned with the guidelines. Overall results show that PLMs perform comparably to LLMs and adapt effectively to out-of-domain texts.

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### ACPO: Adaptive Curriculum Policy Optimization for Aligning Vision-Language Models in Complex Reasoning

Authors: Yunhao Wang, Ziting Li, Shuai Chen, Tao Liu, Chao Song, Junjie Jiang, Jian Zhu, Peng Gao, Bin Qin
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00690v1

Aligning large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) for complex reasoning via reinforcement learning is often hampered by the limitations of existing policy optimization algorithms, such as static training schedules and the rigid, uniform clipping mechanism in Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). In this work, we introduce Adaptive Curriculum Policy Optimization (ACPO), a novel framework that addresses these challenges through a dual-component adaptive learning strategy. First, ACPO employs a dynamic curriculum that orchestrates a principled transition from a stable, near on-policy exploration phase to an efficient, off-policy exploitation phase by progressively increasing sample reuse. Second, we propose an Advantage-Aware Adaptive Clipping (AAAC) mechanism that replaces the fixed clipping hyperparameter with dynamic, sample-wise bounds modulated by the normalized advantage of each token. This allows for more granular and robust policy updates, enabling larger gradients for high-potential samples while safeguarding against destructive ones. We conduct extensive experiments on a suite of challenging multimodal reasoning benchmarks, including MathVista, LogicVista, and MMMU-Pro. Results demonstrate that ACPO consistently outperforms strong baselines such as DAPO and PAPO, achieving state-of-the-art performance, accelerated convergence, and superior training stability.

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### Relevance-Zone Reduction in Game Solving

Authors: Chi-Huang Lin, Ting Han Wei, Chun-Jui Wang, Hung Guei, Chung-Chin Shih, Yun-Jui Tsai, I-Chen Wu, Ti-Rong Wu
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00689v1

Game solving aims to find the optimal strategies for all players and determine the theoretical outcome of a game. However, due to the exponential growth of game trees, many games remain unsolved, even though methods like AlphaZero have demonstrated super-human level in game playing. The Relevance-Zone (RZ) is a local strategy reuse technique that restricts the search to only the regions relevant to the outcome, significantly reducing the search space. However, RZs are not unique. Different solutions may result in RZs of varying sizes. Smaller RZs are generally more favorable, as they increase the chance of reuse and improve pruning efficiency. To this end, we propose an iterative RZ reduction method that repeatedly solves the same position while gradually restricting the region involved, guiding the solver toward smaller RZs. We design three constraint generation strategies and integrate an RZ Pattern Table to fully leverage past solutions. In experiments on 7x7 Killall-Go, our method reduces the average RZ size to 85.95% of the original. Furthermore, the reduced RZs can be permanently stored as reusable knowledge for future solving tasks, especially for larger board sizes or different openings.

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### Stochastic Self-Organization in Multi-Agent Systems

Authors: Nurbek Tastan, Samuel Horvath, Karthik Nandakumar
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.MA, cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00685v2

Multi-agent systems (MAS) based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to solve tasks that are beyond the reach of any single LLM. However, this potential can only be realized when the collaboration mechanism between agents is optimized. Specifically, optimizing the communication structure between agents is critical for fruitful collaboration. Most existing approaches rely on fixed topologies, pretrained graph generators, optimization over edges, or employ external LLM judges, thereby adding to the complexity. In this work, we introduce a response-conditioned framework that adapts communication on-the-fly. Agents independently generate responses to the user query and assess peer contributions using an approximation of the Shapley value. A directed acyclic graph (DAG) is then constructed to regulate the propagation of the responses among agents, which ensures stable and efficient message transmission from high-contributing agents to others. This graph is dynamically updated based on the agent responses from the previous collaboration round. Since the proposed framework enables the self-organization of agents without additional supervision or training, we refer to it as SelfOrg. The SelfOrg framework goes beyond task- and query-level optimization and takes into account the stochastic nature of agent responses. Experiments with both strong and weak LLM backends demonstrate robust performance, with significant gains in the weak regime where prior methods collapse. We also theoretically show that multiple agents increase the chance of correctness and that the correct responses naturally dominate the information flow.

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### ProtoMask: Segmentation-Guided Prototype Learning

Authors: Steffen Meinert, Philipp Schlinge, Nils Strodthoff, Martin Atzmueller
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00683v1

XAI gained considerable importance in recent years. Methods based on prototypical case-based reasoning have shown a promising improvement in explainability. However, these methods typically rely on additional post-hoc saliency techniques to explain the semantics of learned prototypes. Multiple critiques have been raised about the reliability and quality of such techniques. For this reason, we study the use of prominent image segmentation foundation models to improve the truthfulness of the mapping between embedding and input space. We aim to restrict the computation area of the saliency map to a predefined semantic image patch to reduce the uncertainty of such visualizations. To perceive the information of an entire image, we use the bounding box from each generated segmentation mask to crop the image. Each mask results in an individual input in our novel model architecture named ProtoMask. We conduct experiments on three popular fine-grained classification datasets with a wide set of metrics, providing a detailed overview on explainability characteristics. The comparison with other popular models demonstrates competitive performance and unique explainability features of our model. https://github.com/uos-sis/quanproto

