# Research Papers — 2025-10 · bundle page 73 of 217

> Full-text markdown of papers #3601–3650 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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### On-Device Inference versus Wireless Streaming: Energy-Efficient Multi-Modal Deep Learning for Wearable Cardiovascular Patches

Authors: Mustafa Fuad Rifet Ibrahim, Tunc Alkanat, Felix Manthey, Maurice Meijer, Alexander Schlaefer, Peer Stelldinger
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18668v5

Wearable cardiovascular sensor patches promise continuous, unobtrusive monitoring, but their tight energy, memory, and compute budgets make it unclear whether physiological signals should be analyzed on the device or streamed to the cloud for processing. We study this inference-versus-transmission trade-off for a resource-constrained patch that records synchronized electrocardiogram (ECG) and phonocardiogram (PCG) signals. We propose an end-to-end, multi-modal convolutional neural network (CNN) with early fusion that classifies the two modalities directly on the device, without hand-crafted features. Trained and validated on the PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2016 dataset, the floating-point model attains an accuracy of 0.975, which is competitive with the best reported results. At the same time, it reduces the parameter count and computational cost by approximately three orders of magnitude. We deploy an 8-bit integer version of the model on a microcontroller with an integrated neural processing unit (NPU) and measure its inference energy. We also benchmark the energy required for Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) communication on a representative evaluation kit across a range of payload sizes. NPU inference consumes approximately one-seventh of the energy required for CPU inference. For realistic per-second payloads, local inference is also several times more energy efficient than continuous raw-data streaming. These results show that on-device intelligence, rather than constant transmission, is the more energy-efficient basis for always-on wearable cardiovascular monitoring at the edge.

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### Image augmentation with invertible networks in interactive satellite image change detection

Authors: Hichem Sahbi
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18660v1

This paper devises a novel interactive satellite image change detection algorithm based on active learning. Our framework employs an iterative process that leverages a question-and-answer model. This model queries the oracle (user) about the labels of a small subset of images (dubbed as display), and based on the oracle's responses, change detection model is dynamically updated. The main contribution of our framework resides in a novel invertible network that allows augmenting displays, by mapping them from highly nonlinear input spaces to latent ones, where augmentation transformations become linear and more tractable. The resulting augmented data are afterwards mapped back to the input space, and used to retrain more effective change detection criteria in the subsequent iterations of active learning. Experimental results demonstrate superior performance of our proposed method compared to the related work.

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### Sherlock Your Queries: Learning to Ask the Right Questions for Dialogue-Based Retrieval

Authors: Dong Yun, Marco Schouten, Dim Papadopoulos
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18659v1

User queries in information retrieval are often ambiguous, making it challenging for systems to identify a user's target from a single query. While recent dialogue-based interactive retrieval systems can clarify user intent, they are inefficient as they often lack an explicit strategy to ask the most informative questions. To address this limitation, we propose SherlockLLM, a dialogue-driven retrieval framework that learns an optimal questioning strategy via Reinforcement Learning (RL) and avoids the need for large-scale annotated dialogue data. In our framework, an agent is trained to generate a sequence of binary questions to efficiently narrow down the search space. To validate our approach, we introduce a benchmark with both structured and unstructured tasks. Experimental results show that SherlockLLM is a robust and efficient solution. On the structured tasks, its performance matches strong baselines and approaches the theoretical optimal defined by binary search. On the challenging unstructured task, our agent significantly outperforms these baselines, showcasing its ability to learn a highly effective information-seeking dialogue policy.

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### Differentially Private E-Values

Authors: Daniel Csillag, Diego Mesquita
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: stat.ME, cs.CR, cs.LG, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18654v1

E-values have gained prominence as flexible tools for statistical inference and risk control, enabling anytime- and post-hoc-valid procedures under minimal assumptions. However, many real-world applications fundamentally rely on sensitive data, which can be leaked through e-values. To ensure their safe release, we propose a general framework to transform non-private e-values into differentially private ones. Towards this end, we develop a novel biased multiplicative noise mechanism that ensures our e-values remain statistically valid. We show that our differentially private e-values attain strong statistical power, and are asymptotically as powerful as their non-private counterparts. Experiments across online risk monitoring, private healthcare, and conformal e-prediction demonstrate our approach's effectiveness and illustrate its broad applicability.

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### Binary Quadratic Quantization: Beyond First-Order Quantization for Real-Valued Matrix Compression

Authors: Kyo Kuroki, Yasuyuki Okoshi, Thiem Van Chu, Kazushi Kawamura, Masato Motomura
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.NE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18650v1

This paper proposes a novel matrix quantization method, Binary Quadratic Quantization (BQQ). In contrast to conventional first-order quantization approaches, such as uniform quantization and binary coding quantization, that approximate real-valued matrices via linear combinations of binary bases, BQQ leverages the expressive power of binary quadratic expressions while maintaining an extremely compact data format. We validate our approach with two experiments: a matrix compression benchmark and post-training quantization (PTQ) on pretrained Vision Transformer-based models. Experimental results demonstrate that BQQ consistently achieves a superior trade-off between memory efficiency and reconstruction error than conventional methods for compressing diverse matrix data. It also delivers strong PTQ performance, even though we neither target state-of-the-art PTQ accuracy under tight memory constraints nor rely on PTQ-specific binary matrix optimization. For example, our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art PTQ method by up to 2.2\% and 59.1% on the ImageNet dataset under the calibration-based and data-free scenarios, respectively, with quantization equivalent to 2 bits. These findings highlight the surprising effectiveness of binary quadratic expressions for efficient matrix approximation and neural network compression.

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### Learning Time-Varying Turn-Taking Behavior in Group Conversations

Authors: Madeline Navarro, Lisa O'Bryan, Santiago Segarra
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18649v1

We propose a flexible probabilistic model for predicting turn-taking patterns in group conversations based solely on individual characteristics and past speaking behavior. Many models of conversation dynamics cannot yield insights that generalize beyond a single group. Moreover, past works often aim to characterize speaking behavior through a universal formulation that may not be suitable for all groups. We thus develop a generalization of prior conversation models that predicts speaking turns among individuals in any group based on their individual characteristics, that is, personality traits, and prior speaking behavior. Importantly, our approach provides the novel ability to learn how speaking inclination varies based on when individuals last spoke. We apply our model to synthetic and real-world conversation data to verify the proposed approach and characterize real group interactions. Our results demonstrate that previous behavioral models may not always be realistic, motivating our data-driven yet theoretically grounded approach.

