# Research Papers — 2025-11 · bundle page 128 of 197

> Full-text markdown of papers #6351–6400 of 9830 published in 2025-11, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 9830-paper 2025-11 archive (50 papers per file).

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### WMPO: World Model-based Policy Optimization for Vision-Language-Action Models

Authors: Fangqi Zhu, Zhengyang Yan, Zicong Hong, Quanxin Shou, Xiao Ma, Song Guo
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09515v1

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for general-purpose robotic manipulation, but their reliance on expert demonstrations limits their ability to learn from failures and perform self-corrections. Reinforcement learning (RL) addresses these through self-improving interactions with the physical environment, but suffers from high sample complexity on real robots. We introduce World-Model-based Policy Optimization (WMPO), a principled framework for on-policy VLA RL without interacting with the real environment. In contrast to widely used latent world models, WMPO focuses on pixel-based predictions that align the "imagined" trajectories with the VLA features pretrained with web-scale images. Crucially, WMPO enables the policy to perform on-policy GRPO that provides stronger performance than the often-used off-policy methods. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-robot settings demonstrate that WMPO (i) substantially improves sample efficiency, (ii) achieves stronger overall performance, (iii) exhibits emergent behaviors such as self-correction, and (iv) demonstrates robust generalization and lifelong learning capabilities.

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### GenePheno: Interpretable Gene Knockout-Induced Phenotype Abnormality Prediction from Gene Sequences

Authors: Jingquan Yan, Yuwei Miao, Lei Yu, Yuzhi Guo, Xue Xiao, Lin Xu, Junzhou Huang
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09512v2

Exploring how genetic sequences shape phenotypes is a fundamental challenge in biology and a key step toward scalable, hypothesis-driven experimentation. The task is complicated by the large modality gap between sequences and phenotypes, as well as the pleiotropic nature of gene-phenotype relationships. Existing sequence-based efforts focus on the degree to which variants of specific genes alter a limited set of phenotypes, while general gene knockout induced phenotype abnormality prediction methods heavily rely on curated genetic information as inputs, which limits scalability and generalizability. As a result, the task of broadly predicting the presence of multiple phenotype abnormalities under gene knockout directly from gene sequences remains underexplored. We introduce GenePheno, the first interpretable multi-label prediction framework that predicts knockout induced phenotypic abnormalities from gene sequences. GenePheno employs a contrastive multi-label learning objective that captures inter-phenotype correlations, complemented by an exclusive regularization that enforces biological consistency. It further incorporates a gene function bottleneck layer, offering human interpretable concepts that reflect functional mechanisms behind phenotype formation. To support progress in this area, we curate four datasets with canonical gene sequences as input and multi-label phenotypic abnormalities induced by gene knockouts as targets. Across these datasets, GenePheno achieves state-of-the-art gene-centric $F_{\text{max}}$ and phenotype-centric AUC, and case studies demonstrate its ability to reveal gene functional mechanisms.

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### Quasi-Newton Compatible Actor-Critic for Deterministic Policies

Authors: Arash Bahari Kordabad, Dean Brandner, Sebastien Gros, Sergio Lucia, Sadegh Soudjani
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.LG, eess.SY, math.OC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09509v1

In this paper, we propose a second-order deterministic actor-critic framework in reinforcement learning that extends the classical deterministic policy gradient method to exploit curvature information of the performance function. Building on the concept of compatible function approximation for the critic, we introduce a quadratic critic that simultaneously preserves the true policy gradient and an approximation of the performance Hessian. A least-squares temporal difference learning scheme is then developed to estimate the quadratic critic parameters efficiently. This construction enables a quasi-Newton actor update using information learned by the critic, yielding faster convergence compared to first-order methods. The proposed approach is general and applicable to any differentiable policy class. Numerical examples demonstrate that the method achieves improved convergence and performance over standard deterministic actor-critic baselines.

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### DreamPose3D: Hallucinative Diffusion with Prompt Learning for 3D Human Pose Estimation

Authors: Jerrin Bright, Yuhao Chen, John S. Zelek
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09502v1

Accurate 3D human pose estimation remains a critical yet unresolved challenge, requiring both temporal coherence across frames and fine-grained modeling of joint relationships. However, most existing methods rely solely on geometric cues and predict each 3D pose independently, which limits their ability to resolve ambiguous motions and generalize to real-world scenarios. Inspired by how humans understand and anticipate motion, we introduce DreamPose3D, a diffusion-based framework that combines action-aware reasoning with temporal imagination for 3D pose estimation. DreamPose3D dynamically conditions the denoising process using task-relevant action prompts extracted from 2D pose sequences, capturing high-level intent. To model the structural relationships between joints effectively, we introduce a representation encoder that incorporates kinematic joint affinity into the attention mechanism. Finally, a hallucinative pose decoder predicts temporally coherent 3D pose sequences during training, simulating how humans mentally reconstruct motion trajectories to resolve ambiguity in perception. Extensive experiments on benchmarked Human3.6M and MPI-3DHP datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across all metrics. To further validate DreamPose3D's robustness, we tested it on a broadcast baseball dataset, where it demonstrated strong performance despite ambiguous and noisy 2D inputs, effectively handling temporal consistency and intent-driven motion variations.

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### Distributional Shrinkage I: Universal Denoiser Beyond Tweedie's Formula

Authors: Tengyuan Liang
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, math.ST, stat.ME
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09500v4

We study the problem of denoising when only the noise level is known, not the noise distribution. Independent noise $Z$ corrupts a signal $X$, yielding the observation $Y = X + σZ$ with known $σ\in (0,1)$. We propose \emph{universal} denoisers, agnostic to both signal and noise distributions, that recover the signal distribution $P_X$ from $P_Y$. When the focus is on distributional recovery of $P_X$ rather than on individual realizations of $X$, our denoisers achieve order-of-magnitude improvements over the Bayes-optimal denoiser derived from Tweedie's formula, which achieves $O(σ^2)$ accuracy. They shrink $P_Y$ toward $P_X$ with $O(σ^4)$ and $O(σ^6)$ accuracy in matching generalized moments and densities. Drawing on optimal transport theory, our denoisers approximate the Monge--Ampère equation with higher-order accuracy and can be implemented efficiently via score matching. Let $q$ denote the density of $P_Y$. For distributional denoising, we propose replacing the Bayes-optimal denoiser, $$\mathbf{T}^*(y) = y + σ^2 \nabla \log q(y),$$ with denoisers exhibiting less-aggressive distributional shrinkage, $$\mathbf{T}_1(y) = y + \frac{σ^2}{2} \nabla \log q(y),$$ $$\mathbf{T}_2(y) = y + \frac{σ^2}{2} \nabla \log q(y) - \frac{σ^4}{8} \nabla \!\left( \frac{1}{2} \| \nabla \log q(y) \|^2 + \nabla \cdot \nabla \log q(y) \right)\!.$$

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### Distributional Shrinkage I: Universal Denoisers in Multi-Dimensions

Authors: Tengyuan Liang
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, math.ST
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09500v1

We revisit the problem of denoising from noisy measurements where only the noise level is known, not the noise distribution. In multi-dimensions, independent noise $Z$ corrupts the signal $X$, resulting in the noisy measurement $Y = X + σZ$, where $σ\in (0, 1)$ is a known noise level. Our goal is to recover the underlying signal distribution $P_X$ from denoising $P_Y$. We propose and analyze universal denoisers that are agnostic to a wide range of signal and noise distributions. Our distributional denoisers offer order-of-magnitude improvements over the Bayes-optimal denoiser derived from Tweedie's formula, if the focus is on the entire distribution $P_X$ rather than on individual realizations of $X$. Our denoisers shrink $P_Y$ toward $P_X$ optimally, achieving $O(σ^4)$ and $O(σ^6)$ accuracy in matching generalized moments and density functions. Inspired by optimal transport theory, the proposed denoisers are optimal in approximating the Monge-Ampère equation with higher-order accuracy, and can be implemented efficiently via score matching. Let $q$ represent the density of $P_Y$; for optimal distributional denoising, we recommend replacing the Bayes-optimal denoiser, \( \mathbf{T}^*(y) = y + σ^2 \nabla \log q(y), \) with denoisers exhibiting less aggressive distributional shrinkage, \( \mathbf{T}_1(y) = y + \frac{σ^2}{2} \nabla \log q(y), \) \( \mathbf{T}_2(y) = y + \frac{σ^2}{2} \nabla \log q(y) - \frac{σ^4}{8} \nabla \left( \frac{1}{2} \| \nabla \log q(y) \|^2 + \nabla \cdot \nabla \log q(y) \right) . \)