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### Adaptive Event Stream Slicing for Open-Vocabulary Event-Based Object Detection via Vision-Language Knowledge Distillation

Authors: Jinchang Zhang, Zijun Li, Jiakai Lin, Guoyu Lu
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00681v2

Event cameras offer advantages in object detection tasks due to high-speed response, low latency, and robustness to motion blur. However, event cameras lack texture and color information, making open-vocabulary detection particularly challenging. Current event-based detection methods are typically trained on predefined categories, limiting their ability to generalize to novel objects, where encountering previously unseen objects is common. Vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled open-vocabulary object detection in RGB images. However, the modality gap between images and event streams makes it ineffective to directly transfer CLIP to event data, as CLIP was not designed for event streams. To bridge this gap, we propose an event-image knowledge distillation framework that leverages CLIP's semantic understanding to achieve open-vocabulary object detection on event data. Instead of training CLIP directly on event streams, we use image frames as inputs to a teacher model, guiding the event-based student model to learn CLIP's rich visual representations. Through spatial attention-based distillation, the student network learns meaningful visual features directly from raw event inputs while inheriting CLIP's broad visual knowledge. Furthermore, to prevent information loss due to event data segmentation, we design a hybrid spiking neural network (SNN) and convolutional neural network (CNN) framework. Unlike fixed-group event segmentation methods, which often discard crucial temporal information, our SNN adaptively determines the optimal event segmentation moments, ensuring that key temporal features are extracted. The extracted event features are then processed by CNNs for object detection.

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### Milco: Learned Sparse Retrieval Across Languages via a Multilingual Connector

Authors: Thong Nguyen, Yibin Lei, Jia-Huei Ju, Eugene Yang, Andrew Yates
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.IR, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00671v2

Learned Sparse Retrieval (LSR) combines the efficiency of bi-encoders with the transparency of lexical matching, but existing approaches struggle to scale beyond English. We introduce MILCO, an LSR architecture that maps queries and documents from different languages into a shared English lexical space via a multilingual connector. MILCO is trained with a specialized two-stage regime that combines Sparse Alignment Pretraining with contrastive training to provide representation transparency and effectiveness while mitigating semantic collapse. Motivated by the observation that uncommon entities are often lost when projected into English, we propose a new LexEcho head, which enhances robustness by augmenting the English lexical representation with a source-language view obtained through a special (ECHO) token. MILCO achieves state-of-the-art multilingual and cross-lingual LSR performance, outperforming leading dense, sparse, and multi-vector baselines such as BGE-M3 and Qwen3-Embed on standard multilingual benchmarks, while supporting dynamic efficiency through post-hoc pruning. Notably, when using mass-based pruning to reduce document representations to only 30 active dimensions on average, MILCO 560M outperforms the similarly-sized Qwen3-Embed 0.6B with 1024 dimensions, while achieving 3$\times$ lower retrieval latency and 10$\times$ smaller index size.

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### Beyond one-hot encoding? Journey into compact encoding for large multi-class segmentation

Authors: Aaron Kujawa, Thomas Booth, Tom Vercauteren
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.CV, eess.IV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00667v1

This work presents novel methods to reduce computational and memory requirements for medical image segmentation with a large number of classes. We curiously observe challenges in maintaining state-of-the-art segmentation performance with all of the explored options. Standard learning-based methods typically employ one-hot encoding of class labels. The computational complexity and memory requirements thus increase linearly with the number of classes. We propose a family of binary encoding approaches instead of one-hot encoding to reduce the computational complexity and memory requirements to logarithmic in the number of classes. In addition to vanilla binary encoding, we investigate the effects of error-correcting output codes (ECOCs), class weighting, hard/soft decoding, class-to-codeword assignment, and label embedding trees. We apply the methods to the use case of whole brain parcellation with 108 classes based on 3D MRI images. While binary encodings have proven efficient in so-called extreme classification problems in computer vision, we faced challenges in reaching state-of-the-art segmentation quality with binary encodings. Compared to one-hot encoding (Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) = 82.4 (2.8)), we report reduced segmentation performance with the binary segmentation approaches, achieving DSCs in the range from 39.3 to 73.8. Informative negative results all too often go unpublished. We hope that this work inspires future research of compact encoding strategies for large multi-class segmentation tasks.

