# Research Papers — 2025-10 · bundle page 76 of 217

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### DelvePO: Direction-Guided Self-Evolving Framework for Flexible Prompt Optimization

Authors: Tao Tao, Guanghui Zhu, Lang Guo, Hongyi Chen, Chunfeng Yuan, Yihua Huang
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18257v1

Prompt Optimization has emerged as a crucial approach due to its capabilities in steering Large Language Models to solve various tasks. However, current works mainly rely on the random rewriting ability of LLMs, and the optimization process generally focus on specific influencing factors, which makes it easy to fall into local optimum. Besides, the performance of the optimized prompt is often unstable, which limits its transferability in different tasks. To address the above challenges, we propose $\textbf{DelvePO}$ ($\textbf{D}$irection-Guid$\textbf{e}$d Se$\textbf{l}$f-E$\textbf{v}$olving Framework for Fl$\textbf{e}$xible $\textbf{P}$rompt $\textbf{O}$ptimization), a task-agnostic framework to optimize prompts in self-evolve manner. In our framework, we decouple prompts into different components that can be used to explore the impact that different factors may have on various tasks. On this basis, we introduce working memory, through which LLMs can alleviate the deficiencies caused by their own uncertainties and further obtain key insights to guide the generation of new prompts. Extensive experiments conducted on different tasks covering various domains for both open- and closed-source LLMs, including DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B, Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct and GPT-4o-mini. Experimental results show that DelvePO consistently outperforms previous SOTA methods under identical experimental settings, demonstrating its effectiveness and transferability across different tasks.

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### Hyperbolic Space Learning Method Leveraging Temporal Motion Priors for Human Mesh Recovery

Authors: Xiang Zhang, Suping Wu, Weibin Qiu, Zhaocheng Jin, Sheng Yang
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18256v1

3D human meshes show a natural hierarchical structure (like torso-limbs-fingers). But existing video-based 3D human mesh recovery methods usually learn mesh features in Euclidean space. It's hard to catch this hierarchical structure accurately. So wrong human meshes are reconstructed. To solve this problem, we propose a hyperbolic space learning method leveraging temporal motion prior for recovering 3D human meshes from videos. First, we design a temporal motion prior extraction module. This module extracts the temporal motion features from the input 3D pose sequences and image feature sequences respectively. Then it combines them into the temporal motion prior. In this way, it can strengthen the ability to express features in the temporal motion dimension. Since data representation in non-Euclidean space has been proved to effectively capture hierarchical relationships in real-world datasets (especially in hyperbolic space), we further design a hyperbolic space optimization learning strategy. This strategy uses the temporal motion prior information to assist learning, and uses 3D pose and pose motion information respectively in the hyperbolic space to optimize and learn the mesh features. Then, we combine the optimized results to get an accurate and smooth human mesh. Besides, to make the optimization learning process of human meshes in hyperbolic space stable and effective, we propose a hyperbolic mesh optimization loss. Extensive experimental results on large publicly available datasets indicate superiority in comparison with most state-of-the-art.

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### Illusions of reflection: open-ended task reveals systematic failures in Large Language Models' reflective reasoning

Authors: Sion Weatherhead, Flora Salim, Aaron Belbasis
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18254v2

Humans do not just find mistakes after the fact -- we often catch them mid-stream because 'reflection' is tied to the goal and its constraints. Today's large language models produce reasoning tokens and 'reflective' text, but is it functionally equivalent with human reflective reasoning? Prior work on closed-ended tasks -- with clear, external 'correctness' signals -- can make 'reflection' look effective while masking limits in self-correction. We therefore test eight frontier models on a simple, real-world task that is open-ended yet rule-constrained, with auditable success criteria: to produce valid scientific test items, then revise after considering their own critique. First-pass performance is poor (often zero valid items out of 4 required; mean $\approx$ 1), and reflection yields only modest gains (also $\approx$ 1). Crucially, the second attempt frequently repeats the same violation of constraint, indicating 'corrective gains' arise largely from chance production of a valid item rather than error detection and principled, constraint-sensitive repair. Performance before and after reflection deteriorates as open-endedness increases, and models marketed for 'reasoning' show no advantage. Our results suggest that current LLM 'reflection' lacks functional evidence of the active, goal-driven monitoring that helps humans respect constraints even on a first pass. Until such mechanisms are instantiated in the model itself, reliable performance requires external structure that enforces constraints. Our code is available at: https://github.com/cruiseresearchgroup/LLM_ReflectionTest

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### OpenInsGaussian: Open-vocabulary Instance Gaussian Segmentation with Context-aware Cross-view Fusion

Authors: Tianyu Huang, Runnan Chen, Dongting Hu, Fengming Huang, Mingming Gong, Tongliang Liu
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18253v1

Understanding 3D scenes is pivotal for autonomous driving, robotics, and augmented reality. Recent semantic Gaussian Splatting approaches leverage large-scale 2D vision models to project 2D semantic features onto 3D scenes. However, they suffer from two major limitations: (1) insufficient contextual cues for individual masks during preprocessing and (2) inconsistencies and missing details when fusing multi-view features from these 2D models. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{OpenInsGaussian}, an \textbf{Open}-vocabulary \textbf{Ins}tance \textbf{Gaussian} segmentation framework with Context-aware Cross-view Fusion. Our method consists of two modules: Context-Aware Feature Extraction, which augments each mask with rich semantic context, and Attention-Driven Feature Aggregation, which selectively fuses multi-view features to mitigate alignment errors and incompleteness. Through extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, OpenInsGaussian achieves state-of-the-art results in open-vocabulary 3D Gaussian segmentation, outperforming existing baselines by a large margin. These findings underscore the robustness and generality of our proposed approach, marking a significant step forward in 3D scene understanding and its practical deployment across diverse real-world scenarios.

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### Finding the Sweet Spot: Optimal Data Augmentation Ratio for Imbalanced Credit Scoring Using ADASYN

Authors: Luis H. Chia
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: stat.AP, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18252v1

Credit scoring models face a critical challenge: severe class imbalance, with default rates typically below 10%, which hampers model learning and predictive performance. While synthetic data augmentation techniques such as SMOTE and ADASYN have been proposed to address this issue, the optimal augmentation ratio remains unclear, with practitioners often defaulting to full balancing (1:1 ratio) without empirical justification. This study systematically evaluates 10 data augmentation scenarios using the Give Me Some Credit dataset (97,243 observations, 7% default rate), comparing SMOTE, BorderlineSMOTE, and ADASYN at different multiplication factors (1x, 2x, 3x). All models were trained using XGBoost and evaluated on a held-out test set of 29,173 real observations. Statistical significance was assessed using bootstrap testing with 1,000 iterations. Key findings reveal that ADASYN with 1x multiplication (doubling the minority class) achieved optimal performance with AUC of 0.6778 and Gini coefficient of 0.3557, representing statistically significant improvements of +0.77% and +3.00% respectively (p = 0.017, bootstrap test). Higher multiplication factors (2x and 3x) resulted in performance degradation, with 3x showing a -0.48% decrease in AUC, suggesting a "law of diminishing returns" for synthetic oversampling. The optimal class imbalance ratio was found to be 6.6:1 (majority:minority), contradicting the common practice of balancing to 1:1. This work provides the first empirical evidence of an optimal "sweet spot" for data augmentation in credit scoring, with practical guidelines for industry practitioners and researchers working with imbalanced datasets. While demonstrated on a single representative dataset, the methodology provides a reproducible framework for determining optimal augmentation ratios in other imbalanced domains.