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### Fundamentals of Physical AI

Authors: Vahid Salehi
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09497v1

This work will elaborate the fundamental principles of physical artificial intelligence (Physical AI) from a scientific and systemic perspective. The aim is to create a theoretical foundation that describes the physical embodiment, sensory perception, ability to act, learning processes, and context sensitivity of intelligent systems within a coherent framework. While classical AI approaches rely on symbolic processing and data driven models, Physical AI understands intelligence as an emergent phenomenon of real interaction between body, environment, and experience. The six fundamentals presented here are embodiment, sensory perception, motor action, learning, autonomy, and context sensitivity, and form the conceptual basis for designing and evaluating physically intelligent systems. Theoretically, it is shown that these six principles do not represent loose functional modules but rather act as a closed control loop in which energy, information, control, and context are in constant interaction. This circular interaction enables a system to generate meaning not from databases, but from physical experience, a paradigm shift that understands intelligence as an physical embodied process. Physical AI understands learning not as parameter adjustment, but as a change in the structural coupling between agents and the environment. To illustrate this, the theoretical model is explained using a practical scenario: An adaptive assistant robot supports patients in a rehabilitation clinic. This example illustrates that physical intelligence does not arise from abstract calculation, but from immediate, embodied experience. It shows how the six fundamentals interact in a real system: embodiment as a prerequisite, perception as input, movement as expression, learning as adaptation, autonomy as regulation, and context as orientation.

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### Consensus Sampling for Safer Generative AI

Authors: Adam Tauman Kalai, Yael Tauman Kalai, Or Zamir
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09493v2

Motivated by undetectable risks in generative AI, we study a general robust aggregation problem: how to aggregate several probability distributions to boost safety. We present consensus sampling, a black-box algorithm that, given k distributions, has risk competitive with the average risk of the safest $s$ while abstaining when there is insufficient agreement. This yields an architecture-agnostic approach to generative-model safety when the distributions are induced by models that can sample and evaluate output probabilities. We formalize the guarantee through R-robustness, which also bounds information leakage and adversarial influence. Inspired by robust statistics and the provable copyright protection algorithm of Vyas et al (2023), we show that while a standard mixture is vulnerable to one unsafe constituent, a pointwise-median construction provides robust intuition, and our efficient sampler is Pareto-optimal for the tradeoff between worst-case risk and abstention. Experiments on synthetic distributions and image generation illustrate the general mechanism and its motivating safety application. The method requires overlap among safe distributions, but it provides a model-agnostic way to inherit guarantees from an unknown reliable subset.

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### Consensus Sampling for Safer Generative AI

Authors: Adam Tauman Kalai, Yael Tauman Kalai, Or Zamir
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09493v1

Many approaches to AI safety rely on inspecting model outputs or activations, yet certain risks are inherently undetectable by inspection alone. We propose a complementary, architecture-agnostic approach that enhances safety through the aggregation of multiple generative models, with the aggregated model inheriting its safety from the safest subset of a given size among them. Specifically, we present a consensus sampling algorithm that, given $k$ models and a prompt, achieves risk competitive with the average risk of the safest $s$ of the $k$ models, where $s$ is a chosen parameter, while abstaining when there is insufficient agreement between them. The approach leverages the models' ability to compute output probabilities, and we bound the probability of abstention when sufficiently many models are safe and exhibit adequate agreement. The algorithm is inspired by the provable copyright protection algorithm of Vyas et al. (2023). It requires some overlap among safe models, offers no protection when all models are unsafe, and may accumulate risk over repeated use. Nonetheless, our results provide a new, model-agnostic approach for AI safety by amplifying safety guarantees from an unknown subset of models within a collection to that of a single reliable model.

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### Enhancing Password Security Through a High-Accuracy Scoring Framework Using Random Forests

Authors: Muhammed El Mustaqeem Mazelan, Noor Hazlina Abdul, Nouar AlDahoul
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09492v2

Password security plays a crucial role in cybersecurity, yet traditional password strength meters, which rely on static rules like character-type requirements, often fail. Such methods are easily bypassed by common password patterns (e.g., 'P@ssw0rd1!'), giving users a false sense of security. To address this, we implement and evaluate a password strength scoring system by comparing four machine learning models: Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM), a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and Logistic Regression with a dataset of over 660,000 real-world passwords. Our primary contribution is a novel hybrid feature engineering approach that captures nuanced vulnerabilities missed by standard metrics. We introduce features like leetspeak-normalized Shannon entropy to assess true randomness, pattern detection for keyboard walks and sequences, and character-level TF-IDF n-grams to identify frequently reused substrings from breached password datasets. our RF model achieved superior performance, achieving 99.12% accuracy on a held-out test set. Crucially, the interpretability of the Random Forest model allows for feature importance analysis, providing a clear pathway to developing security tools that offer specific, actionable feedback to users. This study bridges the gap between predictive accuracy and practical usability, resulting in a high-performance scoring system that not only reduces password-based vulnerabilities but also empowers users to make more informed security decisions.

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### AutoSynth: Automated Workflow Optimization for High-Quality Synthetic Dataset Generation via Monte Carlo Tree Search

Authors: Shuzhen Bi, Chang Song, Siyu Song, Jinze Lv, Jian Chen, Xinyun Wang, Aimin Zhou, Hao Hao
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09488v1

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of large language models (LLMs) for specialized tasks requires high-quality datasets, but manual curation is prohibitively expensive. Synthetic data generation offers scalability, but its effectiveness relies on complex, multi-stage workflows, integrating prompt engineering and model orchestration. Existing automated workflow methods face a cold start problem: they require labeled datasets for reward modeling, which is especially problematic for subjective, open-ended tasks with no objective ground truth. We introduce AutoSynth, a framework that automates workflow discovery and optimization without reference datasets by reframing the problem as a Monte Carlo Tree Search guided by a novel dataset-free hybrid reward. This reward enables meta-learning through two LLM-as-judge components: one evaluates sample quality using dynamically generated task-specific metrics, and another assesses workflow code and prompt quality. Experiments on subjective educational tasks show that while expert-designed workflows achieve higher human preference rates (96-99% win rates vs. AutoSynth's 40-51%), models trained on AutoSynth-generated data dramatically outperform baselines (40-51% vs. 2-5%) and match or surpass expert workflows on certain metrics, suggesting discovery of quality dimensions beyond human intuition. These results are achieved while reducing human effort from 5-7 hours to just 30 minutes (>90% reduction). AutoSynth tackles the cold start issue in data-centric AI, offering a scalable, cost-effective method for subjective LLM tasks. Code: https://github.com/bisz9918-maker/AutoSynth.