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### Informed Learning for Estimating Drought Stress at Fine-Scale Resolution Enables Accurate Yield Prediction

Authors: Miro Miranda, Marcela Charfuelan, Matias Valdenegro Toro, Andreas Dengel
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18648v1

Water is essential for agricultural productivity. Assessing water shortages and reduced yield potential is a critical factor in decision-making for ensuring agricultural productivity and food security. Crop simulation models, which align with physical processes, offer intrinsic explainability but often perform poorly. Conversely, machine learning models for crop yield modeling are powerful and scalable, yet they commonly operate as black boxes and lack adherence to the physical principles of crop growth. This study bridges this gap by coupling the advantages of both worlds. We postulate that the crop yield is inherently defined by the water availability. Therefore, we formulate crop yield as a function of temporal water scarcity and predict both the crop drought stress and the sensitivity to water scarcity at fine-scale resolution. Sequentially modeling the crop yield response to water enables accurate yield prediction. To enforce physical consistency, a novel physics-informed loss function is proposed. We leverage multispectral satellite imagery, meteorological data, and fine-scale yield data. Further, to account for the uncertainty within the model, we build upon a deep ensemble approach. Our method surpasses state-of-the-art models like LSTM and Transformers in crop yield prediction with a coefficient of determination ($R^2$-score) of up to 0.82 while offering high explainability. This method offers decision support for industry, policymakers, and farmers in building a more resilient agriculture in times of changing climate conditions.

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### Optimality and NP-Hardness of Transformers in Learning Markovian Dynamical Functions

Authors: Yanna Ding, Songtao Lu, Yingdong Lu, Tomasz Nowicki, Jianxi Gao
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18638v2

Transformer architectures can solve unseen tasks based on input-output pairs in a given prompt due to in-context learning (ICL). Existing theoretical studies on ICL have mainly focused on linear regression tasks, often with i.i.d. inputs. To understand how transformers express ICL when modeling dynamics-driven functions, we investigate Markovian function learning through a structured ICL setup, where we characterize the loss landscape to reveal underlying optimization behaviors. Specifically, we (1) provide the closed-form expression of the global minimizer (in an enlarged parameter space) for a single-layer linear self-attention (LSA) model; (2) prove that recovering transformer parameters that realize the optimal solution is NP-hard in general, revealing a fundamental limitation of one-layer LSA in representing structured dynamical functions; and (3) supply a novel interpretation of a multilayer LSA as performing preconditioned gradient descent to optimize multiple objectives beyond the square loss. These theoretical results are numerically validated using simplified transformers.

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### ε-Seg: Sparsely Supervised Semantic Segmentation of Microscopy Data

Authors: Sheida Rahnamai Kordasiabi, Damian Dalle Nogare, Florian Jug
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18637v2

Semantic segmentation of electron microscopy (EM) images of biological samples remains a challenge in the life sciences. EM data captures details of biological structures, sometimes with such complexity that even human observers can find it overwhelming. We introduce ε-Seg, a method based on hierarchical variational autoencoders (HVAEs), employing center-region masking, sparse label contrastive learning (CL), a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) prior, and clustering-free label prediction. Center-region masking and the inpainting loss encourage the model to learn robust and representative embeddings to distinguish the desired classes, even if training labels are sparse (0.05% of the total image data or less). For optimal performance, we employ CL and a GMM prior to shape the latent space of the HVAE such that encoded input patches tend to cluster wrt. the semantic classes we wish to distinguish. Finally, instead of clustering latent embeddings for semantic segmentation, we propose a MLP semantic segmentation head to directly predict class labels from latent embeddings. We show empirical results of ε-Seg and baseline methods on 2 dense EM datasets of biological tissues and demonstrate the applicability of our method also on fluorescence microscopy data. Our results show that ε-Seg is capable of achieving competitive sparsely-supervised segmentation results on complex biological image data, even if only limited amounts of training labels are available.

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### C-SWAP: Explainability-Aware Structured Pruning for Efficient Neural Networks Compression

Authors: Baptiste Bauvin, Loïc Baret, Ola Ahmad
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18636v1

Neural network compression has gained increasing attention in recent years, particularly in computer vision applications, where the need for model reduction is crucial for overcoming deployment constraints. Pruning is a widely used technique that prompts sparsity in model structures, e.g. weights, neurons, and layers, reducing size and inference costs. Structured pruning is especially important as it allows for the removal of entire structures, which further accelerates inference time and reduces memory overhead. However, it can be computationally expensive, requiring iterative retraining and optimization. To overcome this problem, recent methods considered one-shot setting, which applies pruning directly at post-training. Unfortunately, they often lead to a considerable drop in performance. In this paper, we focus on this issue by proposing a novel one-shot pruning framework that relies on explainable deep learning. First, we introduce a causal-aware pruning approach that leverages cause-effect relations between model predictions and structures in a progressive pruning process. It allows us to efficiently reduce the size of the network, ensuring that the removed structures do not deter the performance of the model. Then, through experiments conducted on convolution neural network and vision transformer baselines, pre-trained on classification tasks, we demonstrate that our method consistently achieves substantial reductions in model size, with minimal impact on performance, and without the need for fine-tuning. Overall, our approach outperforms its counterparts, offering the best trade-off. Our code is available on GitHub.

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### Hardness of Learning Regular Languages in the Next Symbol Prediction Setting

Authors: Satwik Bhattamishra, Phil Blunsom, Varun Kanade
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18634v1

We study the learnability of languages in the Next Symbol Prediction (NSP) setting, where a learner receives only positive examples from a language together with, for every prefix, (i) whether the prefix itself is in the language and (ii) which next symbols can lead to an accepting string. This setting has been used in prior works to empirically analyze neural sequence models, and additionally, we observe that efficient algorithms for the NSP setting can be used to learn the (truncated) support of language models. We formalize the setting so as to make it amenable to PAC-learning analysis. While the setting provides a much richer set of labels than the conventional classification setting, we show that learning concept classes such as DFAs and Boolean formulas remains computationally hard. The proof is via a construction that makes almost all additional labels uninformative, yielding a reduction from the conventional learning problem to learning with NSP labels. Under cryptographic assumptions, the reduction implies that the problem of learning DFAs is computationally hard in the NSP setting.

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### Query Decomposition for RAG: Balancing Exploration-Exploitation

Authors: Roxana Petcu, Kenton Murray, Daniel Khashabi, Evangelos Kanoulas, Maarten de Rijke, Dawn Lawrie, Kevin Duh
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18633v1

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems address complex user requests by decomposing them into subqueries, retrieving potentially relevant documents for each, and then aggregating them to generate an answer. Efficiently selecting informative documents requires balancing a key trade-off: (i) retrieving broadly enough to capture all the relevant material, and (ii) limiting retrieval to avoid excessive noise and computational cost. We formulate query decomposition and document retrieval in an exploitation-exploration setting, where retrieving one document at a time builds a belief about the utility of a given sub-query and informs the decision to continue exploiting or exploring an alternative. We experiment with a variety of bandit learning methods and demonstrate their effectiveness in dynamically selecting the most informative sub-queries. Our main finding is that estimating document relevance using rank information and human judgments yields a 35% gain in document-level precision, 15% increase in α-nDCG, and better performance on the downstream task of long-form generation.