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### ssToken: Self-modulated and Semantic-aware Token Selection for LLM Fine-tuning

Authors: Xiaohan Qin, Xiaoxing Wang, Ning Liao, Cancheng Zhang, Xiangdong Zhang, Mingquan Feng, Jingzhi Wang, Junchi Yan
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18250v1

Data quality plays a critical role in enhancing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) for large language models (LLMs), and token-level data selection has emerged as a promising direction for its fine-grained nature. Despite their strong empirical performance, existing token-level selection methods share two key limitations: (1) requiring training or accessing an additional reference model, and (2) relying solely on loss information for token selection, which cannot well preserve semantically important tokens that are not favored by loss-based metrics. To address these challenges, we propose ssToken, a Self-modulated and Semantic-aware Token Selection approach. ssToken leverages readily accessible history models to compute the per-token loss difference with the current model, which serves as a self-modulated signal that enables the model to adaptively select tokens along its optimization trajectory, rather than relying on excess loss from an offline-trained reference model as in prior works. We further introduce a semantic-aware, attention-based token importance estimation metric, orthogonal to loss-based selection and providing complementary semantic information for more effective filtering. Extensive experiments across different model families and scales demonstrate that both self-modulated selection and semantic-aware selection alone outperform full-data fine-tuning, while their integration--ssToken--achieves synergistic gains and further surpasses prior token-level selection methods, delivering performance improvements while maintaining training efficiency.

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### Scaling Laws Meet Model Architecture: Toward Inference-Efficient LLMs

Authors: Song Bian, Tao Yu, Shivaram Venkataraman, Youngsuk Park
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18245v3

Scaling the number of parameters and the size of training data has proven to be an effective strategy for improving large language model (LLM) performance. Yet, as these models grow increasingly powerful and widely deployed, the cost of inference has become a pressing concern. Despite its importance, the trade-off between model accuracy and inference efficiency remains underexplored. In this work, we examine how key architectural factors, hidden size, the allocation of parameters between MLP and attention (mlp-to-attention ratio), and grouped-query attention (GQA), influence both inference cost and accuracy. We introduce a conditional scaling law that augments the Chinchilla framework with architectural information, along with a search framework for identifying architectures that are simultaneously inference-efficient and accurate. To validate our approach, we train more than 200 models spanning 80M to 3B parameters and 8B to 100B training tokens, and fit the proposed conditional scaling law. Our results show that the conditional scaling law reliably predicts optimal architectural choices and that the resulting models outperform existing open-source baselines. Under the same training budget, optimized architectures achieve up to 2.1% higher accuracy and 42% greater inference throughput compared to LLaMA-3.2.

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### BlendCLIP: Bridging Synthetic and Real Domains for Zero-Shot 3D Object Classification with Multimodal Pretraining

Authors: Ajinkya Khoche, Gergő László Nagy, Maciej Wozniak, Thomas Gustafsson, Patric Jensfelt
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18244v1

Zero-shot 3D object classification is crucial for real-world applications like autonomous driving, however it is often hindered by a significant domain gap between the synthetic data used for training and the sparse, noisy LiDAR scans encountered in the real-world. Current methods trained solely on synthetic data fail to generalize to outdoor scenes, while those trained only on real data lack the semantic diversity to recognize rare or unseen objects. We introduce BlendCLIP, a multimodal pretraining framework that bridges this synthetic-to-real gap by strategically combining the strengths of both domains. We first propose a pipeline to generate a large-scale dataset of object-level triplets -- consisting of a point cloud, image, and text description -- mined directly from real-world driving data and human annotated 3D boxes. Our core contribution is a curriculum-based data mixing strategy that first grounds the model in the semantically rich synthetic CAD data before progressively adapting it to the specific characteristics of real-world scans. Our experiments show that our approach is highly label-efficient: introducing as few as 1.5\% real-world samples per batch into training boosts zero-shot accuracy on the nuScenes benchmark by 27\%. Consequently, our final model achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging outdoor datasets like nuScenes and TruckScenes, improving over the best prior method by 19.3\% on nuScenes, while maintaining strong generalization on diverse synthetic benchmarks. Our findings demonstrate that effective domain adaptation, not full-scale real-world annotation, is the key to unlocking robust open-vocabulary 3D perception. Our code and dataset will be released upon acceptance on https://github.com/kesu1/BlendCLIP.

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### Fast and Efficient Parallel Sampling Using Higher Order Langevin Dynamics

Authors: Jaideep Mahajan, Kaihong Zhang, Feng Liang, Jingbo Liu
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: math.ST, stat.ME, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18242v2

We study parallel sampling from high-dimensional strongly log-concave distributions. Langevin-based samplers converge rapidly in continuous time, but their discretizations are typically sequential and often require polynomially many steps in the dimension $d$, the target accuracy $\varepsilon^{-1}$, or both. Picard-based parallel sampling methods reduce this sequential depth to polylogarithmic scale by solving for many time-discretization points in parallel; however, existing guarantees often require a polynomial number of processors, leading to substantial memory and gradient-evaluation costs in high dimensions. We show that higher-order Langevin structure can reduce this parallel resource burden while preserving polylogarithmic sequential depth. Our method combines arbitrary-order Langevin dynamics with blockwise Lagrange polynomial interpolation. This sharper discretization reduces the number of parallel points required to achieve a target accuracy. Our results cover both higher-order smooth potentials and ridge-separable potentials, including models such as Bayesian logistic regression and two-layer neural networks, and improve upon the space complexity of the current literature on parallel log-concave sampling.

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### Learning with Dual-level Noisy Correspondence for Multi-modal Entity Alignment

Authors: Haobin Li, Yijie Lin, Peng Hu, Mouxing Yang, Xi Peng
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18240v1

Multi-modal entity alignment (MMEA) aims to identify equivalent entities across heterogeneous multi-modal knowledge graphs (MMKGs), where each entity is described by attributes from various modalities. Existing methods typically assume that both intra-entity and inter-graph correspondences are faultless, which is often violated in real-world MMKGs due to the reliance on expert annotations. In this paper, we reveal and study a highly practical yet under-explored problem in MMEA, termed Dual-level Noisy Correspondence (DNC). DNC refers to misalignments in both intra-entity (entity-attribute) and inter-graph (entity-entity and attribute-attribute) correspondences. To address the DNC problem, we propose a robust MMEA framework termed RULE. RULE first estimates the reliability of both intra-entity and inter-graph correspondences via a dedicated two-fold principle. Leveraging the estimated reliabilities, RULE mitigates the negative impact of intra-entity noise during attribute fusion and prevents overfitting to noisy inter-graph correspondences during inter-graph discrepancy elimination. Beyond the training-time designs, RULE further incorporates a correspondence reasoning module that uncovers the underlying attribute-attribute connection across graphs, guaranteeing more accurate equivalent entity identification. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks verify the effectiveness of our method against the DNC compared with seven state-of-the-art methods.The code is available at \href{https://github.com/XLearning-SCU/RULE}{XLearning-SCU/RULE}

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### LIME: Link-based User-item Interaction Modeling with Decoupled XOR Attention for Efficient Test Time Scaling

Authors: Yang Liu, Yunjiang Jiang, Ayush Agarwal, Yihan Wu, Haoran Liu, Bi Xue
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.IR, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18239v4

Scaling large recommendation systems requires advancing three major frontiers: processing longer user histories, expanding candidate sets, and increasing model capacity. While promising, transformers' computational cost scales quadratically with the user sequence length and linearly with the number of candidates. This trade-off makes it prohibitively expensive to expand candidate sets or increase sequence length at inference, despite the significant performance improvements. We introduce \textbf{LIME}, a novel architecture that resolves this trade-off. Through two key innovations, LIME fundamentally reduces computational complexity. First, low-rank ``link embeddings" enable pre-computation of attention weights by decoupling user and candidate interactions, making the inference cost nearly independent of candidate set size. Second, a linear attention mechanism, \textbf{LIME-XOR}, reduces the complexity with respect to user sequence length from quadratic ($O(N^2)$) to linear ($O(N)$). Experiments on public and industrial datasets show LIME achieves near-parity with state-of-the-art transformers but with a 10$\times$ inference speedup on large candidate sets or long sequence lengths. When tested on a major recommendation platform, LIME improved user engagement while maintaining minimal inference costs with respect to candidate set size and user history length, establishing a new paradigm for efficient and expressive recommendation systems.