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### PDAC: Efficient Coreset Selection for Continual Learning via Probability Density Awareness

Authors: Junqi Gao, Zhichang Guo, Dazhi Zhang, Yao Li, Yi Ran, Biqing Qi
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09487v1

Rehearsal-based Continual Learning (CL) maintains a limited memory buffer to store replay samples for knowledge retention, making these approaches heavily reliant on the quality of the stored samples. Current Rehearsal-based CL methods typically construct the memory buffer by selecting a representative subset (referred to as coresets), aiming to approximate the training efficacy of the full dataset with minimal storage overhead. However, mainstream Coreset Selection (CS) methods generally formulate the CS problem as a bi-level optimization problem that relies on numerous inner and outer iterations to solve, leading to substantial computational cost thus limiting their practical efficiency. In this paper, we aim to provide a more efficient selection logic and scheme for coreset construction. To this end, we first analyze the Mean Squared Error (MSE) between the buffer-trained model and the Bayes-optimal model through the perspective of localized error decomposition to investigate the contribution of samples from different regions to MSE suppression. Further theoretical and experimental analyses demonstrate that samples with high probability density play a dominant role in error suppression. Inspired by this, we propose the Probability Density-Aware Coreset (PDAC) method. PDAC leverages the Projected Gaussian Mixture (PGM) model to estimate each sample's joint density, enabling efficient density-prioritized buffer selection. Finally, we introduce the streaming Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm to enhance the adaptability of PGM parameters to streaming data, yielding Streaming PDAC (SPDAC) for streaming scenarios. Extensive comparative experiments show that our methods outperforms other baselines across various CL settings while ensuring favorable efficiency.

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### A general framework for adaptive nonparametric dimensionality reduction

Authors: Antonio Di Noia, Federico Ravenda, Antonietta Mira
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: stat.ML, cs.AI, cs.LG, stat.ME
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09486v2

Dimensionality reduction is a fundamental task in modern data science. Several projection methods specifically tailored to take into account the non-linearity of the data via local embeddings have been proposed. Such methods are often based on local neighbourhood structures and require tuning the number of neighbours that define this local structure, and the dimensionality of the lower-dimensional space onto which the data are projected. Such choices critically influence the quality of the resulting embedding. In this paper, we exploit a recently proposed intrinsic dimension estimator which also returns the optimal locally adaptive neighbourhood sizes according to some desirable criteria. In principle, this adaptive framework can be employed to perform an optimal hyper-parameter tuning of any dimensionality reduction algorithm that relies on local neighbourhood structures. Numerical experiments on both real-world and simulated datasets show that the proposed method can be used to significantly improve well-known projection methods when employed for various learning tasks, with improvements measurable through both quantitative metrics and the quality of low-dimensional visualizations.

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### A general framework for adaptive nonparametric dimensionality reduction

Authors: Antonio Di Noia, Federico Ravenda, Antonietta Mira
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: stat.ML, cs.AI, cs.LG, stat.ME
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09486v1

Dimensionality reduction is a fundamental task in modern data science. Several projection methods specifically tailored to take into account the non-linearity of the data via local embeddings have been proposed. Such methods are often based on local neighbourhood structures and require tuning the number of neighbours that define this local structure, and the dimensionality of the lower-dimensional space onto which the data are projected. Such choices critically influence the quality of the resulting embedding. In this paper, we exploit a recently proposed intrinsic dimension estimator which also returns the optimal locally adaptive neighbourhood sizes according to some desirable criteria. In principle, this adaptive framework can be employed to perform an optimal hyper-parameter tuning of any dimensionality reduction algorithm that relies on local neighbourhood structures. Numerical experiments on both real-world and simulated datasets show that the proposed method can be used to significantly improve well-known projection methods when employed for various learning tasks, with improvements measurable through both quantitative metrics and the quality of low-dimensional visualizations.

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### SPIDER: Scalable Physics-Informed Dexterous Retargeting

Authors: Chaoyi Pan, Changhao Wang, Haozhi Qi, Julen Urain, Zixi Liu, Homanga Bharadhwaj, Akash Sharma, Tingfan Wu, Guanya Shi, Jitendra Malik, Francois Hogan
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09484v3

Learning agile robotic policies requires large-scale demonstrations, but translating abundant human motion data to robots is bottlenecked by the embodiment gap and missing dynamic information. To bridge this gap, we propose Scalable Physics-Informed DExterous Retargeting (SPIDER), a physics-based retargeting framework to transform and augment kinematic-only human demonstrations into dynamically feasible robot trajectories at scale. Our key insight is that human demonstrations should provide global task structure and objective, while a sampling-based solver can be used to find the feasible solution given the physics constraints. As a general framework, SPIDER is an efficient physics-based retargeting method that can be applied to both humanoid whole-body loco-manipulation and dexterous manipulation across 9 humanoid/dexterous hand embodiments, 6 datasets and 3 simulators. By bypassing the need for policy optimization, it achieves state-of-the-art performance while being 10x faster than reinforcement learning (RL) baselines. Furthermore, SPIDER enables physics-based data augmentation, such as imposing external payloads, perturbations, and new contact patterns, to generate diverse data. We demonstrate that the retargeted motion can be executed on the robot directly open-loop or serve as feasible reference motion for efficient RL policy learning. Our pipeline enables large-scale generation of robot trajectories from human motion, and we release a dataset of 6,520 simulated demonstrations across four hands and 191 dataset-specific object identities to support future research.

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### SPIDER: Scalable Physics-Informed Dexterous Retargeting

Authors: Chaoyi Pan, Changhao Wang, Haozhi Qi, Zixi Liu, Homanga Bharadhwaj, Akash Sharma, Tingfan Wu, Guanya Shi, Jitendra Malik, Francois Hogan
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09484v1

Learning dexterous and agile policy for humanoid and dexterous hand control requires large-scale demonstrations, but collecting robot-specific data is prohibitively expensive. In contrast, abundant human motion data is readily available from motion capture, videos, and virtual reality, which could help address the data scarcity problem. However, due to the embodiment gap and missing dynamic information like force and torque, these demonstrations cannot be directly executed on robots. To bridge this gap, we propose Scalable Physics-Informed DExterous Retargeting (SPIDER), a physics-based retargeting framework to transform and augment kinematic-only human demonstrations to dynamically feasible robot trajectories at scale. Our key insight is that human demonstrations should provide global task structure and objective, while large-scale physics-based sampling with curriculum-style virtual contact guidance should refine trajectories to ensure dynamical feasibility and correct contact sequences. SPIDER scales across diverse 9 humanoid/dexterous hand embodiments and 6 datasets, improving success rates by 18% compared to standard sampling, while being 10X faster than reinforcement learning (RL) baselines, and enabling the generation of a 2.4M frames dynamic-feasible robot dataset for policy learning. As a universal physics-based retargeting method, SPIDER can work with diverse quality data and generate diverse and high-quality data to enable efficient policy learning with methods like RL.

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### CrochetBench: Can Vision-Language Models Move from Describing to Doing in Crochet Domain?

Authors: Peiyu Li, Xiaobao Huang, Ting Hua, Nitesh V. Chawla
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09483v3

While multimodal large language models can describe visual content, their ability to generate executable procedures remains underexplored. CrochetBench presented in this paper evaluates this shift from describing to doing through fine-grained procedural reasoning in crochet: models must recognize stitches, select structurally appropriate instructions, and generate compilable procedures. We adopt the CrochetPARADE DSL as our intermediate representation, enabling structural validation and functional evaluation via execution. The benchmark covers tasks including stitch classification, instruction grounding, and both natural language and image-to-DSL translation. Across all tasks, performance sharply decreases as the evaluation shifts from surface-level similarity to executable correctness, revealing limitations in long-range symbolic reasoning and 3D-aware procedural synthesis. Our proposed CrochetBench offers a new lens for assessing procedural competence in multimodal models and highlights the gap between surface-level understanding and executable precision in real-world creative domains. Code is available at https://github.com/Peiyu-Georgia-Li/crochetBench.