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### Think with 3D: Geometric Imagination Grounded Spatial Reasoning from Limited Views

Authors: Zhangquan Chen, Manyuan Zhang, Xinlei Yu, Xufang Luo, Mingze Sun, Zihao Pan, Xiang An, Yan Feng, Peng Pei, Xunliang Cai, Ruqi Huang
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18632v4

Though recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across a wide range of multimodal tasks, understanding 3D spatial relationships from limited views remains a significant challenge. Previous reasoning methods typically rely on pure text (e.g., topological cognitive maps) or on 2D visual cues. However, their limited representational capacity hinders performance in specific tasks that require 3D spatial imagination. To address this limitation, we propose 3DThinker, a framework that can effectively exploits the rich geometric information embedded within images while reasoning, like humans do. Our framework is the first to enable 3D mentaling during reasoning without any 3D prior input, and it does not rely on explicitly labeled 3D data for training. Specifically, our training consists of two stages. First, we perform supervised training to align the 3D latent generated by VLM while reasoning with that of a 3D foundation model (e.g., VGGT). Then, we optimize the entire reasoning trajectory solely based on outcome signals, thereby refining the underlying 3D mentaling. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that 3DThinker consistently outperforms strong baselines and offers a new perspective toward unifying 3D representations into multimodal reasoning. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhangquanchen/3DThinker.

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### Comparative Expressivity for Structured Argumentation Frameworks with Uncertain Rules and Premises

Authors: Carlo Proietti, Antonio Yuste-Ginel
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.AI, cs.LO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18631v2

Modelling qualitative uncertainty in formal argumentation is essential both for practical applications and theoretical understanding. Yet, most of the existing works focus on \textit{abstract} models for arguing with uncertainty. Following a recent trend in the literature, we tackle the open question of studying plausible instantiations of these abstract models. To do so, we ground the uncertainty of arguments in their components, structured within rules and premises. Our main technical contributions are: i) the introduction of a notion of expressivity that can handle abstract and structured formalisms, and ii) the presentation of both negative and positive expressivity results, comparing the expressivity of abstract and structured models of argumentation with uncertainty. These results affect incomplete abstract argumentation frameworks, and their extension with dependencies, on the abstract side, and ASPIC+, on the structured side.

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### Dynamical model parameters from ultrasound tongue kinematics

Authors: Sam Kirkham, Patrycja Strycharczuk
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18629v1

The control of speech can be modelled as a dynamical system in which articulators are driven toward target positions. These models are typically evaluated using fleshpoint data, such as electromagnetic articulography (EMA), but recent methodological advances make ultrasound imaging a promising alternative. We evaluate whether the parameters of a linear harmonic oscillator can be reliably estimated from ultrasound tongue kinematics and compare these with parameters estimated from simultaneously-recorded EMA data. We find that ultrasound and EMA yield comparable dynamical parameters, while mandibular short tendon tracking also adequately captures jaw motion. This supports using ultrasound kinematics to evaluate dynamical articulatory models.

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### Leveraging Association Rules for Better Predictions and Better Explanations

Authors: Gilles Audemard, Sylvie Coste-Marquis, Pierre Marquis, Mehdi Sabiri, Nicolas Szczepanski
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18628v1

We present a new approach to classification that combines data and knowledge. In this approach, data mining is used to derive association rules (possibly with negations) from data. Those rules are leveraged to increase the predictive performance of tree-based models (decision trees and random forests) used for a classification task. They are also used to improve the corresponding explanation task through the generation of abductive explanations that are more general than those derivable without taking such rules into account. Experiments show that for the two tree-based models under consideration, benefits can be offered by the approach in terms of predictive performance and in terms of explanation sizes.

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### Visual Attention Reasoning via Hierarchical Search and Self-Verification

Authors: Wei Cai, Jian Zhao, Yuchen Yuan, Tianle Zhang, Ming Zhu, Haichuan Tang, Xuelong Li
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18619v4

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) frequently hallucinate due to their reliance on fragile, linear reasoning and weak visual grounding. We propose Visual Attention Reasoning (VAR), a reinforcement learning framework that reformulates reasoning as a hierarchical search with self-verification. VAR enforces traceable evidence grounding by generating explicit bounding boxes, guided by a novel reward function combining geometric precision and semantic sufficiency. Furthermore, it replaces linear Chain-of-Thought with a tree-search policy capable of backtracking to correct logical errors. Theoretical analysis validates the framework's reliability, and extensive experiments demonstrate that VAR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on complex hallucination and safety benchmarks.

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### A Rectification-Based Approach for Distilling Boosted Trees into Decision Trees

Authors: Gilles Audemard, Sylvie Coste-Marquis, Pierre Marquis, Mehdi Sabiri, Nicolas Szczepanski
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18615v1

We present a new approach for distilling boosted trees into decision trees, in the objective of generating an ML model offering an acceptable compromise in terms of predictive performance and interpretability. We explain how the correction approach called rectification can be used to implement such a distillation process. We show empirically that this approach provides interesting results, in comparison with an approach to distillation achieved by retraining the model.

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### Unrolled-SINDy: A Stable Explicit Method for Non linear PDE Discovery from Sparsely Sampled Data

Authors: Fayad Ali Banna, Antoine Caradot, Eduardo Brandao, Jean-Philippe Colombier, Rémi Emonet, Marc Sebban
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18611v1

Identifying from observation data the governing differential equations of a physical dynamics is a key challenge in machine learning. Although approaches based on SINDy have shown great promise in this area, they still fail to address a whole class of real world problems where the data is sparsely sampled in time. In this article, we introduce Unrolled-SINDy, a simple methodology that leverages an unrolling scheme to improve the stability of explicit methods for PDE discovery. By decorrelating the numerical time step size from the sampling rate of the available data, our approach enables the recovery of equation parameters that would not be the minimizers of the original SINDy optimization problem due to large local truncation errors. Our method can be exploited either through an iterative closed-form approach or by a gradient descent scheme. Experiments show the versatility of our method. On both traditional SINDy and state-of-the-art noise-robust iNeuralSINDy, with different numerical schemes (Euler, RK4), our proposed unrolling scheme allows to tackle problems not accessible to non-unrolled methods.

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### A Compositional Paradigm for Foundation Models: Towards Smarter Robotic Agents

Authors: Luigi Quarantiello, Elia Piccoli, Jack Bell, Malio Li, Giacomo Carfì, Eric Nuertey Coleman, Gerlando Gramaglia, Lanpei Li, Mauro Madeddu, Irene Testa, Vincenzo Lomonaco
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18608v1

The birth of Foundation Models brought unprecedented results in a wide range of tasks, from language to vision, to robotic control. These models are able to process huge quantities of data, and can extract and develop rich representations, which can be employed across different domains and modalities. However, they still have issues in adapting to dynamic, real-world scenarios without retraining the entire model from scratch. In this work, we propose the application of Continual Learning and Compositionality principles to foster the development of more flexible, efficient and smart AI solutions.

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### Channel-Aware Vector Quantization for Robust Semantic Communication on Discrete Channels

Authors: Zian Meng, Qiang Li, Wenqian Tang, Mingdie Yan, Xiaohu Ge
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: eess.SP, cs.LG, eess.IV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18604v1

Deep learning-based semantic communication has largely relied on analog or semi-digital transmission, which limits compatibility with modern digital communication infrastructures. Recent studies have employed vector quantization (VQ) to enable discrete semantic transmission, yet existing methods neglect channel state information during codebook optimization, leading to suboptimal robustness. To bridge this gap, we propose a channel-aware vector quantization (CAVQ) algorithm within a joint source-channel coding (JSCC) framework, termed VQJSCC, established on a discrete memoryless channel. In this framework, semantic features are discretized and directly mapped to modulation constellation symbols, while CAVQ integrates channel transition probabilities into the quantization process, aligning easily confused symbols with semantically similar codewords. A multi-codebook alignment mechanism is further introduced to handle mismatches between codebook order and modulation order by decomposing the transmission stream into multiple independently optimized subchannels. Experimental results demonstrate that VQJSCC effectively mitigates the digital cliff effect, achieves superior reconstruction quality across various modulation schemes, and outperforms state-of-the-art digital semantic communication baselines in both robustness and efficiency.