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### Fostering the Ecosystem of AI for Social Impact Requires Expanding and Strengthening Evaluation Standards

Authors: Bryan Wilder, Angela Zhou
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18238v1

There has been increasing research interest in AI/ML for social impact, and correspondingly more publication venues have refined review criteria for practice-driven AI/ML research. However, these review guidelines tend to most concretely recognize projects that simultaneously achieve deployment and novel ML methodological innovation. We argue that this introduces incentives for researchers that undermine the sustainability of a broader research ecosystem of social impact, which benefits from projects that make contributions on single front (applied or methodological) that may better meet project partner needs. Our position is that researchers and reviewers in machine learning for social impact must simultaneously adopt: 1) a more expansive conception of social impacts beyond deployment and 2) more rigorous evaluations of the impact of deployed systems.

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### DeepSeek-OCR: Contexts Optical Compression

Authors: Haoran Wei, Yaofeng Sun, Yukun Li
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18234v1

We present DeepSeek-OCR as an initial investigation into the feasibility of compressing long contexts via optical 2D mapping. DeepSeek-OCR consists of two components: DeepEncoder and DeepSeek3B-MoE-A570M as the decoder. Specifically, DeepEncoder serves as the core engine, designed to maintain low activations under high-resolution input while achieving high compression ratios to ensure an optimal and manageable number of vision tokens. Experiments show that when the number of text tokens is within 10 times that of vision tokens (i.e., a compression ratio < 10x), the model can achieve decoding (OCR) precision of 97%. Even at a compression ratio of 20x, the OCR accuracy still remains at about 60%. This shows considerable promise for research areas such as historical long-context compression and memory forgetting mechanisms in LLMs. Beyond this, DeepSeek-OCR also demonstrates high practical value. On OmniDocBench, it surpasses GOT-OCR2.0 (256 tokens/page) using only 100 vision tokens, and outperforms MinerU2.0 (6000+ tokens per page on average) while utilizing fewer than 800 vision tokens. In production, DeepSeek-OCR can generate training data for LLMs/VLMs at a scale of 200k+ pages per day (a single A100-40G). Codes and model weights are publicly accessible at http://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-OCR.

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### ACTG-ARL: Differentially Private Conditional Text Generation with RL-Boosted Control

Authors: Yuzheng Hu, Ryan McKenna, Da Yu, Shanshan Wu, Han Zhao, Zheng Xu, Peter Kairouz
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18232v2

Generating high-quality synthetic text under differential privacy (DP) is critical for training and evaluating language models without compromising user privacy. Prior work on synthesizing DP datasets often fail to preserve key statistical attributes, suffer utility loss from the noise required by DP, and lack fine-grained control over generation. To address these challenges, we make two contributions. First, we introduce a hierarchical framework that decomposes DP synthetic text generation into two subtasks: feature learning and conditional text generation. This design explicitly incorporates learned features into the generation process and simplifies the end-to-end synthesis task. Through systematic ablations, we identify the most effective configuration: a rich tabular schema as feature, a DP tabular synthesizer, and a DP fine-tuned conditional generator, which we term ACTG (Attribute-Conditioned Text Generation). Second, we propose Anchored RL (ARL), a post-training method that improves the instruction-following ability of ACTG for conditional generation. ARL combines RL to boost control with an SFT anchor on best-of-$N$ data to prevent reward hacking. Together, these components form our end-to-end algorithm ACTG-ARL, which advances both the quality of DP synthetic text (+20% MAUVE over prior work) and the control of the conditional generator under strong privacy guarantees.

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### Unbiased Object Detection Beyond Frequency with Visually Prompted Image Synthesis

Authors: Xinhao Cai, Liulei Li, Gensheng Pei, Tao Chen, Jinshan Pan, Yazhou Yao, Wenguan Wang
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18229v3

This paper presents a generation-based debiasing framework for object detection. Prior debiasing methods are often limited by the representation diversity of samples, while naive generative augmentation often preserves the biases it aims to solve. Moreover, our analysis reveals that simply generating more data for rare classes is suboptimal due to two core issues: i) instance frequency is an incomplete proxy for the true data needs of a model, and ii) current layout-to-image synthesis lacks the fidelity and control to generate high-quality, complex scenes. To overcome this, we introduce the representation score (RS) to diagnose representational gaps beyond mere frequency, guiding the creation of new, unbiased layouts. To ensure high-quality synthesis, we replace ambiguous text prompts with a precise visual blueprint and employ a generative alignment strategy, which fosters communication between the detector and generator. Our method significantly narrows the performance gap for underrepresented object groups, \eg, improving large/rare instances by 4.4/3.6 mAP over the baseline, and surpassing prior L2I synthesis models by 15.9 mAP for layout accuracy in generated images.

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### Towards Fast LLM Fine-tuning through Zeroth-Order Optimization with Projected Gradient-Aligned Perturbations

Authors: Zhendong Mi, Qitao Tan, Grace Li Zhang, Zhaozhuo Xu, Geng Yuan, Shaoyi Huang
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18228v1

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) using zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has emerged as a promising alternative to traditional gradient-based methods due to its reduced memory footprint requirement. However, existing ZO methods suffer from high variance in gradient estimation, leading to slow convergence and suboptimal performance on large-scale models. In this work, we propose P-GAP, a fast LLM fine-tuning approach through zeroth-order optimization with Projected Gradient-Aligned Perturbations. Specifically, we first estimate a low-dimensional gradient space and then align perturbations in projected gradients' direction within the space. This approach enables reduced the number of perturbed parameters and decreased variance, therefore accelerated convergence for LLM fine-tuning. Experiments on LLMs show that P-GAP consistently surpasses the baselines, achieving up to 6% increase in accuracy on classification tasks and up to 12% higher accuracy on generation tasks, with up to about 81% less training iterations and 70% less GPU hours. These results demonstrate that P-GAP enables fast, scalable, and resource-efficient ZO LLM fine-tuning.

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### Joint Optimization of Cooperation Efficiency and Communication Covertness for Target Detection with AUVs

Authors: Xueyao Zhang, Bo Yang, Zhiwen Yu, Xuelin Cao, Wei Xiang, Bin Guo, Liang Wang, Billy Pik Lik Lau, George C. Alexandropoulos, Jun Luo, Mérouane Debbah, Zhu Han et al.
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18225v1

This paper investigates underwater cooperative target detection using autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), with a focus on the critical trade-off between cooperation efficiency and communication covertness. To tackle this challenge, we first formulate a joint trajectory and power control optimization problem, and then present an innovative hierarchical action management framework to solve it. According to the hierarchical formulation, at the macro level, the master AUV models the agent selection process as a Markov decision process and deploys the proximal policy optimization algorithm for strategic task allocation. At the micro level, each selected agent's decentralized decision-making is modeled as a partially observable Markov decision process, and a multi-agent proximal policy optimization algorithm is used to dynamically adjust its trajectory and transmission power based on its local observations. Under the centralized training and decentralized execution paradigm, our target detection framework enables adaptive covert cooperation while satisfying both energy and mobility constraints. By comprehensively modeling the considered system, the involved signals and tasks, as well as energy consumption, theoretical insights and practical solutions for the efficient and secure operation of multiple AUVs are provided, offering significant implications for the execution of underwater covert communication tasks.

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### EVER: Edge-Assisted Auto-Verification for Mobile MR-Aided Operation

Authors: Jiangong Chen, Mingyu Zhu, Bin Li
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.MM, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18224v1

Mixed Reality (MR)-aided operation overlays digital objects on the physical world to provide a more immersive and intuitive operation process. A primary challenge is the precise and fast auto-verification of whether the user follows MR guidance by comparing frames before and after each operation. The pre-operation frame includes virtual guiding objects, while the post-operation frame contains physical counterparts. Existing approaches fall short of accounting for the discrepancies between physical and virtual objects due to imperfect 3D modeling or lighting estimation. In this paper, we propose EVER: an edge-assisted auto-verification system for mobile MR-aided operations. Unlike traditional frame-based similarity comparisons, EVER leverages the segmentation model and rendering pipeline adapted to the unique attributes of frames with physical pieces and those with their virtual counterparts; it adopts a threshold-based strategy using Intersection over Union (IoU) metrics for accurate auto-verification. To ensure fast auto-verification and low energy consumption, EVER offloads compute-intensive tasks to an edge server. Through comprehensive evaluations of public datasets and custom datasets with practical implementation, EVER achieves over 90% verification accuracy within 100 milliseconds (significantly faster than average human reaction time of approximately 273 milliseconds), while consuming only minimal additional computational resources and energy compared to a system without auto-verification.