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### AdaCuRL: Adaptive Curriculum Reinforcement Learning with Invalid Sample Mitigation and Historical Revisiting

Authors: Renda Li, Hailang Huang, Fei Wei, Feng Xiong, Yong Wang, Xiangxiang Chu
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09478v1

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated considerable potential for enhancing reasoning in large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods suffer from Gradient Starvation and Policy Degradation when training directly on samples with mixed difficulty. To mitigate this, prior approaches leverage Chain-of-Thought (CoT) data, but the construction of high-quality CoT annotations remains labor-intensive. Alternatively, curriculum learning strategies have been explored but frequently encounter challenges, such as difficulty mismatch, reliance on manual curriculum design, and catastrophic forgetting. To address these issues, we propose AdaCuRL, a Adaptive Curriculum Reinforcement Learning framework that integrates coarse-to-fine difficulty estimation with adaptive curriculum scheduling. This approach dynamically aligns data difficulty with model capability and incorporates a data revisitation mechanism to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. Furthermore, AdaCuRL employs adaptive reference and sparse KL strategies to prevent Policy Degradation. Extensive experiments across diverse reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that AdaCuRL consistently achieves significant performance improvements on both LLMs and MLLMs.

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### Latent Planning via Embedding Arithmetic: A Contrastive Approach to Strategic Reasoning

Authors: Andrew Hamara, Greg Hamerly, Pablo Rivas, Andrew C. Freeman
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09477v1

Planning in high-dimensional decision spaces is increasingly being studied through the lens of learned representations. Rather than training policies or value heads, we investigate whether planning can be carried out directly in an evaluation-aligned embedding space. We introduce SOLIS, which learns such a space using supervised contrastive learning. In this representation, outcome similarity is captured by proximity, and a single global advantage vector orients the space from losing to winning regions. Candidate actions are then ranked according to their alignment with this direction, reducing planning to vector operations in latent space. We demonstrate this approach in chess, where SOLIS uses only a shallow search guided by the learned embedding to reach competitive strength under constrained conditions. More broadly, our results suggest that evaluation-aligned latent planning offers a lightweight alternative to traditional dynamics models or policy learning.

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### Enhancing Explainability in Solar Energetic Particle Event Prediction: A Global Feature Mapping Approach

Authors: Anli Ji, Pranjal Patil, Chetraj Pandey, Manolis K. Georgoulis, Berkay Aydin
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09475v1

Solar energetic particle (SEP) events, as one of the most prominent manifestations of solar activity, can generate severe hazardous radiation when accelerated by solar flares or shock waves formed aside from coronal mass ejections (CMEs). However, most existing data-driven methods used for SEP predictions are operated as black-box models, making it challenging for solar physicists to interpret the results and understand the underlying physical causes of such events rather than just obtain a prediction. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework that integrates global explanations and ad-hoc feature mapping to enhance model transparency and provide deeper insights into the decision-making process. We validate our approach using a dataset of 341 SEP events, including 244 significant (>=10 MeV) proton events exceeding the Space Weather Prediction Center S1 threshold, spanning solar cycles 22, 23, and 24. Furthermore, we present an explainability-focused case study of major SEP events, demonstrating how our method improves explainability and facilitates a more physics-informed understanding of SEP event prediction.

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### Revisiting Cross-Architecture Distillation: Adaptive Dual-Teacher Transfer for Lightweight Video Models

Authors: Ying Peng, Hongsen Ye, Changxin Huang, Xiping Hu, Jian Chen, Runhao Zeng
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09469v1

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved strong performance in video action recognition, but their high computational cost limits their practicality. Lightweight CNNs are more efficient but suffer from accuracy gaps. Cross-Architecture Knowledge Distillation (CAKD) addresses this by transferring knowledge from ViTs to CNNs, yet existing methods often struggle with architectural mismatch and overlook the value of stronger homogeneous CNN teachers. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Dual-Teacher Knowledge Distillation framework that leverages both a heterogeneous ViT teacher and a homogeneous CNN teacher to collaboratively guide a lightweight CNN student. We introduce two key components: (1) Discrepancy-Aware Teacher Weighting, which dynamically fuses the predictions from ViT and CNN teachers by assigning adaptive weights based on teacher confidence and prediction discrepancy with the student, enabling more informative and effective supervision; and (2) a Structure Discrepancy-Aware Distillation strategy, where the student learns the residual features between ViT and CNN teachers via a lightweight auxiliary branch, focusing on transferable architectural differences without mimicking all of ViT's high-dimensional patterns. Extensive experiments on benchmarks including HMDB51, EPIC-KITCHENS-100, and Kinetics-400 demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art distillation approaches, achieving notable performance improvements with a maximum accuracy gain of 5.95% on HMDB51.

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### Branching Flows: Discrete, Continuous, and Manifold Flow Matching with Splits and Deletions

Authors: Lukas Billera, Hedwig Nora Nordlinder, Jack Collier Ryder, Anton Oresten, Aron Stålmarck, Theodor Mosetti Björk, Ben Murrell
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09465v4

Diffusion and flow matching approaches to generative modeling have shown promise in domains where the state space is continuous, such as image generation or protein folding & design, and discrete, exemplified by diffusion large language models. They offer a natural fit when the number of elements in a state is fixed in advance (e.g. images), but require ad hoc solutions when, for example, the length of a response from a large language model, or the number of amino acids in a protein chain is not known a priori. Here we propose Branching Flows, a generative modeling framework that, like diffusion and flow matching approaches, transports a simple distribution to the data distribution. But in Branching Flows, the elements in the state evolve over a forest of binary trees, branching and dying stochastically with rates that are learned by the model. This allows the model to control, during generation, the number of elements in the sequence. We also show that Branching Flows can compose with any flow matching base process on discrete sets, continuous Euclidean spaces, smooth manifolds, and `multimodal' product spaces that mix these components. We demonstrate this in three domains: small molecule generation (multimodal), antibody sequence generation (discrete), and protein backbone generation (multimodal), and show that Branching Flows is a capable distribution learner with a stable learning objective, and that it enables new capabilities.

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### Branching Flows: Discrete, Continuous, and Manifold Flow Matching with Splits and Deletions

Authors: Hedwig Nora Nordlinder, Lukas Billera, Jack Collier Ryder, Anton Oresten, Aron Stålmarck, Theodor Mosetti Björk, Ben Murrell
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09465v1

Diffusion and flow matching approaches to generative modeling have shown promise in domains where the state space is continuous, such as image generation or protein folding & design, and discrete, exemplified by diffusion large language models. They offer a natural fit when the number of elements in a state is fixed in advance (e.g. images), but require ad hoc solutions when, for example, the length of a response from a large language model, or the number of amino acids in a protein chain is not known a priori. Here we propose Branching Flows, a generative modeling framework that, like diffusion and flow matching approaches, transports a simple distribution to the data distribution. But in Branching Flows, the elements in the state evolve over a forest of binary trees, branching and dying stochastically with rates that are learned by the model. This allows the model to control, during generation, the number of elements in the sequence. We also show that Branching Flows can compose with any flow matching base process on discrete sets, continuous Euclidean spaces, smooth manifolds, and `multimodal' product spaces that mix these components. We demonstrate this in three domains: small molecule generation (multimodal), antibody sequence generation (discrete), and protein backbone generation (multimodal), and show that Branching Flows is a capable distribution learner with a stable learning objective, and that it enables new capabilities.

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### Hand Held Multi-Object Tracking Dataset in American Football

Authors: Rintaro Otsubo, Kanta Sawafuji, Hideo Saito
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09455v1

Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) plays a critical role in analyzing player behavior from videos, enabling performance evaluation. Current MOT methods are often evaluated using publicly available datasets. However, most of these focus on everyday scenarios such as pedestrian tracking or are tailored to specific sports, including soccer and basketball. Despite the inherent challenges of tracking players in American football, such as frequent occlusion and physical contact, no standardized dataset has been publicly available, making fair comparisons between methods difficult. To address this gap, we constructed the first dedicated detection and tracking dataset for the American football players and conducted a comparative evaluation of various detection and tracking methods. Our results demonstrate that accurate detection and tracking can be achieved even in crowded scenarios. Fine-tuning detection models improved performance over pre-trained models. Furthermore, when these fine-tuned detectors and re-identification models were integrated into tracking systems, we observed notable improvements in tracking accuracy compared to existing approaches. This work thus enables robust detection and tracking of American football players in challenging, high-density scenarios previously underserved by conventional methods.