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### A Geometric Unification of Generative AI with Manifold-Probabilistic Projection Models

Authors: Leah Bar, Liron Mor Yosef, Shai Zucker, Neta Shoham, Inbar Seroussi, Nir Sochen
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00666v2

Most models of generative AI for images assume that images are inherently low-dimensional objects embedded within a high-dimensional space. Additionally, it is often implicitly assumed that thematic image datasets form smooth or piecewise smooth manifolds. Common approaches overlook the geometric structure and focus solely on probabilistic methods, approximating the probability distribution through universal approximation techniques such as the kernel method. In some generative models the low dimensional nature of the data manifest itself by the introduction of a lower dimensional latent space. Yet, the probability distribution in the latent or the manifold's coordinate space is considered uninteresting and is predefined or considered uniform. In this study, we address the problem of Blind Image Denoising (BID), and to some extent, the problem of generating images from noise by unifying geometric and probabilistic perspectives. We introduce a novel framework that improves upon existing probabilistic approaches by incorporating geometric assumptions that enable the effective use of kernel-based probabilistic methods. Furthermore, the proposed framework extends prior geometric approaches by combining explicit and implicit manifold descriptions through the introduction of a distance function. The resulting framework demystifies diffusion models by interpreting them as a projection mechanism onto the manifold of ``good images''. This interpretation leads to the construction of a new deterministic model, the Manifold-Probabilistic Projection Model (MPPM), which operates in both the representation (pixel) space and the latent space. We demonstrate that the Latent MPPM (LMPPM) outperforms the Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) across various datasets, achieving superior results in terms of image restoration and generation.

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### Multi-Domain Brain Vessel Segmentation Through Feature Disentanglement

Authors: Francesco Galati, Daniele Falcetta, Rosa Cortese, Ferran Prados, Ninon Burgos, Maria A. Zuluaga
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00665v2

The intricate morphology of brain vessels poses significant challenges for automatic segmentation models, which usually focus on a single imaging modality. However, accurately treating brain-related conditions requires a comprehensive understanding of the cerebrovascular tree, regardless of the specific acquisition procedure. Our framework effectively segments brain arteries and veins in various datasets through image-to-image translation while avoiding domain-specific model design and data harmonization between the source and the target domain. This is accomplished by employing disentanglement techniques to independently manipulate different image properties, allowing them to move from one domain to another in a label-preserving manner. Specifically, we focus on manipulating vessel appearances during adaptation while preserving spatial information, such as shapes and locations, which are crucial for correct segmentation. Our evaluation effectively bridges large and varied domain gaps across medical centers, image modalities, and vessel types. Additionally, we conduct ablation studies on the optimal number of required annotations and other architectural choices. The results highlight our framework's robustness and versatility, demonstrating the potential of domain adaptation methodologies to perform cerebrovascular image segmentation in multiple scenarios accurately. Our code is available at https://github.com/i-vesseg/MultiVesSeg.

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### Batch-CAM: Introduction to better reasoning in convolutional deep learning models

Authors: Giacomo Ignesti, Davide Moroni, Massimo Martinelli
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00664v2

Deep learning opacity often impedes deployment in high-stakes domains. We propose a training framework that aligns model focus with class-representative features without requiring pixel-level annotations. To this end, we introduce Batch-CAM, a vectorised implementation of Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping that integrates directly into the training loop with minimal computational overhead. We propose two regularisation terms: a Prototype Loss, which aligns individual-sample attention with the global class average, and a Batch-CAM Loss, which enforces consistency within a training batch. These are evaluated using L1, L2, and SSIM metrics. Validated on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST using ResNet18 and ConvNeXt-V2, our method generates significantly more coherent and human-interpretable saliency maps compared to baselines. While maintaining competitive classification accuracy, the framework successfully suppresses spurious feature activation, as evidenced by qualitative reconstruction analysis. Batch-CAM appears to offer a scalable pathway for training intrinsically interpretable models by leveraging batch-level statistics to guide feature extraction, effectively bridging the gap between predictive performance and explainability.

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### Facilitating Cognitive Accessibility with LLMs: A Multi-Task Approach to Easy-to-Read Text Generation

Authors: François Ledoyen, Gaël Dias, Jeremie Pantin, Alexis Lechervy, Fabrice Maurel, Youssef Chahir
Published: 2025-10-01
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00662v1

Simplifying complex texts is essential for ensuring equitable access to information, especially for individuals with cognitive impairments. The Easy-to-Read (ETR) initiative offers a framework for making content accessible to the neurodivergent population, but the manual creation of such texts remains time-consuming and resource-intensive. In this work, we investigate the potential of large language models (LLMs) to automate the generation of ETR content. To address the scarcity of aligned corpora and the specificity of ETR constraints, we propose a multi-task learning (MTL) approach that trains models jointly on text summarization, text simplification, and ETR generation. We explore two different strategies: multi-task retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for in-context learning, and MTL-LoRA for parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Our experiments with Mistral-7B and LLaMA-3-8B, based on ETR-fr, a new high-quality dataset, demonstrate the benefits of multi-task setups over single-task baselines across all configurations. Moreover, results show that the RAG-based strategy enables generalization in out-of-domain settings, while MTL-LoRA outperforms all learning strategies within in-domain configurations.

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