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### The Emergence of Complex Behavior in Large-Scale Ecological Environments

Authors: Joseph Bejjani, Chase Van Amburg, Chengrui Wang, Chloe Huangyuan Su, Sarah M. Pratt, Yasin Mazloumi, Naeem Khoshnevis, Sham M. Kakade, Kianté Brantley, Aaron Walsman
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.MA, cs.AI, cs.NE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18221v3

We explore how physical scale and population size shape the emergence of complex behaviors in open-ended ecological environments. In our setting, agents are unsupervised and have no explicit rewards or learning objectives but instead evolve over time according to reproduction, mutation, and selection. As they act, agents also shape their environment and the population around them in an ongoing dynamic ecology. Our goal is not to optimize a single high-performance policy, but instead to examine how behaviors emerge and evolve across large populations due to natural competition and environmental pressures. We use modern hardware along with a new multi-agent simulator to scale the environment and population to sizes much larger than previously attempted, reaching populations of over 60,000 agents, each with their own evolved neural network policy. We identify various emergent behaviors such as long-range resource extraction, vision-based foraging, and predation that arise under competitive and survival pressures. We examine how sensing modalities and environmental scale affect the emergence of these behaviors and find that some of them appear only in sufficiently large environments and populations, and that larger scales increase the stability and consistency of these emergent behaviors. While there is a rich history of research in evolutionary settings, our scaling results on modern hardware provide promising new directions to explore ecology as an instrument of machine learning in an era of increasingly abundant computational resources and efficient machine frameworks. Experimental code is available at https://github.com/jbejjani2022/ecological-emergent-behavior.

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### DualHash: A Stochastic Primal-Dual Algorithm with Theoretical Guarantee for Deep Hashing

Authors: Luxuan Li, Xiao Wang, Chunfeng Cui
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: math.OC, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18218v2

Deep hashing converts high-dimensional feature vectors into compact binary codes, enabling efficient large-scale retrieval. A fundamental challenge in deep hashing stems from the discrete nature of quantization in generating the codes. W-type regularizations, such as $||z|-1|$, have been proven effective as they encourage variables toward binary values. However, existing methods often directly optimize these regularizations without convergence guarantees. While proximal gradient methods offer a promising solution, the coupling between W-type regularizers and neural network outputs results in composite forms that generally lack closed-form proximal solutions. In this paper, we present a stochastic primal-dual hashing algorithm, referred to as DualHash, that provides rigorous complexity bounds. Using Fenchel duality, we partially transform the nonconvex W-type regularization optimization into the dual space, which results in a proximal operator that admits closed-form solutions. We derive two algorithm instances: a momentum-accelerated version with $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-4})$ complexity and an improved $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-3})$ version using variance reduction. Experiments on three image retrieval databases demonstrate the superior performance of DualHash.

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### The Bias-Variance Tradeoff in Data-Driven Optimization: A Local Misspecification Perspective

Authors: Haixiang Lan, Luofeng Liao, Adam N. Elmachtoub, Christian Kroer, Henry Lam, Haofeng Zhang
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18215v1

Data-driven stochastic optimization is ubiquitous in machine learning and operational decision-making problems. Sample average approximation (SAA) and model-based approaches such as estimate-then-optimize (ETO) or integrated estimation-optimization (IEO) are all popular, with model-based approaches being able to circumvent some of the issues with SAA in complex context-dependent problems. Yet the relative performance of these methods is poorly understood, with most results confined to the dichotomous cases of the model-based approach being either well-specified or misspecified. We develop the first results that allow for a more granular analysis of the relative performance of these methods under a local misspecification setting, which models the scenario where the model-based approach is nearly well-specified. By leveraging tools from contiguity theory in statistics, we show that there is a bias-variance tradeoff between SAA, IEO, and ETO under local misspecification, and that the relative importance of the bias and the variance depends on the degree of local misspecification. Moreover, we derive explicit expressions for the decision bias, which allows us to characterize (un)impactful misspecification directions, and provide further geometric understanding of the variance.

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### VLSU: Mapping the Limits of Joint Multimodal Understanding for AI Safety

Authors: Shruti Palaskar, Leon Gatys, Mona Abdelrahman, Mar Jacobo, Larry Lindsey, Rutika Moharir, Gunnar Lund, Yang Xu, Navid Shiee, Jeffrey Bigham, Charles Maalouf, Joseph Yitan Cheng
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18214v2

Safety evaluation of multimodal foundation models often treats vision and language inputs separately, missing risks from joint interpretation where benign content becomes harmful in combination. Existing approaches also fail to distinguish clearly unsafe content from borderline cases, leading to problematic over-blocking or under-refusal of genuinely harmful content. We present Vision Language Safety Understanding (VLSU), a comprehensive framework to systematically evaluate multimodal safety through fine-grained severity classification and combinatorial analysis across 17 distinct safety patterns. Using a multi-stage pipeline with real-world images and human annotation, we construct a large-scale benchmark of 8,187 samples spanning 15 harm categories. Our evaluation of eleven state-of-the-art models reveals systematic joint understanding failures: while models achieve 90%-plus accuracy on clear unimodal safety signals, performance degrades substantially to 20-55% when joint image-text reasoning is required to determine the safety label. Most critically, 34% of errors in joint image-text safety classification occur despite correct classification of the individual modalities, further demonstrating absent compositional reasoning capabilities. Additionally, we find that models struggle to balance refusing unsafe content while still responding to borderline cases that deserve engagement. For example, we find that instruction framing can reduce the over-blocking rate on borderline content from 62.4% to 10.4% in Gemini-1.5, but only at the cost of under-refusing on unsafe content with refusal rate dropping from 90.8% to 53.9%. Overall, our framework exposes weaknesses in joint image-text understanding and alignment gaps in current models, and provides a critical test bed to enable the next milestones in research on robust vision-language safety.

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### EMA-SAM: Exponential Moving-average for SAM-based PTMC Segmentation

Authors: Maryam Dialameh, Hossein Rajabzadeh, Jung Suk Sim, Hyock Ju Kwon
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18213v1

Papillary thyroid microcarcinoma (PTMC) is increasingly managed with radio-frequency ablation (RFA), yet accurate lesion segmentation in ultrasound videos remains difficult due to low contrast, probe-induced motion, and heat-related artifacts. The recent Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM-2) generalizes well to static images, but its frame-independent design yields unstable predictions and temporal drift in interventional ultrasound. We introduce \textbf{EMA-SAM}, a lightweight extension of SAM-2 that incorporates a confidence-weighted exponential moving average pointer into the memory bank, providing a stable latent prototype of the tumour across frames. This design preserves temporal coherence through probe pressure and bubble occlusion while rapidly adapting once clear evidence reappears. On our curated PTMC-RFA dataset (124 minutes, 13 patients), EMA-SAM improves \emph{maxDice} from 0.82 (SAM-2) to 0.86 and \emph{maxIoU} from 0.72 to 0.76, while reducing false positives by 29\%. On external benchmarks, including VTUS and colonoscopy video polyp datasets, EMA-SAM achieves consistent gains of 2--5 Dice points over SAM-2. Importantly, the EMA pointer adds \textless0.1\% FLOPs, preserving real-time throughput of $\sim$30\,FPS on a single A100 GPU. These results establish EMA-SAM as a robust and efficient framework for stable tumour tracking, bridging the gap between foundation models and the stringent demands of interventional ultrasound. Codes are available here \hyperref(code {https://github.com/mdialameh/EMA-SAM}.