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### Individualized Algorithmic Advice as a Strategic Signal on Competitive Markets

Authors: Tobias R. Rebholz, Maxwell Uphoff, Christian H. R. Bernges, Florian Scholten
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.GT, econ.GN
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09454v2

As algorithms increasingly mediate competitive decision-making, their influence extends beyond individual outcomes to shaping strategic market dynamics. In our experiment, we examined how algorithmic advice affects human behavior in a classic economic game with a unique, non-collusive, and analytically traceable equilibrium. Participants (N = 129) played a Cournot quantity competition with equilibrium-aligned or strategically biased algorithmic recommendations. While individualized equilibrium advice supported stable convergence, collusively downward-biased advice led to sustained underproduction and supracompetitive profits - hallmarks of tacit collusion. Participants' quantities converged faster and more consistently toward individualized than collective equilibrium advice, potentially due to an objective quality advantage or greater perceived ownership of the former. These findings demonstrate that algorithmic advice can function as a strategic signal, shaping coordination even without explicit communication. The results echo real-world concerns about algorithmic collusion and underscore the need for careful design and oversight of algorithmic decision-support systems in competitive environments.

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### How does the Performance of the Data-driven Traffic Flow Forecasting Models deteriorate with Increasing Forecasting Horizon? An Extensive Approach Considering Statistical, Machine Learning and Deep Learning Models

Authors: Amanta Sherfenaz, Nazmul Haque, Protiva Sadhukhan Prova, Md Asif Raihan, Md. Hadiuzzaman
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09450v1

With rapid urbanization in recent decades, traffic congestion has intensified due to increased movement of people and goods. As planning shifts from demand-based to supply-oriented strategies, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have become essential for managing traffic within existing infrastructure. A core ITS function is traffic forecasting, enabling proactive measures like ramp metering, signal control, and dynamic routing through platforms such as Google Maps. This study assesses the performance of statistical, machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) models in forecasting traffic speed and flow using real-world data from California's Harbor Freeway, sourced from the Caltrans Performance Measurement System (PeMS). Each model was evaluated over 20 forecasting windows (up to 1 hour 40 minutes) using RMSE, MAE, and R-Square metrics. Results show ANFIS-GP performs best at early windows with RMSE of 0.038, MAE of 0.0276, and R-Square of 0.9983, while Bi-LSTM is more robust for medium-term prediction due to its capacity to model long-range temporal dependencies, achieving RMSE of 0.1863, MAE of 0.0833, and R-Square of 0.987 at a forecasting of 20. The degradation in model performance was quantified using logarithmic transformation, with slope values used to measure robustness. Among DL models, Bi-LSTM had the flattest slope (0.0454 RMSE, 0.0545 MAE for flow), whereas ANFIS-GP had 0.1058 for RMSE and 0.1037 for flow MAE. The study concludes by identifying hybrid models as a promising future direction.

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### MCAD: Multimodal Context-Aware Audio Description Generation For Soccer

Authors: Lipisha Chaudhary, Trisha Mittal, Subhadra Gopalakrishnan, Ifeoma Nwogu, Jaclyn Pytlarz
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.MM, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09448v1

Audio Descriptions (AD) are essential for making visual content accessible to individuals with visual impairments. Recent works have shown a promising step towards automating AD, but they have been limited to describing high-quality movie content using human-annotated ground truth AD in the process. In this work, we present an end-to-end pipeline, MCAD, that extends AD generation beyond movies to the domain of sports, with a focus on soccer games, without relying on ground truth AD. To address the absence of domain-specific AD datasets, we fine-tune a Video Large Language Model on publicly available movie AD datasets so that it learns the narrative structure and conventions of AD. During inference, MCAD incorporates multimodal contextual cues such as player identities, soccer events and actions, and commentary from the game. These cues, combined with input prompts to the fine-tuned VideoLLM, allow the system to produce complete AD text for each video segment. We further introduce a new evaluation metric, ARGE-AD, designed to accurately assess the quality of generated AD. ARGE-AD evaluates the generated AD for the presence of five characteristics: (i) usage of people's names, (ii) mention of actions and events, (iii) appropriate length of AD, (iv) absence of pronouns, and (v) overlap from commentary or subtitles. We present an in-depth analysis of our approach on both movie and soccer datasets. We also validate the use of this metric to quantitatively comment on the quality of generated AD using our metric across domains. Additionally, we contribute audio descriptions for 100 soccer game clips annotated by two AD experts.

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### BronchOpt : Vision-Based Pose Optimization with Fine-Tuned Foundation Models for Accurate Bronchoscopy Navigation

Authors: Hongchao Shu, Roger D. Soberanis-Mukul, Jiru Xu, Hao Ding, Morgan Ringel, Mali Shen, Saif Iftekar Sayed, Hedyeh Rafii-Tari, Mathias Unberath
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09443v1

Accurate intra-operative localization of the bronchoscope tip relative to patient anatomy remains challenging due to respiratory motion, anatomical variability, and CT-to-body divergence that cause deformation and misalignment between intra-operative views and pre-operative CT. Existing vision-based methods often fail to generalize across domains and patients, leading to residual alignment errors. This work establishes a generalizable foundation for bronchoscopy navigation through a robust vision-based framework and a new synthetic benchmark dataset that enables standardized and reproducible evaluation. We propose a vision-based pose optimization framework for frame-wise 2D-3D registration between intra-operative endoscopic views and pre-operative CT anatomy. A fine-tuned modality- and domain-invariant encoder enables direct similarity computation between real endoscopic RGB frames and CT-rendered depth maps, while a differentiable rendering module iteratively refines camera poses through depth consistency. To enhance reproducibility, we introduce the first public synthetic benchmark dataset for bronchoscopy navigation, addressing the lack of paired CT-endoscopy data. Trained exclusively on synthetic data distinct from the benchmark, our model achieves an average translational error of 2.65 mm and a rotational error of 0.19 rad, demonstrating accurate and stable localization. Qualitative results on real patient data further confirm strong cross-domain generalization, achieving consistent frame-wise 2D-3D alignment without domain-specific adaptation. Overall, the proposed framework achieves robust, domain-invariant localization through iterative vision-based optimization, while the new benchmark provides a foundation for standardized progress in vision-based bronchoscopy navigation.

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### LLM-Guided Dynamic-UMAP for Personalized Federated Graph Learning

Authors: Sai Puppala, Ismail Hossain, Md Jahangir Alam, Tanzim Ahad, Sajedul Talukder
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09438v1

We propose a method that uses large language models to assist graph machine learning under personalization and privacy constraints. The approach combines data augmentation for sparse graphs, prompt and instruction tuning to adapt foundation models to graph tasks, and in-context learning to supply few-shot graph reasoning signals. These signals parameterize a Dynamic UMAP manifold of client-specific graph embeddings inside a Bayesian variational objective for personalized federated learning. The method supports node classification and link prediction in low-resource settings and aligns language model latent representations with graph structure via a cross-modal regularizer. We outline a convergence argument for the variational aggregation procedure, describe a differential privacy threat model based on a moments accountant, and present applications to knowledge graph completion, recommendation-style link prediction, and citation and product graphs. We also discuss evaluation considerations for benchmarking LLM-assisted graph machine learning.