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### CUARewardBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Reward Models on Computer-using Agent

Authors: Haojia Lin, Xiaoyu Tan, Yulei Qin, Zihan Xu, Yuchen Shi, Zongyi Li, Gang Li, Shaofei Cai, Siqi Cai, Chaoyou Fu, Ke Li, Xing Sun
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.SE, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18596v1

Computer-using agents (CUAs) enable task completion through natural interaction with operating systems and software interfaces. While script-based verifiers are widely adopted for evaluation, they suffer from limited scalability and inability to provide step-wise assessment. Reward models offer promising alternatives, but their effectiveness on CUA evaluation remains largely underexplored. To address this gap, we present CUARewardBench, comprising four key contributions: (1) First-ever Comprehensive CUA Reward Benchmark: We introduce the first benchmark for evaluating both outcome reward models (ORM) and process reward models (PRM) on CUA tasks, enabling systematic assessment across trajectory-level and step-level evaluation. (2) Diverse, Practical and Reliable Dataset: CUARewardBench encompasses trajectories from 10 software categories and 7 agent architectures with varying performance levels (25.9%-50.8% success rates). All trajectories are expertly annotated through carefully designed protocols, with rigorous quality control to ensure reliability and practical applicability. (3) Comprehensive Analysis and Insights: Through extensive experiments across 7 vision-language models and 3 prompt templates, we reveal critical limitations of current CUA RMs, including insufficient visual reasoning capabilities, knowledge deficiencies, and the superiority of general VLMs over specialized CUA models for reward evaluation. (4) Unanimous Prompt Ensemble (UPE): Based on the insights from our comprehensive analysis, we propose UPE, a novel ensemble method that significantly enhances reward model reliability through strict unanimous voting and strategic prompt-template configurations. UPE achieves 89.8% precision and 93.3% NPV for ORM, and 81.7% precision and 85.1% NPV for PRM, substantially outperforming single VLMs and traditional ensemble approaches.

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### Robustness Verification of Graph Neural Networks Via Lightweight Satisfiability Testing

Authors: Chia-Hsuan Lu, Tony Tan, Michael Benedikt
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18591v2

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are the predominant architecture for learning over graphs. As with any machine learning model, an important issue is the detection of attacks, where an adversary can change the output with a small perturbation of the input. Techniques for solving the adversarial robustness problem - determining whether an attack exists - were originally developed for image classification. In the case of graph learning, the attack model usually considers changes to the graph structure in addition to or instead of the numerical features of the input, and the state of the art techniques proceed via reduction to constraint solving, working on top of powerful solvers, e.g. for mixed integer programming. We show that it is possible to improve on the state of the art in structural robustness by replacing the use of powerful solvers by calls to efficient partial solvers, which run in polynomial time but may be incomplete. We evaluate our tool RobLight on a diverse set of GNN variants and datasets.

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### CovMatch: Cross-Covariance Guided Multimodal Dataset Distillation with Trainable Text Encoder

Authors: Yongmin Lee, Hye Won Chung
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18583v1

Multimodal dataset distillation aims to synthesize a small set of image-text pairs that enables efficient training of large-scale vision-language models. While dataset distillation has shown promise in unimodal tasks, extending it to multimodal contrastive learning presents key challenges: learning cross-modal alignment and managing the high computational cost of large encoders. Prior approaches address scalability by freezing the text encoder and update only the image encoder and text projection layer. However, we find this severely limits semantic alignment and becomes a bottleneck for performance scaling. We propose CovMatch, a scalable dataset distillation framework that aligns the cross-covariance of real and synthetic features while regularizing feature distributions within each modality. Unlike prior approaches, CovMatch enables joint optimization of both encoders, leading to stronger cross-modal alignment and improved performance. Evaluated on Flickr30K and COCO, CovMatch outperforms state-of-the-art multimodal distillation methods and achieves up to 6.8% absolute gains in retrieval accuracy using only 500 synthetic pairs.

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### Beyond the Explicit: A Bilingual Dataset for Dehumanization Detection in Social Media

Authors: Dennis Assenmacher, Paloma Piot, Katarina Laken, David Jurgens, Claudia Wagner
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18582v1

Digital dehumanization, although a critical issue, remains largely overlooked within the field of computational linguistics and Natural Language Processing. The prevailing approach in current research concentrating primarily on a single aspect of dehumanization that identifies overtly negative statements as its core marker. This focus, while crucial for understanding harmful online communications, inadequately addresses the broader spectrum of dehumanization. Specifically, it overlooks the subtler forms of dehumanization that, despite not being overtly offensive, still perpetuate harmful biases against marginalized groups in online interactions. These subtler forms can insidiously reinforce negative stereotypes and biases without explicit offensiveness, making them harder to detect yet equally damaging. Recognizing this gap, we use different sampling methods to collect a theory-informed bilingual dataset from Twitter and Reddit. Using crowdworkers and experts to annotate 16,000 instances on a document- and span-level, we show that our dataset covers the different dimensions of dehumanization. This dataset serves as both a training resource for machine learning models and a benchmark for evaluating future dehumanization detection techniques. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we fine-tune ML models on this dataset, achieving performance that surpasses state-of-the-art models in zero and few-shot in-context settings.

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### The Cost-Benefit of Interdisciplinarity in AI for Mental Health

Authors: Katerina Drakos, Eva Paraschou, Simay Toplu, Line Harder Clemmensen, Christoph Lütge, Nicole Nadine Lønfeldt, Sneha Das
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18581v1

Artificial intelligence has been introduced as a way to improve access to mental health support. However, most AI mental health chatbots rely on a limited range of disciplinary input, and fail to integrate expertise across the chatbot's lifecycle. This paper examines the cost-benefit trade-off of interdisciplinary collaboration in AI mental health chatbots. We argue that involving experts from technology, healthcare, ethics, and law across key lifecycle phases is essential to ensure value-alignment and compliance with the high-risk requirements of the AI Act. We also highlight practical recommendations and existing frameworks to help balance the challenges and benefits of interdisciplinarity in mental health chatbots.