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### A Definition of AGI

Authors: Dan Hendrycks, Dawn Song, Christian Szegedy, Honglak Lee, Yarin Gal, Erik Brynjolfsson, Sharon Li, Andy Zou, Lionel Levine, Bo Han, Jie Fu, Ziwei Liu et al.
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18212v3

The lack of a concrete definition for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) obscures the gap between today's specialized AI and human-level cognition. This paper introduces a quantifiable framework to address this, defining AGI as matching the cognitive versatility and proficiency of a well-educated adult. To operationalize this, we ground our methodology in Cattell-Horn-Carroll theory, the most empirically validated model of human cognition. The framework dissects general intelligence into ten core cognitive domains-including reasoning, memory, and perception-and adapts established human psychometric batteries to evaluate AI systems. Application of this framework reveals a highly "jagged" cognitive profile in contemporary models. While proficient in knowledge-intensive domains, current AI systems have critical deficits in foundational cognitive machinery, particularly long-term memory storage. The resulting AGI scores (e.g., GPT-4 at 27%, GPT-5 at 57%) concretely quantify both rapid progress and the substantial gap remaining before AGI.

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### RESCUE: Retrieval Augmented Secure Code Generation

Authors: Jiahao Shi, Tianyi Zhang
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG, cs.SE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18204v2

Despite recent advances, Large Language Models (LLMs) still generate vulnerable code. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has the potential to enhance LLMs for secure code generation by incorporating external security knowledge. However, the conventional RAG design struggles with the noise of raw security-related documents, and existing retrieval methods overlook the significant security semantics implicitly embedded in task descriptions. To address these issues, we propose \textsc{Rescue}, a new RAG framework for secure code generation with two key innovations. First, we propose a hybrid knowledge base construction method that combines LLM-assisted cluster-then-summarize distillation with program slicing, producing both high-level security guidelines and concise, security-focused code examples. Second, we design a hierarchical multi-faceted retrieval that traverses the constructed knowledge base from top to bottom and integrates multiple security-critical facts at each hierarchical level, ensuring comprehensive and accurate retrieval. We evaluated \textsc{Rescue} on four benchmarks and compared it with five state-of-the-art secure code generation methods on six LLMs. The results demonstrate that \textsc{Rescue} improves the SecurePass@1 metric by an average of 4.8 points, establishing a new state-of-the-art performance for security. Furthermore, we performed in-depth analysis and ablation studies to rigorously validate the effectiveness of individual components in \textsc{Rescue}. Our code is available at https://github.com/steven1518/RESCUE.

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### MARCUS: An Event-Centric NLP Pipeline that generates Character Arcs from Narratives

Authors: Sriharsh Bhyravajjula, Ujwal Narayan, Manish Shrivastava
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18201v1

Character arcs are important theoretical devices employed in literary studies to understand character journeys, identify tropes across literary genres, and establish similarities between narratives. This work addresses the novel task of computationally generating event-centric, relation-based character arcs from narratives. Providing a quantitative representation for arcs brings tangibility to a theoretical concept and paves the way for subsequent applications. We present MARCUS (Modelling Arcs for Understanding Stories), an NLP pipeline that extracts events, participant characters, implied emotion, and sentiment to model inter-character relations. MARCUS tracks and aggregates these relations across the narrative to generate character arcs as graphical plots. We generate character arcs from two extended fantasy series, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. We evaluate our approach before outlining existing challenges, suggesting applications of our pipeline, and discussing future work.

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### Contrastive Decoding Mitigates Score Range Bias in LLM-as-a-Judge

Authors: Yoshinari Fujinuma
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18196v2

Large Language Models (LLMs) are commonly used as evaluators in various applications, but the reliability of the outcomes remains a challenge. One such challenge is using LLMs-as-judges for direct assessment, i.e., assigning scores from a specified range without any references. Focusing on summarization, we first show that this challenge stems from LLM judge outputs being associated with score range bias, i.e., LLM judge outputs are highly sensitive to pre-defined score ranges. We also show that similar biases exist among models from the same family. We then mitigate this bias through contrastive decoding, achieving up to 11.7% relative improvement on average in Spearman correlation with human judgments across different score ranges.

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### Ensemble based Closed-Loop Optimal Control using Physics-Informed Neural Networks

Authors: Jostein Barry-Straume, Adwait D. Verulkar, Arash Sarshar, Andrey A. Popov, Adrian Sandu
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.LG, math.OC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18195v1

The objective of designing a control system is to steer a dynamical system with a control signal, guiding it to exhibit the desired behavior. The Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) partial differential equation offers a framework for optimal control system design. However, numerical solutions to this equation are computationally intensive, and analytical solutions are frequently unavailable. Knowledge-guided machine learning methodologies, such as physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), offer new alternative approaches that can alleviate the difficulties of solving the HJB equation numerically. This work presents a multistage ensemble framework to learn the optimal cost-to-go, and subsequently the corresponding optimal control signal, through the HJB equation. Prior PINN-based approaches rely on a stabilizing the HJB enforcement during training. Our framework does not use stabilizer terms and offers a means of controlling the nonlinear system, via either a singular learned control signal or an ensemble control signal policy. Success is demonstrated in closed-loop control, using both ensemble- and singular-control, of a steady-state time-invariant two-state continuous nonlinear system with an infinite time horizon, accounting of noisy, perturbed system states and varying initial conditions.

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### FST.ai 2.0: An Explainable AI Ecosystem for Fair, Fast, and Inclusive Decision-Making in Olympic and Paralympic Taekwondo

Authors: Keivan Shariatmadar, Ahmad Osman, Ramin Ray, Kisam Kim
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18193v2

Fair, transparent, and explainable decision-making remains a critical challenge in Olympic and Paralympic combat sports. This paper presents \emph{FST.ai 2.0}, an explainable AI ecosystem designed to support referees, coaches, and athletes in real time during Taekwondo competitions and training. The system integrates {pose-based action recognition} using graph convolutional networks (GCNs), {epistemic uncertainty modeling} through credal sets, and {explainability overlays} for visual decision support. A set of {interactive dashboards} enables human--AI collaboration in referee evaluation, athlete performance analysis, and Para-Taekwondo classification. Beyond automated scoring, FST.ai~2.0 incorporates modules for referee training, fairness monitoring, and policy-level analytics within the World Taekwondo ecosystem. Experimental validation on competition data demonstrates an {85\% reduction in decision review time} and {93\% referee trust} in AI-assisted decisions. The framework thus establishes a transparent and extensible pipeline for trustworthy, data-driven officiating and athlete assessment. By bridging real-time perception, explainable inference, and governance-aware design, FST.ai~2.0 represents a step toward equitable, accountable, and human-aligned AI in sports.

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### Joint Estimation of Piano Dynamics and Metrical Structure with a Multi-task Multi-Scale Network

Authors: Zhanhong He, Hanyu Meng, David Huang, Roberto Togneri
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: eess.AS, cs.LG, cs.SD
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18190v2

Estimating piano dynamic from audio recordings is a fundamental challenge in computational music analysis. In this paper, we propose an efficient multi-task network that jointly predicts dynamic levels, change points, beats, and downbeats from a shared latent representation. These four targets form the metrical structure of dynamics in the music score. Inspired by recent vocal dynamic research, we use a multi-scale network as the backbone, which takes Bark-scale specific loudness as the input feature. Compared to log-Mel as input, this reduces model size from 14.7 M to 0.5 M, enabling long sequential input. We use a 60-second audio length in audio segmentation, which doubled the length of beat tracking commonly used. Evaluated on the public MazurkaBL dataset, our model achieves state-of-the-art results across all tasks. This work sets a new benchmark for piano dynamic estimation and delivers a powerful and compact tool, paving the way for large-scale, resource-efficient analysis of musical expression.