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### What We Don't C: Manifold Disentanglement for Structured Discovery

Authors: Brian Rogers, Micah Bowles, Chris J. Lintott, Steve Croft, Oliver N. F. King, James Kostas Ray
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09433v2

Accessing information in learned representations is critical for annotation, discovery, and data filtering in disciplines where high-dimensional datasets are common. We introduce What We Don't C, a novel approach based on latent flow matching that disentangles latent subspaces by explicitly removing information included in conditional guidance, resulting in meaningful residual representations. This allows factors of variation which have not already been captured in conditioning to become more readily available. We show how guidance in the flow path necessarily represses the information from the guiding, conditioning variables. Our results highlight this approach as a simple yet powerful mechanism for analyzing, controlling, and repurposing latent representations, providing a pathway toward using generative models to explore what we don't capture, consider, or catalog.

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### Equivariant Sparse Autoencoders: Mechanistic Interpretability of Neural Networks on Symmetric Data

Authors: Ege Erdogan, Ana Lucic
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09432v2

Machine learning (ML) models achieve remarkable performance but remain hard to interpret due to their scale and complexity. In particular, their activations entangle many concepts into fewer dimensions, a phenomenon known as superposition. Mechanistic interpretability methods such as sparse autoencoders (SAEs) can disentangle these dense activations into sparse sums of interpretable features, but SAEs suffer from unidentifiability: different explanations can fit the data equally well without necessarily being more interpretable or faithful to the underlying model. We show that this problem is exacerbated by data symmetries such as rotations that are prevalent in scientific domains. We extend the Linear Representation Hypothesis, the theory behind SAEs, to account for symmetries and show on synthetic as well as real-world scientific datasets and models that the resulting Equivariant SAEs can (1) avoid the pitfalls of existing SAEs on symmetric data and (2) discover features more useful for downstream tasks despite worse reconstructions. Our results show that incorporating the correct priors in SAEs can significantly improve their usefulness while highlighting that reconstruction quality can be inversely correlated with feature usefulness under symmetries, cautioning against its use as a key measure of interpretability. Code: https://github.com/ege-erdogan/equivariant-sae

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### Adversarially and Distributionally Robust Virtual Energy Storage Systems via the Scenario Approach

Authors: Georgios Pantazis, Nicola Mignoni, Raffaele Carli, Mariagrazia Dotoli, Sergio Grammatico
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: math.OC, cs.LG, eess.SY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09427v2

We study virtual energy storage services based on the aggregation of EV batteries in parking lots under time-varying, uncertain EV departures and state-of-charge limits. We propose a convex data-driven scheduling framework in which a parking lot manager provides storage services to a prosumer community while interacting with a retailer. The framework yields finite-sample, distribution-free guarantees on constraint violations and allows the parking lot manager to explicitly tune the trade-off between economic performance and operational safety. To enhance reliability under imperfect data, we extend the formulation to adversarial perturbations of the training samples and Wasserstein distributional shifts, obtaining robustness certificates against both corrupted data and out-of-distribution uncertainty. Numerical studies confirm the predicted profit-risk trade-off and show consistency between the theoretical certificates and the observed violation levels.

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### BIG5-TPoT: Predicting BIG Five Personality Traits, Facets, and Items Through Targeted Preselection of Texts

Authors: Triet M. Le, Arjun Chandra, C. Anton Rytting, Valerie P. Karuzis, Vladimir Rife, William A. Simpson
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09426v1

Predicting an individual's personalities from their generated texts is a challenging task, especially when the text volume is large. In this paper, we introduce a straightforward yet effective novel strategy called targeted preselection of texts (TPoT). This method semantically filters the texts as input to a deep learning model, specifically designed to predict a Big Five personality trait, facet, or item, referred to as the BIG5-TPoT model. By selecting texts that are semantically relevant to a particular trait, facet, or item, this strategy not only addresses the issue of input text limits in large language models but also improves the Mean Absolute Error and accuracy metrics in predictions for the Stream of Consciousness Essays dataset.

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### Supporting Evidence for the Adaptive Feature Program across Diverse Models

Authors: Yicheng Li, Qian Lin
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09425v3

Theoretically exploring the advantages of neural networks might be one of the most challenging problems in the AI era. An adaptive feature program has recently been proposed to analyze feature learning, the characteristic property of neural networks, in a more abstract way. Motivated by the celebrated Le Cam equivalence, we advocate the over-parameterized sequence models to further simplify the analysis of the training dynamics of adaptive feature program and present several pieces of supporting evidence for the adaptive feature program. More precisely, after having introduced the feature error measure (FEM) to characterize the quality of the learned feature, we show that the FEM is decreasing during the training process of several concrete adaptive feature models including linear regression, single/multiple index models, etc. We believe that this hints at the potential successes of the adaptive feature program.

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### Several Supporting Evidences for the Adaptive Feature Program

Authors: Yicheng Li, Qian Lin
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09425v1

Theoretically exploring the advantages of neural networks might be one of the most challenging problems in the AI era. An adaptive feature program has recently been proposed to analyze the feature learning characteristic property of neural networks in a more abstract way. Motivated by the celebrated Le Cam equivalence, we advocate the over-parametrized sequence models to further simplify the analysis of the training dynamics of adaptive feature program and present several supporting evidences for the adaptive feature program. More precisely, after having introduced the feature error measure (FEM) to characterize the quality of the learned feature, we show that the FEM is decreasing during the training process of several concrete adaptive feature models including linear regression, single/multiple index models, etc. We believe that this hints at the potential successes of the adaptive feature program.

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### Transformer Semantic Genetic Programming for d-dimensional Symbolic Regression Problems

Authors: Philipp Anthes, Dominik Sobania, Franz Rothlauf
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.LG, cs.NE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09416v2

Transformer Semantic Genetic Programming (TSGP) is a semantic search approach that uses a pre-trained transformer model as a variation operator to generate offspring programs with high semantic similarity to a given parent. Unlike other semantic GP approaches that rely on fixed syntactic transformations, TSGP aims to learn diverse structural variations that lead to solutions with similar semantics. We find that a single transformer model trained on millions of programs is able to generalize across symbolic regression problems of varying dimension. Evaluated on 24 real-world and synthetic datasets, TSGP significantly outperforms standard GP, SLIM_GSGP, Deep Symbolic Regression, and Denoising Autoencoder GP, achieving an average rank of 1.58 across all benchmarks. Moreover, TSGP produces more compact solutions than SLIM_GSGP, despite its higher accuracy. In addition, the target semantic distance is able to effectively adjust the step size in the semantic space: small values enable consistent improvement in fitness but often lead to larger programs, while larger values promote faster convergence and compactness. Thus, the target semantic distance provides an effective mechanism for balancing exploration and exploitation.

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### Transformer Semantic Genetic Programming for d-dimensional Symbolic Regression Problems

Authors: Philipp Anthes, Dominik Sobania, Franz Rothlauf
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.LG, cs.NE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09416v1

Transformer Semantic Genetic Programming (TSGP) is a semantic search approach that uses a pre-trained transformer model as a variation operator to generate offspring programs with controlled semantic similarity to a given parent. Unlike other semantic GP approaches that rely on fixed syntactic transformations, TSGP aims to learn diverse structural variations that lead to solutions with similar semantics. We find that a single transformer model trained on millions of programs is able to generalize across symbolic regression problems of varying dimension. Evaluated on 24 real-world and synthetic datasets, TSGP significantly outperforms standard GP, SLIM_GSGP, Deep Symbolic Regression, and Denoising Autoencoder GP, achieving an average rank of 1.58 across all benchmarks. Moreover, TSGP produces more compact solutions than SLIM_GSGP, despite its higher accuracy. In addition, the target semantic distance $\mathrm{SD}_t$ is able to control the step size in the semantic space: small values of $\mathrm{SD}_t$ enable consistent improvement in fitness but often lead to larger programs, while larger values promote faster convergence and compactness. Thus, $\mathrm{SD}_t$ provides an effective mechanism for balancing exploration and exploitation.