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### HeFS: Helper-Enhanced Feature Selection via Pareto-Optimized Genetic Search

Authors: Yusi Fan, Tian Wang, Zhiying Yan, Chang Liu, Qiong Zhou, Qi Lu, Zhehao Guo, Ziqi Deng, Wenyu Zhu, Ruochi Zhang, Fengfeng Zhou
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.LG, q-bio.QM
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18575v1

Feature selection is a combinatorial optimization problem that is NP-hard. Conventional approaches often employ heuristic or greedy strategies, which are prone to premature convergence and may fail to capture subtle yet informative features. This limitation becomes especially critical in high-dimensional datasets, where complex and interdependent feature relationships prevail. We introduce the HeFS (Helper-Enhanced Feature Selection) framework to refine feature subsets produced by existing algorithms. HeFS systematically searches the residual feature space to identify a Helper Set - features that complement the original subset and improve classification performance. The approach employs a biased initialization scheme and a ratio-guided mutation mechanism within a genetic algorithm, coupled with Pareto-based multi-objective optimization to jointly maximize predictive accuracy and feature complementarity. Experiments on 18 benchmark datasets demonstrate that HeFS consistently identifies overlooked yet informative features and achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods, including in challenging domains such as gastric cancer classification, drug toxicity prediction, and computer science applications. The code and datasets are available at https://healthinformaticslab.org/supp/.

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### Kaleido: Open-Sourced Multi-Subject Reference Video Generation Model

Authors: Zhenxing Zhang, Jiayan Teng, Zhuoyi Yang, Tiankun Cao, Cheng Wang, Xiaotao Gu, Jie Tang, Dan Guo, Meng Wang
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18573v2

We present Kaleido, a subject-to-video~(S2V) generation framework, which aims to synthesize subject-consistent videos conditioned on multiple reference images of target subjects. Despite recent progress in S2V generation models, existing approaches remain inadequate at maintaining multi-subject consistency and at handling background disentanglement, often resulting in lower reference fidelity and semantic drift under multi-image conditioning. These shortcomings can be attributed to several factors. Primarily, the training dataset suffers from a lack of diversity and high-quality samples, as well as cross-paired data, i.e., paired samples whose components originate from different instances. In addition, the current mechanism for integrating multiple reference images is suboptimal, potentially resulting in the confusion of multiple subjects. To overcome these limitations, we propose a dedicated data construction pipeline, incorporating low-quality sample filtering and diverse data synthesis, to produce consistency-preserving training data. Moreover, we introduce Reference Rotary Positional Encoding (R-RoPE) to process reference images, enabling stable and precise multi-image integration. Extensive experiments across numerous benchmarks demonstrate that Kaleido significantly outperforms previous methods in consistency, fidelity, and generalization, marking an advance in S2V generation.

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### A Multi-Evidence Framework Rescues Low-Power Prognostic Signals and Rejects Statistical Artifacts in Cancer Genomics

Authors: Gokturk Aytug Akarlar
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: q-bio.GN, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18571v1

Motivation: Standard genome-wide association studies in cancer genomics rely on statistical significance with multiple testing correction, but systematically fail in underpowered cohorts. In TCGA breast cancer (n=967, 133 deaths), low event rates (13.8%) create severe power limitations, producing false negatives for known drivers and false positives for large passenger genes. Results: We developed a five-criteria computational framework integrating causal inference (inverse probability weighting, doubly robust estimation) with orthogonal biological validation (expression, mutation patterns, literature evidence). Applied to TCGA-BRCA mortality analysis, standard Cox+FDR detected zero genes at FDR<0.05, confirming complete failure in underpowered settings. Our framework correctly identified RYR2 -- a cardiac gene with no cancer function -- as a false positive despite nominal significance (p=0.024), while identifying KMT2C as a complex candidate requiring validation despite marginal significance (p=0.047, q=0.954). Power analysis revealed median power of 15.1% across genes, with KMT2C achieving only 29.8% power (HR=1.55), explaining borderline statistical significance despite strong biological evidence. The framework distinguished true signals from artifacts through mutation pattern analysis: RYR2 showed 29.8% silent mutations (passenger signature) with no hotspots, while KMT2C showed 6.7% silent mutations with 31.4% truncating variants (driver signature). This multi-evidence approach provides a template for analyzing underpowered cohorts, prioritizing biological interpretability over purely statistical significance. Availability: All code and analysis pipelines available at github.com/akarlaraytu/causal-inference-for-cancer-genomics

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### QuantEvolve: Automating Quantitative Strategy Discovery through Multi-Agent Evolutionary Framework

Authors: Junhyeog Yun, Hyoun Jun Lee, Insu Jeon
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18569v1

Automating quantitative trading strategy development in dynamic markets is challenging, especially with increasing demand for personalized investment solutions. Existing methods often fail to explore the vast strategy space while preserving the diversity essential for robust performance across changing market conditions. We present QuantEvolve, an evolutionary framework that combines quality-diversity optimization with hypothesis-driven strategy generation. QuantEvolve employs a feature map aligned with investor preferences, such as strategy type, risk profile, turnover, and return characteristics, to maintain a diverse set of effective strategies. It also integrates a hypothesis-driven multi-agent system to systematically explore the strategy space through iterative generation and evaluation. This approach produces diverse, sophisticated strategies that adapt to both market regime shifts and individual investment needs. Empirical results show that QuantEvolve outperforms conventional baselines, validating its effectiveness. We release a dataset of evolved strategies to support future research.

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### Large language models for folktale type automation based on motifs: Cinderella case study

Authors: Tjaša Arčon, Marko Robnik-Šikonja, Polona Tratnik
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18561v1

Artificial intelligence approaches are being adapted to many research areas, including digital humanities. We built a methodology for large-scale analyses in folkloristics. Using machine learning and natural language processing, we automatically detected motifs in a large collection of Cinderella variants and analysed their similarities and differences with clustering and dimensionality reduction. The results show that large language models detect complex interactions in tales, enabling computational analysis of extensive text collections and facilitating cross-lingual comparisons.

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### WebDevJudge: Evaluating (M)LLMs as Critiques for Web Development Quality

Authors: Chunyang Li, Yilun Zheng, Xinting Huang, Tianqing Fang, Jiahao Xu, Lihui Chen, Yangqiu Song, Han Hu
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18560v3

The paradigm of LLM-as-a-judge is emerging as a scalable and efficient alternative to human evaluation, demonstrating strong performance on well-defined tasks. However, its reliability in open-ended tasks with dynamic environments and complex interactions remains unexplored. To bridge the gap, we introduce WebDevJudge, a systematic benchmark for assessing LLM-as-a-judge performance in web development, with support for both non-interactive evaluation based on static observations and continuous interactive evaluation with a dynamic web environment. WebDevJudge comprises human preference labels over paired web implementations, annotated with structured and query-grounded rubrics to ensure high-quality ground truth. Using this benchmark, we comprehensively evaluate various evaluators, including LLMs, MLLMs, and agentic workflows. We systematically investigate the impact of different paradigms and guidance mechanisms. Our experiments reveal a significant gap between LLM judges and human experts. In-depth analysis indicates this gap stems from fundamental model limitations, including failures in recognizing functional equivalence, verifying task feasibility, and mitigating bias. Overall, WebDevJudge presents a challenge to LLM-as-a-judge, offering insights to guide future research toward developing more reliable and capable automated evaluators for complicated scenarios. Code and data are available at https://github.com/lcy2723/WebDevJudge.