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### A Generalizable Light Transport 3D Embedding for Global Illumination

Authors: Bing Xu, Mukund Varma T, Cheng Wang, Tzu-Mao Li, Lifan Wu, Bartlomiej Wronski, Ravi Ramamoorthi, Marco Salvi
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.GR, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18189v2

Global illumination (GI) is essential for realistic rendering but remains computationally expensive due to the complexity of simulating indirect light transport. Recent neural methods have mainly relied on per-scene optimization, sometimes extended to handle changes in camera or geometry. Efforts toward cross-scene generalization have largely stayed in 2D screen space, such as neural denoising or G-buffer based GI prediction, which often suffer from view inconsistency and limited spatial understanding. We propose a generalizable 3D light transport embedding that approximates global illumination directly from 3D scene configurations, without using rasterized or path-traced cues. Each scene is represented as a point cloud with geometric and material features. A scalable transformer models global point-to-point interactions to encode these features into neural primitives. At render time, each query point retrieves nearby primitives via nearest-neighbor search and aggregates their latent features through cross-attention to predict the desired rendering quantity. We demonstrate results on diffuse global illumination prediction across diverse indoor scenes with varying layouts, geometry, and materials. The embedding trained for irradiance estimation can be quickly adapted to new rendering tasks with limited fine-tuning. We also present preliminary results for spatial-directional radiance field estimation for glossy materials and show how the normalized field can accelerate unbiased path guiding. This approach highlights a path toward integrating learned priors into rendering pipelines without explicit ray-traced illumination cues.

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### RadDiagSeg-M: A Vision Language Model for Joint Diagnosis and Multi-Target Segmentation in Radiology

Authors: Chengrun Li, Corentin Royer, Haozhe Luo, Bastian Wittmann, Xia Li, Ibrahim Hamamci, Sezgin Er, Anjany Sekuboyina, Bjoern Menze
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18188v1

Most current medical vision language models struggle to jointly generate diagnostic text and pixel-level segmentation masks in response to complex visual questions. This represents a major limitation towards clinical application, as assistive systems that fail to provide both modalities simultaneously offer limited value to medical practitioners. To alleviate this limitation, we first introduce RadDiagSeg-D, a dataset combining abnormality detection, diagnosis, and multi-target segmentation into a unified and hierarchical task. RadDiagSeg-D covers multiple imaging modalities and is precisely designed to support the development of models that produce descriptive text and corresponding segmentation masks in tandem. Subsequently, we leverage the dataset to propose a novel vision-language model, RadDiagSeg-M, capable of joint abnormality detection, diagnosis, and flexible segmentation. RadDiagSeg-M provides highly informative and clinically useful outputs, effectively addressing the need to enrich contextual information for assistive diagnosis. Finally, we benchmark RadDiagSeg-M and showcase its strong performance across all components involved in the task of multi-target text-and-mask generation, establishing a robust and competitive baseline.

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### VelocityNet: Real-Time Crowd Anomaly Detection via Person-Specific Velocity Analysis

Authors: Fatima AlGhamdi, Omar Alharbi, Abdullah Aldwyish, Raied Aljadaany, Muhammad Kamran J Khan, Huda Alamri
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18187v1

Detecting anomalies in crowded scenes is challenging due to severe inter-person occlusions and highly dynamic, context-dependent motion patterns. Existing approaches often struggle to adapt to varying crowd densities and lack interpretable anomaly indicators. To address these limitations, we introduce VelocityNet, a dual-pipeline framework that combines head detection and dense optical flow to extract person-specific velocities. Hierarchical clustering categorizes these velocities into semantic motion classes (halt, slow, normal, and fast), and a percentile-based anomaly scoring system measures deviations from learned normal patterns. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in real-time detection of diverse anomalous motion patterns within densely crowded environments.

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### ActivationReasoning: Logical Reasoning in Latent Activation Spaces

Authors: Lukas Helff, Ruben Härle, Wolfgang Stammer, Felix Friedrich, Manuel Brack, Antonia Wüst, Hikaru Shindo, Patrick Schramowski, Kristian Kersting
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18184v3

Large language models (LLMs) excel at generating fluent text, but their internal reasoning remains opaque and difficult to control. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) make hidden activations more interpretable by exposing latent features that often align with human concepts. Yet, these features are fragile and passive, offering no mechanism for systematic reasoning or model control. To address this, we introduce ActivationReasoning (AR), a framework that embeds explicit logical reasoning into the latent space of LLMs. It proceeds in three stages: (1) Finding latent representations, first latent concept representations are identified (e.g., via SAEs) and organized into a dictionary; (2) Activating propositions, at inference time AR detects activating concepts and maps them to logical propositions; and (3)Logical reasoning, applying logical rules over these propositions to infer higher-order structures, compose new concepts, and steer model behavior. We evaluate AR on multi-hop reasoning (PrOntoQA), abstraction and robustness to indirect concept cues (Rail2Country), reasoning over natural and diverse language (ProverQA), and context-sensitive safety (BeaverTails). Across all tasks, AR scales robustly with reasoning complexity, generalizes to abstract and context-sensitive tasks, and transfers across model backbones. These results demonstrate that grounding logical structure in latent activations not only improves transparency but also enables structured reasoning, reliable control, and alignment with desired behaviors, providing a path toward more reliable and auditable AI.

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### NashPG: A Policy Gradient Method with Iteratively Refined Regularization for Finding Nash Equilibria

Authors: Eason Yu, Tzu Hao Liu, Clément L. Canonne, Yunke Wang, Chang Xu, Nguyen H. Tran, Stefano V. Albrecht
Published: 2025-10-21
Categories: cs.LG, cs.GT
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18183v3

Finding Nash equilibria in two-player zero-sum imperfect-information games remains a central challenge in multi-agent reinforcement learning. Recent multi-round regularization methods offer a promising direction, yet existing approaches either require full enumeration of the game tree or rely on non-policy-gradient inner solvers that underperform in practice, leaving a scalable policy-gradient-based solution open. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-round regularization procedure and show that it guarantees strictly monotonic reduction in Bregman divergence to Nash equilibria and eventual convergence to one in two-player zero-sum extensive-form games. Guided by this framework, we develop a practical algorithm, Nash Policy Gradient (NashPG), which places the regularization directly in the policy optimization objective and is implemented using standard policy gradient methods. Empirically, NashPG achieves comparable or lower exploitability than prior model-free methods on classic benchmark games and scales to large domains such as Battleship and No-Limit Texas Hold'em, where it attains higher average payoff in head-to-head play.

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### KP-Agent: Keyword Pruning in Sponsored Search Advertising via LLM-Powered Contextual Bandits

Authors: Hou-Wan Long, Yicheng Song, Zidong Wang, Tianshu Sun
Published: 2025-10-20
Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05257v1

Sponsored search advertising (SSA) requires advertisers to constantly adjust keyword strategies. While bid adjustment and keyword generation are well-studied, keyword pruning-refining keyword sets to enhance campaign performance-remains under-explored. This paper addresses critical inefficiencies in current practices as evidenced by a dataset containing 0.5 million SSA records from a pharmaceutical advertiser on search engine Meituan, China's largest delivery platform. We propose KP-Agent, an LLM agentic system with domain tool set and a memory module. By modeling keyword pruning within a contextual bandit framework, KP-Agent generates code snippets to refine keyword sets through reinforcement learning. Experiments show KP-Agent improves cumulative profit by up to 49.28% over baselines.

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### Naiad: Novel Agentic Intelligent Autonomous System for Inland Water Monitoring

Authors: Eirini Baltzi, Tilemachos Moumouris, Athena Psalta, Vasileios Tsironis, Konstantinos Karantzalos
Published: 2025-10-20
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CV, cs.IR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05256v1

Inland water monitoring is vital for safeguarding public health and ecosystems, enabling timely interventions to mitigate risks. Existing methods often address isolated sub-problems such as cyanobacteria, chlorophyll, or other quality indicators separately. NAIAD introduces an agentic AI assistant that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) and external analytical tools to deliver a holistic solution for inland water monitoring using Earth Observation (EO) data. Designed for both experts and non-experts, NAIAD provides a single-prompt interface that translates natural-language queries into actionable insights. Through Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), LLM reasoning, external tool orchestration, computational graph execution, and agentic reflection, it retrieves and synthesizes knowledge from curated sources to produce tailored reports. The system integrates diverse tools for weather data, Sentinel-2 imagery, remote-sensing index computation (e.g., NDCI), chlorophyll-a estimation, and established platforms such as CyFi. Performance is evaluated using correctness and relevancy metrics, achieving over 77% and 85% respectively on a dedicated benchmark covering multiple user-expertise levels. Preliminary results show strong adaptability and robustness across query types. An ablation study on LLM backbones further highlights Gemma 3 (27B) and Qwen 2.5 (14B) as offering the best balance between computational efficiency and reasoning performance.