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### Probing then Editing: A Push-Pull Framework for Retain-Free Machine Unlearning in Industrial IoT

Authors: Jiao Chen, Weihua Li, Jianhua Tang
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09414v1

In dynamic Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environments, models need the ability to selectively forget outdated or erroneous knowledge. However, existing methods typically rely on retain data to constrain model behavior, which increases computational and energy burdens and conflicts with industrial data silos and privacy compliance requirements. To address this, we propose a novel retain-free unlearning framework, referred to as Probing then Editing (PTE). PTE frames unlearning as a probe-edit process: first, it probes the decision boundary neighborhood of the model on the to-be-forgotten class via gradient ascent and generates corresponding editing instructions using the model's own predictions. Subsequently, a push-pull collaborative optimization is performed: the push branch actively dismantles the decision region of the target class using the editing instructions, while the pull branch applies masked knowledge distillation to anchor the model's knowledge on retained classes to their original states. Benefiting from this mechanism, PTE achieves efficient and balanced knowledge editing using only the to-be-forgotten data and the original model. Experimental results demonstrate that PTE achieves an excellent balance between unlearning effectiveness and model utility across multiple general and industrial benchmarks such as CWRU and SCUT-FD.

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### GSAP-ERE: Fine-Grained Scholarly Entity and Relation Extraction Focused on Machine Learning

Authors: Wolfgang Otto, Lu Gan, Sharmila Upadhyaya, Saurav Karmakar, Stefan Dietze
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09411v1

Research in Machine Learning (ML) and AI evolves rapidly. Information Extraction (IE) from scientific publications enables to identify information about research concepts and resources on a large scale and therefore is a pathway to improve understanding and reproducibility of ML-related research. To extract and connect fine-grained information in ML-related research, e.g. method training and data usage, we introduce GSAP-ERE. It is a manually curated fine-grained dataset with 10 entity types and 18 semantically categorized relation types, containing mentions of 63K entities and 35K relations from the full text of 100 ML publications. We show that our dataset enables fine-tuned models to automatically extract information relevant for downstream tasks ranging from knowledge graph (KG) construction, to monitoring the computational reproducibility of AI research at scale. Additionally, we use our dataset as a test suite to explore prompting strategies for IE using Large Language Models (LLM). We observe that the performance of state-of-the-art LLM prompting methods is largely outperformed by our best fine-tuned baseline model (NER: 80.6%, RE: 54.0% for the fine-tuned model vs. NER: 44.4%, RE: 10.1% for the LLM). This disparity of performance between supervised models and unsupervised usage of LLMs suggests datasets like GSAP-ERE are needed to advance research in the domain of scholarly information extraction.

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### CARE-Bench: A Benchmark of Diverse Client Simulations Guided by Expert Principles for Evaluating LLMs in Psychological Counseling

Authors: Bichen Wang, Yixin Sun, Junzhe Wang, Hao Yang, Xing Fu, Yanyan Zhao, Si Wei, Shijin Wang, Bing Qin
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09407v1

The mismatch between the growing demand for psychological counseling and the limited availability of services has motivated research into the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in this domain. Consequently, there is a need for a robust and unified benchmark to assess the counseling competence of various LLMs. Existing works, however, are limited by unprofessional client simulation, static question-and-answer evaluation formats, and unidimensional metrics. These limitations hinder their effectiveness in assessing a model's comprehensive ability to handle diverse and complex clients. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{CARE-Bench}, a dynamic and interactive automated benchmark. It is built upon diverse client profiles derived from real-world counseling cases and simulated according to expert guidelines. CARE-Bench provides a multidimensional performance evaluation grounded in established psychological scales. Using CARE-Bench, we evaluate several general-purpose LLMs and specialized counseling models, revealing their current limitations. In collaboration with psychologists, we conduct a detailed analysis of the reasons for LLMs' failures when interacting with clients of different types, which provides directions for developing more comprehensive, universal, and effective counseling models.

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### Spatio-Temporal Graph Unlearning

Authors: Qiming Guo, Wenbo Sun, Wenlu Wang
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09404v1

Spatio-temporal graphs are widely used in modeling complex dynamic processes such as traffic forecasting, molecular dynamics, and healthcare monitoring. Recently, stringent privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA have introduced significant new challenges for existing spatio-temporal graph models, requiring complete unlearning of unauthorized data. Since each node in a spatio-temporal graph diffuses information globally across both spatial and temporal dimensions, existing unlearning methods primarily designed for static graphs and localized data removal cannot efficiently erase a single node without incurring costs nearly equivalent to full model retraining. Therefore, an effective approach for complete spatio-temporal graph unlearning is a pressing need. To address this, we propose CallosumNet, a divide-and-conquer spatio-temporal graph unlearning framework inspired by the corpus callosum structure that facilitates communication between the brain's two hemispheres. CallosumNet incorporates two novel techniques: (1) Enhanced Subgraph Construction (ESC), which adaptively constructs multiple localized subgraphs based on several factors, including biologically-inspired virtual ganglions; and (2) Global Ganglion Bridging (GGB), which reconstructs global spatio-temporal dependencies from these localized subgraphs, effectively restoring the full graph representation. Empirical results on four diverse real-world datasets show that CallosumNet achieves complete unlearning with only 1%-2% relative MAE loss compared to the gold model, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines. Ablation studies verify the effectiveness of both proposed techniques.

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### Abstract Gradient Training: A Unified Certification Framework for Data Poisoning, Unlearning, and Differential Privacy

Authors: Philip Sosnin, Matthew Wicker, Josh Collyer, Calvin Tsay
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09400v1

The impact of inference-time data perturbation (e.g., adversarial attacks) has been extensively studied in machine learning, leading to well-established certification techniques for adversarial robustness. In contrast, certifying models against training data perturbations remains a relatively under-explored area. These perturbations can arise in three critical contexts: adversarial data poisoning, where an adversary manipulates training samples to corrupt model performance; machine unlearning, which requires certifying model behavior under the removal of specific training data; and differential privacy, where guarantees must be given with respect to substituting individual data points. This work introduces Abstract Gradient Training (AGT), a unified framework for certifying robustness of a given model and training procedure to training data perturbations, including bounded perturbations, the removal of data points, and the addition of new samples. By bounding the reachable set of parameters, i.e., establishing provable parameter-space bounds, AGT provides a formal approach to analyzing the behavior of models trained via first-order optimization methods.

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### OUGS: Active View Selection via Object-aware Uncertainty Estimation in 3DGS

Authors: Haiyi Li, Qi Chen, Denis Kalkofen, Hsiang-Ting Chen
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.CV, cs.CG, cs.GR, cs.HC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09397v2

Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have achieved state-of-the-art results for novel view synthesis. However, efficiently capturing high-fidelity reconstructions of specific objects within complex scenes remains a significant challenge. A key limitation of existing active reconstruction methods is their reliance on scene-level uncertainty metrics, which are often biased by irrelevant background clutter and lead to inefficient view selection for object-centric tasks. We present OUGS, a novel framework that addresses this challenge with a more principled, physically-grounded uncertainty formulation for 3DGS. Our core innovation is to derive uncertainty directly from the explicit physical parameters of the 3D Gaussian primitives (e.g., position, scale, rotation). By propagating the covariance of these parameters through the rendering Jacobian, we establish a highly interpretable uncertainty model. This foundation allows us to then seamlessly integrate semantic segmentation masks to produce a targeted, object-aware uncertainty score that effectively disentangles the object from its environment. This allows for a more effective active view selection strategy that prioritizes views critical to improving object fidelity. Experimental evaluations on public datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the efficiency of the 3DGS reconstruction process and achieves higher quality for targeted objects compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, while also serving as a robust uncertainty estimator for the global scene.