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### RAISE: A Unified Framework for Responsible AI Scoring and Evaluation

Authors: Loc Phuc Truong Nguyen, Hung Thanh Do
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CE, cs.CY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18559v1

As AI systems enter high-stakes domains, evaluation must extend beyond predictive accuracy to include explainability, fairness, robustness, and sustainability. We introduce RAISE (Responsible AI Scoring and Evaluation), a unified framework that quantifies model performance across these four dimensions and aggregates them into a single, holistic Responsibility Score. We evaluated three deep learning models: a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), a Tabular ResNet, and a Feature Tokenizer Transformer, on structured datasets from finance, healthcare, and socioeconomics. Our findings reveal critical trade-offs: the MLP demonstrated strong sustainability and robustness, the Transformer excelled in explainability and fairness at a very high environmental cost, and the Tabular ResNet offered a balanced profile. These results underscore that no single model dominates across all responsibility criteria, highlighting the necessity of multi-dimensional evaluation for responsible model selection. Our implementation is available at: https://github.com/raise-framework/raise.

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### Building Trust in Clinical LLMs: Bias Analysis and Dataset Transparency

Authors: Svetlana Maslenkova, Clement Christophe, Marco AF Pimentel, Tathagata Raha, Muhammad Umar Salman, Ahmed Al Mahrooqi, Avani Gupta, Shadab Khan, Ronnie Rajan, Praveenkumar Kanithi
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18556v1

Large language models offer transformative potential for healthcare, yet their responsible and equitable development depends critically on a deeper understanding of how training data characteristics influence model behavior, including the potential for bias. Current practices in dataset curation and bias assessment often lack the necessary transparency, creating an urgent need for comprehensive evaluation frameworks to foster trust and guide improvements. In this study, we present an in-depth analysis of potential downstream biases in clinical language models, with a focus on differential opioid prescription tendencies across diverse demographic groups, such as ethnicity, gender, and age. As part of this investigation, we introduce HC4: Healthcare Comprehensive Commons Corpus, a novel and extensively curated pretraining dataset exceeding 89 billion tokens. Our evaluation leverages both established general benchmarks and a novel, healthcare-specific methodology, offering crucial insights to support fairness and safety in clinical AI applications.

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### Extracting alignment data in open models

Authors: Federico Barbero, Xiangming Gu, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Chawin Sitawarin, Matthew Jagielski, Itay Yona, Petar Veličković, Ilia Shumailov, Jamie Hayes
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18554v2

In this work, we show that it is possible to extract significant amounts of alignment training data from a post-trained model -- useful to steer the model to improve certain capabilities such as long-context reasoning, safety, instruction following, and maths. While the majority of related work on memorisation has focused on measuring success of training data extraction through string matching, we argue that embedding models are better suited for our specific goals. Distances measured through a high quality embedding model can identify semantic similarities between strings that a different metric such as edit distance will struggle to capture. In fact, in our investigation, approximate string matching would have severely undercounted (by a conservative estimate of $10\times$) the amount of data that can be extracted due to trivial artifacts that deflate the metric. Interestingly, we find that models readily regurgitate training data that was used in post-training phases such as SFT or RL. We show that this data can be then used to train a base model, recovering a meaningful amount of the original performance. We believe our work exposes a possibly overlooked risk towards extracting alignment data. Finally, our work opens up an interesting discussion on the downstream effects of distillation practices: since models seem to be regurgitating aspects of their training set, distillation can therefore be thought of as indirectly training on the model's original dataset.

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### Occluded nuScenes: A Multi-Sensor Dataset for Evaluating Perception Robustness in Automated Driving

Authors: Sanjay Kumar, Tim Brophy, Reenu Mohandas, Eoin Martino Grua, Ganesh Sistu, Valentina Donzella, Ciaran Eising
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18552v2

Robust perception in automated driving requires reliable performance under adverse conditions, where sensors may be affected by partial failures or environmental occlusions. Although existing autonomous driving datasets inherently contain sensor noise and environmental variability, very few enable controlled, parameterised, and reproducible degradations across multiple sensing modalities. This gap limits the ability to systematically evaluate how perception and fusion architectures perform under well-defined adverse conditions. To address this limitation, we introduce the Occluded nuScenes Dataset, a novel extension of the widely used nuScenes benchmark. For the camera modality, we release both the full and mini versions with four types of occlusions, two adapted from public implementations and two newly designed. For radar and LiDAR, we provide parameterised occlusion scripts that implement three types of degradations each, enabling flexible and repeatable generation of occluded data. This resource supports consistent, reproducible evaluation of perception models under partial sensor failures and environmental interference. By releasing the first multi-sensor occlusion dataset with controlled and reproducible degradations, we aim to advance research on robust sensor fusion, resilience analysis, and safety-critical perception in automated driving.

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### SOCIA-Nabla: Textual Gradient Meets Multi-Agent Orchestration for Automated Simulator Generation

Authors: Yuncheng Hua, Sion Weatherhead, Mehdi Jafari, Hao Xue, Flora D. Salim
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18551v2

In this paper, we present SOCIA-Nabla, an end-to-end, agentic framework that treats simulator construction asinstance optimization over code within a textual computation graph. Specialized LLM-driven agents are embedded as graph nodes, and a workflow manager executes a loss-driven loop: code synthesis -> execution -> evaluation -> code repair. The optimizer performs Textual-Gradient Descent (TGD), while human-in-the-loop interaction is reserved for task-spec confirmation, minimizing expert effort and keeping the code itself as the trainable object. Across three CPS tasks, i.e., User Modeling, Mask Adoption, and Personal Mobility, SOCIA-Nabla attains state-of-the-art overall accuracy. By unifying multi-agent orchestration with a loss-aligned optimization view, SOCIA-Nabla converts brittle prompt pipelines into reproducible, constraint-aware simulator code generation that scales across domains and simulation granularities. This work is under review, and we will release the code soon.

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### Interval Prediction of Annual Average Daily Traffic on Local Roads via Quantile Random Forest with High-Dimensional Spatial Data

Authors: Ying Yao, Daniel J. Graham
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, stat.AP
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18548v1

Accurate annual average daily traffic (AADT) data are vital for transport planning and infrastructure management. However, automatic traffic detectors across national road networks often provide incomplete coverage, leading to underrepresentation of minor roads. While recent machine learning advances have improved AADT estimation at unmeasured locations, most models produce only point predictions and overlook estimation uncertainty. This study addresses that gap by introducing an interval prediction approach that explicitly quantifies predictive uncertainty. We integrate a Quantile Random Forest model with Principal Component Analysis to generate AADT prediction intervals, providing plausible traffic ranges bounded by estimated minima and maxima. Using data from over 2,000 minor roads in England and Wales, and evaluated with specialized interval metrics, the proposed method achieves an interval coverage probability of 88.22%, a normalized average width of 0.23, and a Winkler Score of 7,468.47. By combining machine learning with spatial and high-dimensional analysis, this framework enhances both the accuracy and interpretability of AADT estimation, supporting more robust and informed transport planning.