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### DynaKV: Enabling Accurate and Efficient Long-Sequence LLM Decoding on Smartphones

Authors: Tuowei Wang, Minxing Huang, Fengzu Li, Ligeng Chen, Jinrui Zhang, Ju Ren
Published: 2025-10-20
Categories: cs.DC, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07427v1

As the demand for human-like reasoning, multi-turn dialogues, and long-form responses grows, large language models (LLMs) are increasingly expected to support efficient and effective long-sequence decoding. However, due to limited DRAM capacity, long-seuqence LLM decoding on smartphones is constrained by the key-value cache (KVCache), whose memory footprint increases linearly with sequence length. Retrieval-based methods mitigate DRAM pressure by offloading KVCache to flash and retrieving query-relevant entries through cluster-based indexing. Unfortunately, as decoding progresses, KVCache distribution shifts render static or local cluster updates progressively misaligned, excluding essential entries or fetching redundant ones. These issues are further exacerbated by smartphone-specific limitations in bandwidth, IOPS, and memory capacity. We propose DynaKV, the first adaptive KVCache management approach that jointly addresses accuracy and efficiency for long-sequence decoding on smartphones. DynaKV integrates three key techniques: (1) Migration-Free Cluster Adaptation, which adaptively splits clusters during retrieval without incurring additional transfers; (2) Continuity-Centric Flash Management, which co-locates correlated entries and clusters and employs a dual-head layout for efficient updates; and (3) Memory-Efficient Cache Design, which virtualizes cache space across DRAM and flash and extends replacement policies to align with cluster-level access patterns. Evaluations demonstrate that DynaKV improves retrieval accuracy and reduces end-to-end latency compared to state-of-the-art solutions, achieving average gains of $1.38\times$ in accuracy and $1.47\times$ speedups. Furthermore, the insights of DynaKV naturally extend to other long-context workloads and multi-tier memory hierarchies, underscoring its broader applicability.

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### Network and Systems Performance Characterization of MCP-Enabled LLM Agents

Authors: Zihao Ding, Mufeng Zhu, Yao Liu
Published: 2025-10-20
Categories: cs.DC, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.NI, cs.SE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07426v1

Model Context Protocol (MCP) has recently gained increased attention within the AI community for providing a standardized way for large language models (LLMs) to interact with external tools and services, significantly enhancing their capabilities. However, the inclusion of extensive contextual information, including system prompts, MCP tool definitions, and context histories, in MCP-enabled LLM interactions, dramatically inflates token usage. Given that LLM providers charge based on tokens, these expanded contexts can quickly escalate monetary costs and increase the computational load on LLM services. This paper presents a comprehensive measurement-based analysis of MCP-enabled interactions with LLMs, revealing trade-offs between capability, performance, and cost. We explore how different LLM models and MCP configurations impact key performance metrics such as token efficiency, monetary cost, task completion times, and task success rates, and suggest potential optimizations, including enabling parallel tool calls and implementing robust task abort mechanisms. These findings provide useful insights for developing more efficient, robust, and cost-effective MCP-enabled workflows.

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### An Evaluation of LLMs Inference on Popular Single-board Computers

Authors: Tung, Nguyen, Tuyen Nguyen
Published: 2025-10-20
Categories: cs.DC, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07425v1

The growing demand for on-device large language model (LLM) inference is driving interest in deploying lightweight, cost-effective AI solutions on edge hardware. Single-board computers (SBCs) such as the Raspberry Pi and Orange Pi offer a promising platform for localized, privacy-preserving inference-but remain underexplored in the context of LLM workloads. In this work, we benchmark the performance of 25 quantized open-source LLMs across three SBCs-Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi 5, and Orange Pi 5 Pro-using two inference runtimes: Ollama and Llamafile. We evaluate generation throughput, memory usage, and power consumption under varying CPU configurations, using multiple prompt types to simulate realistic workloads. Our results show that SBCs can reliably support models up to 1.5B parameters, with Llamafile achieving up to 4x higher throughput and 30-40% lower power usage than Ollama. We identify architecture-specific bottlenecks, highlight runtime-level trade-offs, and provide practical deployment recommendations. This study offers the first broad evaluation of LLM inference on SBCs, bridging the gap between high-performance language models and affordable edge computing.

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### Sorting by Strip Swaps is NP-Hard

Authors: Swapnoneel Roy, Asai Asaithambi, Debajyoti Mukhopadhyay
Published: 2025-10-20
Categories: cs.DS, cs.AI, cs.CC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00015v1

We show that \emph{Sorting by Strip Swaps} (SbSS) is NP-hard by a polynomial reduction of \emph{Block Sorting}. The key idea is a local gadget, a \emph{cage}, that replaces every decreasing adjacency $(a_i,a_{i+1})$ by a guarded triple $a_i,m_i,a_{i+1}$ enclosed by guards $L_i,U_i$, so the only decreasing adjacencies are the two inside the cage. Small \emph{hinge} gadgets couple adjacent cages that share an element and enforce that a strip swap that removes exactly two adjacencies corresponds bijectively to a block move that removes exactly one decreasing adjacency in the source permutation. This yields a clean equivalence between exact SbSS schedules and perfect block schedules, establishing NP-hardness.

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### Using machine learning methods to predict cognitive age from psychophysiological tests

Authors: Daria D. Tyurina, Sergey V. Stasenko, Konstantin V. Lushnikov, Maria V. Vedunova
Published: 2025-10-20
Categories: q-bio.NC, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00013v1

This study introduces a novel method for predicting cognitive age using psychophysiological tests. To determine cognitive age, subjects were asked to complete a series of psychological tests measuring various cognitive functions, including reaction time and cognitive conflict, short-term memory, verbal functions, and color and spatial perception. Based on the tests completed, the average completion time, proportion of correct answers, average absolute delta of the color campimetry test, number of guessed words in the Münsterberg matrix, and other parameters were calculated for each subject. The obtained characteristics of the subjects were preprocessed and used to train a machine learning algorithm implementing a regression task for predicting a person's cognitive age. These findings contribute to the field of remote screening using mobile devices for human health for diagnosing and monitoring cognitive aging.

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### An Enhanced Dual Transformer Contrastive Network for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Authors: Phuong Q. Dao, Mark Roantree, Vuong M. Ngo
Published: 2025-10-20
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.23617v1

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) seeks to understand human emotions by jointly analyzing data from multiple modalities typically text and images offering a richer and more accurate interpretation than unimodal approaches. In this paper, we first propose BERT-ViT-EF, a novel model that combines powerful Transformer-based encoders BERT for textual input and ViT for visual input through an early fusion strategy. This approach facilitates deeper cross-modal interactions and more effective joint representation learning. To further enhance the model's capability, we propose an extension called the Dual Transformer Contrastive Network (DTCN), which builds upon BERT-ViT-EF. DTCN incorporates an additional Transformer encoder layer after BERT to refine textual context (before fusion) and employs contrastive learning to align text and image representations, fostering robust multimodal feature learning. Empirical results on two widely used MSA benchmarks MVSA-Single and TumEmo demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. DTCN achieves best accuracy (78.4%) and F1-score (78.3%) on TumEmo, and delivers competitive performance on MVSA-Single, with 76.6% accuracy and 75.9% F1-score. These improvements highlight the benefits of early fusion and deeper contextual modeling in Transformer-based multimodal sentiment analysis.