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### Multimodal Large Language Models for Low-Resource Languages: A Case Study for Basque

Authors: Lukas Arana, Julen Etxaniz, Ander Salaberria, Gorka Azkune
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09396v2

Current Multimodal Large Language Models exhibit very strong performance for several demanding tasks. While commercial MLLMs deliver acceptable performance in low-resource languages, comparable results remain unattained within the open science community. In this paper, we aim to develop a strong MLLM for a low-resource language, namely Basque. For that purpose, we develop our own training and evaluation image-text datasets. Using two different Large Language Models as backbones, the Llama-3.1-Instruct model and a Basque-adapted variant called Latxa, we explore several data mixtures for training. We show that: i) low ratios of Basque multimodal data (around 20%) are already enough to obtain solid results on Basque benchmarks, and ii) contrary to expected, a Basque instructed backbone LLM is not required to obtain a strong MLLM in Basque. Our results pave the way to develop MLLMs for other low-resource languages by openly releasing our resources.

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### Multimodal Large Language Models for Low-Resource Languages: A Case Study for Basque

Authors: Lukas Arana, Julen Etxaniz, Ander Salaberria, Gorka Azkune
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09396v1

Current Multimodal Large Language Models exhibit very strong performance for several demanding tasks. While commercial MLLMs deliver acceptable performance in low-resource languages, comparable results remain unattained within the open science community. In this paper, we aim to develop a strong MLLM for a low-resource language, namely Basque. For that purpose, we develop our own training and evaluation image-text datasets. Using two different Large Language Models as backbones, the Llama-3.1-Instruct model and a Basque-adapted variant called Latxa, we explore several data mixtures for training. We show that: i) low ratios of Basque multimodal data (around 20%) are already enough to obtain solid results on Basque benchmarks, and ii) contrary to expected, a Basque instructed backbone LLM is not required to obtain a strong MLLM in Basque. Our results pave the way to develop MLLMs for other low-resource languages by openly releasing our resources.

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### Potent but Stealthy: Rethink Profile Pollution against Sequential Recommendation via Bi-level Constrained Reinforcement Paradigm

Authors: Jiajie Su, Zihan Nan, Yunshan Ma, Xiaobo Xia, Xiaohua Feng, Weiming Liu, Xiang Chen, Xiaolin Zheng, Chaochao Chen
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09392v4

Sequential Recommenders, which exploit dynamic user intents through interaction sequences, is vulnerable to adversarial attacks. While existing attacks primarily rely on data poisoning, they require large-scale user access or fake profiles thus lacking practicality. In this paper, we focus on the Profile Pollution Attack that subtly contaminates partial user interactions to induce targeted mispredictions. Previous PPA methods suffer from two limitations, i.e., i) over-reliance on sequence horizon impact restricts fine-grained perturbations on item transitions, and ii) holistic modifications cause detectable distribution shifts. To address these challenges, we propose a constrained reinforcement driven attack CREAT that synergizes a bi-level optimization framework with multi-reward reinforcement learning to balance adversarial efficacy and stealthiness. We first develop a Pattern Balanced Rewarding Policy, which integrates pattern inversion rewards to invert critical patterns and distribution consistency rewards to minimize detectable shifts via unbalanced co-optimal transport. Then we employ a Constrained Group Relative Reinforcement Learning paradigm, enabling step-wise perturbations through dynamic barrier constraints and group-shared experience replay, achieving targeted pollution with minimal detectability. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CREAT.

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### Potent but Stealthy: Rethink Profile Pollution against Sequential Recommendation via Bi-level Constrained Reinforcement Paradigm

Authors: Jiajie Su, Zihan Nan, Yunshan Ma, Xiaobo Xia, Xiaohua Feng, Weiming Liu, Xiaolin Zheng, Chaochao Chen
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09392v1

Sequential Recommenders, which exploit dynamic user intents through interaction sequences, is vulnerable to adversarial attacks. While existing attacks primarily rely on data poisoning, they require large-scale user access or fake profiles thus lacking practicality. In this paper, we focus on the Profile Pollution Attack that subtly contaminates partial user interactions to induce targeted mispredictions. Previous PPA methods suffer from two limitations, i.e., i) over-reliance on sequence horizon impact restricts fine-grained perturbations on item transitions, and ii) holistic modifications cause detectable distribution shifts. To address these challenges, we propose a constrained reinforcement driven attack CREAT that synergizes a bi-level optimization framework with multi-reward reinforcement learning to balance adversarial efficacy and stealthiness. We first develop a Pattern Balanced Rewarding Policy, which integrates pattern inversion rewards to invert critical patterns and distribution consistency rewards to minimize detectable shifts via unbalanced co-optimal transport. Then we employ a Constrained Group Relative Reinforcement Learning paradigm, enabling step-wise perturbations through dynamic barrier constraints and group-shared experience replay, achieving targeted pollution with minimal detectability. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CREAT.

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### Learning by Neighbor-Aware Semantics, Deciding by Open-form Flows: Towards Robust Zero-Shot Skeleton Action Recognition

Authors: Yang Chen, Miaoge Li, Zhijie Rao, Deze Zeng, Song Guo, Jingcai Guo
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09388v2

Recognizing unseen skeleton action categories remains highly challenging due to the absence of corresponding skeletal priors. Existing approaches generally follow an ``align-then-classify'' paradigm but face two fundamental issues, \textit{i.e.}, (i) fragile point-to-point alignment arising from imperfect semantics, and (ii) rigid classifiers restricted by static decision boundaries and coarse-grained anchors. To address these issues, we propose a novel method for zero-shot skeleton action recognition, termed \texttt{\textbf{Flora}}, which builds upon \textbf{F}lexib\textbf{L}e neighb\textbf{O}r-aware semantic attunement and open-form dist\textbf{R}ibution-aware flow cl\textbf{A}ssifier. Specifically, we flexibly attune textual semantics by incorporating neighboring inter-class contextual cues to form direction-aware regional semantics, coupled with a cross-modal geometric consistency objective that ensures stable and robust point-to-region alignment. Furthermore, we employ noise-free flow matching to bridge the modality distribution gap between semantic and skeleton latent embeddings, while a condition-free contrastive regularization enhances discriminability, leading to a distribution-aware classifier with fine-grained decision boundaries achieved through token-level velocity predictions. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our method, showing particularly impressive performance even when trained with only 10% of the seen data. Code is available at https://github.com/cseeyangchen/Flora.

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### AMaPO: Adaptive Margin-attached Preference Optimization for Language Model Alignment

Authors: Ruibo Deng, Duanyu Feng, Wenqiang Lei
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09385v2

Offline preference optimization offers a simpler and more stable alternative to RLHF for aligning language models. However, their effectiveness is critically dependent on ranking accuracy, a metric where further gains are highly impactful. This limitation arises from a fundamental problem that we identify and formalize as the Overfitting-Underfitting Dilemma: current margin designs cause models to apply excessive, wasteful gradients to correctly ranked samples (overfitting) while providing insufficient corrective signals for misranked ones (underfitting). To resolve this dilemma, we propose Adaptive Margin-attached Preference Optimization (AMaPO), a simple yet principled algorithm. AMaPO employs an instance-wise adaptive margin, refined by Z-normalization and exponential scaling, which dynamically reallocates learning effort by amplifying gradients for misranked samples and suppressing them for correct ones. Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks demonstrate that AMaPO not only achieves better ranking accuracy and superior downstream alignment performance, but targeted analysis also confirms that it successfully mitigates the core overfitting and underfitting issues.

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### Diffusion-based Sinogram Interpolation for Limited Angle PET

Authors: Rüveyda Yilmaz, Julian Thull, Johannes Stegmaier, Volkmar Schulz
Published: 2025-11-12
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09383v1

Accurate PET imaging increasingly requires methods that support unconstrained detector layouts from walk-through designs to long-axial rings where gaps and open sides lead to severely undersampled sinograms. Instead of constraining the hardware to form complete cylinders, we propose treating the missing lines-of-responses as a learnable prior. Data-driven approaches, particularly generative models, offer a promising pathway to recover this missing information. In this work, we explore the use of conditional diffusion models to interpolate sparsely sampled sinograms, paving the way for novel, cost-efficient, and patient-friendly PET geometries in real clinical settings.

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