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### EfficientNav: Towards On-Device Object-Goal Navigation with Navigation Map Caching and Retrieval

Authors: Zebin Yang, Sunjian Zheng, Tong Xie, Tianshi Xu, Bo Yu, Fan Wang, Jie Tang, Shaoshan Liu, Meng Li
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18546v3

Object-goal navigation (ObjNav) tasks an agent with navigating to the location of a specific object in an unseen environment. Embodied agents equipped with large language models (LLMs) and online constructed navigation maps can perform ObjNav in a zero-shot manner. However, existing agents heavily rely on giant LLMs on the cloud, e.g., GPT-4, while directly switching to small LLMs, e.g., LLaMA3.2-11b, suffer from significant success rate drops due to limited model capacity for understanding complex navigation maps, which prevents deploying ObjNav on local devices. At the same time, the long prompt introduced by the navigation map description will cause high planning latency on local devices. In this paper, we propose EfficientNav to enable on-device efficient LLM-based zero-shot ObjNav. To help the smaller LLMs better understand the environment, we propose semantics-aware memory retrieval to prune redundant information in navigation maps. To reduce planning latency, we propose discrete memory caching and attention-based memory clustering to efficiently save and re-use the KV cache. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that EfficientNav achieves 11.1% improvement in success rate on HM3D benchmark over GPT-4-based baselines, and demonstrates 6.7x real-time latency reduction and 4.7x end-to-end latency reduction over GPT-4 planner. Our code is available on https://github.com/PKU-SEC-Lab/EfficientNav.

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### Pay Attention to the Triggers: Constructing Backdoors That Survive Distillation

Authors: Giovanni De Muri, Mark Vero, Robin Staab, Martin Vechev
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18541v1

LLMs are often used by downstream users as teacher models for knowledge distillation, compressing their capabilities into memory-efficient models. However, as these teacher models may stem from untrusted parties, distillation can raise unexpected security risks. In this paper, we investigate the security implications of knowledge distillation from backdoored teacher models. First, we show that prior backdoors mostly do not transfer onto student models. Our key insight is that this is because existing LLM backdooring methods choose trigger tokens that rarely occur in usual contexts. We argue that this underestimates the security risks of knowledge distillation and introduce a new backdooring technique, T-MTB, that enables the construction and study of transferable backdoors. T-MTB carefully constructs a composite backdoor trigger, made up of several specific tokens that often occur individually in anticipated distillation datasets. As such, the poisoned teacher remains stealthy, while during distillation the individual presence of these tokens provides enough signal for the backdoor to transfer onto the student. Using T-MTB, we demonstrate and extensively study the security risks of transferable backdoors across two attack scenarios, jailbreaking and content modulation, and across four model families of LLMs.

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### GBlobs: Local LiDAR Geometry for Improved Sensor Placement Generalization

Authors: Dušan Malić, Christian Fruhwirth-Reisinger, Alexander Prutsch, Wei Lin, Samuel Schulter, Horst Possegger
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18539v1

This technical report outlines the top-ranking solution for RoboSense 2025: Track 3, achieving state-of-the-art performance on 3D object detection under various sensor placements. Our submission utilizes GBlobs, a local point cloud feature descriptor specifically designed to enhance model generalization across diverse LiDAR configurations. Current LiDAR-based 3D detectors often suffer from a \enquote{geometric shortcut} when trained on conventional global features (\ie, absolute Cartesian coordinates). This introduces a position bias that causes models to primarily rely on absolute object position rather than distinguishing shape and appearance characteristics. Although effective for in-domain data, this shortcut severely limits generalization when encountering different point distributions, such as those resulting from varying sensor placements. By using GBlobs as network input features, we effectively circumvent this geometric shortcut, compelling the network to learn robust, object-centric representations. This approach significantly enhances the model's ability to generalize, resulting in the exceptional performance demonstrated in this challenge.

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### Physics-guided Emulators Reveal Resilience and Fragility under Operational Latencies and Outages

Authors: Sarth Dubey, Subimal Ghosh, Udit Bhatia
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18535v1

Reliable hydrologic and flood forecasting requires models that remain stable when input data are delayed, missing, or inconsistent. However, most advances in rainfall-runoff prediction have been evaluated under ideal data conditions, emphasizing accuracy rather than operational resilience. Here, we develop an operationally ready emulator of the Global Flood Awareness System (GloFAS) that couples long- and short-term memory networks with a relaxed water-balance constraint to preserve physical coherence. Five architectures span a continuum of information availability: from complete historical and forecast forcings to scenarios with data latency and outages, allowing systematic evaluation of robustness. Trained in minimally managed catchments across the United States and tested in more than 5,000 basins, including heavily regulated rivers in India, the emulator reproduces the hydrological core of GloFAS and degrades smoothly as information quality declines. Transfer across contrasting hydroclimatic and management regimes yields reduced yet physically consistent performance, defining the limits of generalization under data scarcity and human influence. The framework establishes operational robustness as a measurable property of hydrological machine learning and advances the design of reliable real-time forecasting systems.

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### Counterfactual Reasoning for Steerable Pluralistic Value Alignment of Large Language Models

Authors: Hanze Guo, Jing Yao, Xiao Zhou, Xiaoyuan Yi, Xing Xie
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18526v2

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into applications serving users across diverse cultures, communities and demographics, it is critical to align LLMs with pluralistic human values beyond average principles (e.g., HHH). In psychological and social value theories such as Schwartz's Value Theory, pluralistic values are represented by multiple value dimensions paired with various priorities. However, existing methods encounter two challenges when aligning with such fine-grained value objectives: 1) they often treat multiple values as independent and equally important, ignoring their interdependence and relative priorities (value complexity); 2) they struggle to precisely control nuanced value priorities, especially those underrepresented ones (value steerability). To handle these challenges, we propose COUPLE, a COUnterfactual reasoning framework for PLuralistic valuE alignment. It introduces a structural causal model (SCM) to feature complex interdependency and prioritization among features, as well as the causal relationship between high-level value dimensions and behaviors. Moreover, it applies counterfactual reasoning to generate outputs aligned with any desired value objectives. Benefitting from explicit causal modeling, COUPLE also provides better interpretability. We evaluate COUPLE on two datasets with different value systems and demonstrate that COUPLE advances other baselines across diverse types of value objectives.

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### RayPose: Ray Bundling Diffusion for Template Views in Unseen 6D Object Pose Estimation

Authors: Junwen Huang, Shishir Reddy Vutukur, Peter KT Yu, Nassir Navab, Slobodan Ilic, Benjamin Busam
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18521v1

Typical template-based object pose pipelines estimate the pose by retrieving the closest matching template and aligning it with the observed image. However, failure to retrieve the correct template often leads to inaccurate pose predictions. To address this, we reformulate template-based object pose estimation as a ray alignment problem, where the viewing directions from multiple posed template images are learned to align with a non-posed query image. Inspired by recent progress in diffusion-based camera pose estimation, we embed this formulation into a diffusion transformer architecture that aligns a query image with a set of posed templates. We reparameterize object rotation using object-centered camera rays and model object translation by extending scale-invariant translation estimation to dense translation offsets. Our model leverages geometric priors from the templates to guide accurate query pose inference. A coarse-to-fine training strategy based on narrowed template sampling improves performance without modifying the network architecture. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmark datasets show competitive results of our method compared to state-of-the-art approaches in unseen object pose estimation.