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### It Takes Two to Tango: Two Parallel Samplers Improve Quality in Diffusion Models for Limited Steps

Authors: Pedro Cisneros-Velarde
Published: 2025-10-20
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21802v1

We consider the situation where we have a limited number of denoising steps, i.e., of evaluations of a diffusion model. We show that two parallel processors or samplers under such limitation can improve the quality of the sampled image. Particularly, the two samplers make denoising steps at successive times, and their information is appropriately integrated in the latent image. Remarkably, our method is simple both conceptually and to implement: it is plug-&-play, model agnostic, and does not require any additional fine-tuning or external models. We test our method with both automated and human evaluations for different diffusion models. We also show that a naive integration of the information from the two samplers lowers sample quality. Finally, we find that adding more parallel samplers does not necessarily improve sample quality.

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### Morphology-Aware KOA Classification: Integrating Graph Priors with Vision Models

Authors: Marouane Tliba, Mohamed Amine Kerkouri, Yassine Nasser, Nour Aburaed, Aladine Chetouani, Ulas Bagci, Rachid Jennane
Published: 2025-10-20
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21801v1

Knee osteoarthritis (KOA) diagnosis from radiographs remains challenging due to the subtle morphological details that standard deep learning models struggle to capture effectively. We propose a novel multimodal framework that combines anatomical structure with radiographic features by integrating a morphological graph representation - derived from Segment Anything Model (SAM) segmentations - with a vision encoder. Our approach enforces alignment between geometry-informed graph embeddings and radiographic features through mutual information maximization, significantly improving KOA classification accuracy. By constructing graphs from anatomical features, we introduce explicit morphological priors that mirror clinical assessment criteria, enriching the feature space and enhancing the model's inductive bias. Experiments on the Osteoarthritis Initiative dataset demonstrate that our approach surpasses single-modality baselines by up to 10\% in accuracy (reaching nearly 80\%), while outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods by 8\% in accuracy and 11\% in F1 score. These results underscore the critical importance of incorporating anatomical structure into radiographic analysis for accurate KOA severity grading.

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### MARS-M: When Variance Reduction Meets Matrices

Authors: Yifeng Liu, Angela Yuan, Quanquan Gu
Published: 2025-10-20
Categories: cs.LG, math.OC, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21800v3

Matrix-based preconditioned optimizers, such as Muon, have recently been shown to be more efficient than scalar-based optimizers for training large-scale neural networks, including large language models (LLMs). Recent benchmark studies of LLM pretraining optimizers have demonstrated that variance-reduction techniques such as MARS can substantially speed up training compared with standard optimizers that do not employ variance reduction. In this paper, we introduce MARS-M, a new optimizer that integrates MARS-style variance reduction with Muon. Under standard regularity conditions, we prove that MARS-M converges to a first-order stationary point at a rate of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{-1/3})$, improving upon the $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{-1/4})$ rate attained by Muon. Empirical results on language modeling and computer vision tasks demonstrate that MARS-M consistently yields lower losses and improved performance across various downstream benchmarks. The implementation of MARS-M is available at https://github.com/AGI-Arena/MARS/tree/main/MARS_M.

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### An Evaluation of Hybrid Annotation Workflows on High-Ambiguity Spatiotemporal Video Footage

Authors: Juan Gutiérrez, Victor Gutiérrez, Ángel Mora, Silvia Rodriguez, José Luis Blanco
Published: 2025-10-20
Categories: cs.CV, cs.HC, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21798v2

Manual annotation remains the gold standard for high-quality, dense temporal video datasets, yet it is inherently time-consuming. Vision-language models can aid human annotators and expedite this process. We report on the impact of automatic Pre-Annotations from a tuned encoder on a Human-in-the-Loop labeling workflow for video footage. Quantitative analysis in a study of a single-iteration test involving 18 volunteers demonstrates that our workflow reduced annotation time by 35% for the majority (72%) of the participants. Beyond efficiency, we provide a rigorous framework for benchmarking AI-assisted workflows that quantifies trade-offs between algorithmic speed and the integrity of human verification.

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### Mitigating Sample-Level Imbalance via Probabilistic Separation for Adaptive Multimodal Fusion

Authors: Zhiwen Yu, Zhaocheng Liu, Xiaoqing Liu, Huanqiang Zeng, C. L. Philip Chen
Published: 2025-10-20
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.SD, eess.AS
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21797v4

Multimodal learning faces modality imbalance, where dominant modalities suppress weaker ones due to inconsistent convergence rates. Existing static or heuristic methods overlook sample-level variations in prediction bias and fail to isolate low-quality outlier samples. To address this, we propose a novel framework to quantitatively diagnose and dynamically mitigate modality imbalance at the sample level. We first introduce a Modality Gap metric to quantify prediction discrepancies between unimodal branches. Empirical analysis reveals a distinct bimodal distribution, reflecting the natural coexistence of balanced and imbalanced sample subgroups. We then employ a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to model this gap distribution, leveraging Bayesian posterior probabilities for probabilistic soft separation of subgroups. Next, we construct a two-stage training framework comprising a Warm-up stage and an Adaptive Training stage. In the Adaptive Training stage, a GMM-guided Adaptive Loss dynamically reallocates optimization priorities, imposing stronger modality alignment penalties on imbalanced samples while prioritizing multimodal fusion for balanced ones. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, fine-tuning on a high-quality balanced subset filtered by the GMM serves as an effective data purification strategy.

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### A Physics-Guided AI Cascaded Corrector Model Significantly Extends Madden-Julian Oscillation Prediction Skill

Authors: Xiao Zhou, Yuze Sun, Jie Wu, Xiaomeng Huang
Published: 2025-10-20
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, physics.ao-ph
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21796v1

The Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) is an important driver of global weather and climate extremes, but its prediction in operational dynamical models remains challenging, with skillful forecasts typically limited to 3-4 weeks. Here, we introduce a novel deep learning framework, the Physics-guided Cascaded Corrector for MJO (PCC-MJO), which acts as a universal post-processor to correct MJO forecasts from dynamical models. This two-stage model first employs a physics-informed 3D U-Net to correct spatial-temporal field errors, then refines the MJO's RMM index using an LSTM optimized for forecast skill. When applied to three different operational forecasts from CMA, ECMWF and NCEP, our unified framework consistently extends the skillful forecast range (bivariate correlation > 0.5) by 2-8 days. Crucially, the model effectively mitigates the "Maritime Continent barrier", enabling more realistic eastward propagation and amplitude. Explainable AI analysis quantitatively confirms that the model's decision-making is spatially congruent with observed MJO dynamics (correlation > 0.93), demonstrating that it learns physically meaningful features rather than statistical fittings. Our work provides a promising physically consistent, computationally efficient, and highly generalizable pathway to break through longstanding barriers in subseasonal forecasting.

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### Xihe: Scalable Zero-Shot Time Series Learner Via Hierarchical Interleaved Block Attention

Authors: Yinbo Sun, Yuchen Fang, Zhibo Zhu, Jia Li, Yu Liu, Qiwen Deng, Jun Zhou, Hang Yu, Xingyu Lu, Lintao Ma
Published: 2025-10-20
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21795v1

The rapid advancement of time series foundation models (TSFMs) has been propelled by migrating architectures from language models. While existing TSFMs demonstrate impressive performance, their direct adoption of cross-domain architectures constrains effective capture of multiscale temporal dependencies inherent to time series data. This limitation becomes particularly pronounced during zero-shot transfer across datasets with divergent underlying patterns and sampling strategies. To address these challenges, we propose Hierarchical Interleaved Block Attention (HIBA) which employs hierarchical inter- and intra-block sparse attention to effectively capture multi-scale dependencies. Intra-block attention facilitates local information exchange, and inter-block attention operates across blocks to capture global temporal pattern interaction and dynamic evolution. Leveraging the HIBA architecture, we introduce Xihe, a scalable TSFM family spanning from an ultra-efficient 9.5M parameter configuration to high-capacity 1.5B variant. Evaluated on the comprehensive GIFT-Eval benchmark, our most compact Xihe-tiny model (9.5M) surpasses the majority of contemporary TSFMs, demonstrating remarkable parameter efficiency. More impressively, Xihe-max (1.5B) establishes new state-of-the-art zero-shot performance, surpassing previous best results by a substantial margin. This consistent performance excellence across the entire parameter spectrum provides compelling evidence for the exceptional generalization capabilities and architectural superiority of HIBA.

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