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### Partial VOROS: A Cost-aware Performance Metric for Binary Classifiers with Precision and Capacity Constraints

Authors: Christopher Ratigan, Kyle Heuton, Carissa Wang, Lenore Cowen, Michael C. Hughes
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.LG, stat.ME
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18520v2

The ROC curve is widely used to assess binary classifiers. Yet for some applications, such as alert systems for monitoring hospitalized patients, conventional ROC analysis cannot meet two key deployment needs: enforcing a constraint on precision to avoid false alarm fatigue and imposing an upper bound on the number of predicted positives to represent the capacity of hospital staff. The usual area under the curve metric also does not reflect asymmetric costs for false positives and false negatives. In this paper we address all three of these issues. First, we show how the subset of classifiers that meet precision and capacity constraints occupy a feasible region in ROC space. We establish the polygon-shaped geometry of this region. We then define the partial area of lesser classifiers, a performance metric that is monotonic with cost and only accounts for the feasible region. Averaging this area over a desired distribution for cost parameters results in the partial volume over the ROC surface, or partial VOROS. In experiments predicting mortality risk from vital sign history on several datasets, we show this cost-aware metric can outperform alternatives at ranking classifiers for in-hospital alerts.

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### Decoding Dynamic Visual Experience from Calcium Imaging via Cell-Pattern-Aware Pretraining

Authors: Sangyoon Bae, Mehdi Azabou, Blake Richards, Jiook Cha
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: q-bio.NC, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18516v3

Neural recordings exhibit a distinctive form of heterogeneity rooted in differences in cell types, intrinsic circuit dynamics, and stochastic stimulus-response variability that goes beyond ordinary dataset variability, mixing statistically regular neurons with highly stochastic, stimulus-contingent ones within the same dataset. This heterogeneity poses a challenge for self-supervised learning (SSL) -- learnable statistical regularity -- thereby destabilizing representation learning and limiting reliable scaling. We introduce POYO-CAP (Cell-pattern Aware Pretraining), a biologically grounded hybrid pretraining strategy that first trains with masked reconstruction plus lightweight auxiliary supervision on statistically regular neurons -- identified via skewness and kurtosis -- and then fine-tunes on more stochastic populations. On the Allen Brain Observatory dataset, this curriculum yields 12--13\% relative improvements over from-scratch training and enables smooth, monotonic scaling with model size, whereas baselines trained on mixed populations plateau or destabilize. By making statistical predictability an explicit data-selection criterion, POYO-CAP turns neural heterogeneity into a scalable learning advantage for robust neural decoding.

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### DWaste: Greener AI for Waste Sorting using Mobile and Edge Devices

Authors: Suman Kunwar
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18513v2

The rise of convenience packaging has led to generation of enormous waste, making efficient waste sorting crucial for sustainable waste management. To address this, we developed DWaste, a computer vision-powered platform designed for real-time waste sorting on resource-constrained smartphones and edge devices, including offline functionality. We benchmarked various image classification models (EfficientNetV2S/M, ResNet50/101, MobileNet) and object detection (YOLOv8n, YOLOv11n) including our purposed YOLOv8n-CBAM model using our annotated dataset designed for recycling. We found a clear trade-off between accuracy and resource consumption: the best classifier, EfficientNetV2S, achieved high accuracy(~ 96%) but suffered from high latency (~ 0.22s) and elevated carbon emissions. In contrast, lightweight object detection models delivered strong performance (up to 80% mAP) with ultra-fast inference (~ 0.03s) and significantly smaller model sizes (< 7MB ), making them ideal for real-time, low-power use. Model quantization further maximized efficiency, substantially reducing model size and VRAM usage by up to 75%. Our work demonstrates the successful implementation of "Greener AI" models to support real-time, sustainable waste sorting on edge devices.

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### Identity-Aware Large Language Models require Cultural Reasoning

Authors: Alistair Plum, Anne-Marie Lutgen, Christoph Purschke, Achim Rettinger
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18510v1

Large language models have become the latest trend in natural language processing, heavily featuring in the digital tools we use every day. However, their replies often reflect a narrow cultural viewpoint that overlooks the diversity of global users. This missing capability could be referred to as cultural reasoning, which we define here as the capacity of a model to recognise culture-specific knowledge values and social norms, and to adjust its output so that it aligns with the expectations of individual users. Because culture shapes interpretation, emotional resonance, and acceptable behaviour, cultural reasoning is essential for identity-aware AI. When this capacity is limited or absent, models can sustain stereotypes, ignore minority perspectives, erode trust, and perpetuate hate. Recent empirical studies strongly suggest that current models default to Western norms when judging moral dilemmas, interpreting idioms, or offering advice, and that fine-tuning on survey data only partly reduces this tendency. The present evaluation methods mainly report static accuracy scores and thus fail to capture adaptive reasoning in context. Although broader datasets can help, they cannot alone ensure genuine cultural competence. Therefore, we argue that cultural reasoning must be treated as a foundational capability alongside factual accuracy and linguistic coherence. By clarifying the concept and outlining initial directions for its assessment, a foundation is laid for future systems to be able to respond with greater sensitivity to the complex fabric of human culture.

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### Zero-Shot Vehicle Model Recognition via Text-Based Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Authors: Wei-Chia Chang, Yan-Ann Chen
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18502v1

Vehicle make and model recognition (VMMR) is an important task in intelligent transportation systems, but existing approaches struggle to adapt to newly released models. Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) provides strong visual-text alignment, yet its fixed pretrained weights limit performance without costly image-specific finetuning. We propose a pipeline that integrates vision language models (VLMs) with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to support zero-shot recognition through text-based reasoning. A VLM converts vehicle images into descriptive attributes, which are compared against a database of textual features. Relevant entries are retrieved and combined with the description to form a prompt, and a language model (LM) infers the make and model. This design avoids large-scale retraining and enables rapid updates by adding textual descriptions of new vehicles. Experiments show that the proposed method improves recognition by nearly 20% over the CLIP baseline, demonstrating the potential of RAG-enhanced LM reasoning for scalable VMMR in smart-city applications.

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### Alibaba International E-commerce Product Search Competition DILAB Team Technical Report

Authors: Hyewon Lee, Junghyun Oh, Minkyung Song, Soyoung Park, Seunghoon Han
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18499v1

This study presents the multilingual e-commerce search system developed by the DILAB team, which achieved 5th place on the final leaderboard with a competitive overall score of 0.8819, demonstrating stable and high-performing results across evaluation metrics. To address challenges in multilingual query-item understanding, we designed a multi-stage pipeline integrating data refinement, lightweight preprocessing, and adaptive modeling. The data refinement stage enhanced dataset consistency and category coverage, while language tagging and noise filtering improved input quality. In the modeling phase, multiple architectures and fine-tuning strategies were explored, and hyperparameters optimized using curated validation sets to balance performance across query-category (QC) and query-item (QI) tasks. The proposed framework exhibited robustness and adaptability across languages and domains, highlighting the effectiveness of systematic data curation and iterative evaluation for multilingual search systems. The source code is available at https://github.com/2noweyh/DILAB-Alibaba-Ecommerce-Search.

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