# Research Papers — 2025-11 · bundle page 139 of 197 > Full-text markdown of papers #6901–6950 of 9830 published in 2025-11, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 9830-paper 2025-11 archive (50 papers per file). Canonical page: https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-11/page/139 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-11/page/138.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-11/page/140.md) ### Advancements in synthetic data extraction for industrial injection molding Authors: Georg Rottenwalter, Marcel Tilly, Christian Bielenberg, Katharina Obermeier Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08117v1 Machine learning has significant potential for optimizing various industrial processes. However, data acquisition remains a major challenge as it is both time-consuming and costly. Synthetic data offers a promising solution to augment insufficient data sets and improve the robustness of machine learning models. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of incorporating synthetic data into the training process of the injection molding process using an existing Long Short-Term Memory architecture. Our approach is to generate synthetic data by simulating production cycles and incorporating them into the training data set. Through iterative experimentation with different proportions of synthetic data, we attempt to find an optimal balance that maximizes the benefits of synthetic data while preserving the authenticity and relevance of real data. Our results suggest that the inclusion of synthetic data improves the model's ability to handle different scenarios, with potential practical industrial applications to reduce manual labor, machine use, and material waste. This approach provides a valuable alternative for situations where extensive data collection and maintenance has been impractical or costly and thus could contribute to more efficient manufacturing processes in the future. --- ### Introducing Nylon Face Mask Attacks: A Dataset for Evaluating Generalised Face Presentation Attack Detection Authors: Manasa, Sushrut Patwardhan, Narayan Vetrekar, Pavan Kumar, R. S. Gad, Raghavendra Ramachandra Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.ET arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08114v1 Face recognition systems are increasingly deployed across a wide range of applications, including smartphone authentication, access control, and border security. However, these systems remain vulnerable to presentation attacks (PAs), which can significantly compromise their reliability. In this work, we introduce a new dataset focused on a novel and realistic presentation attack instrument called Nylon Face Masks (NFMs), designed to simulate advanced 3D spoofing scenarios. NFMs are particularly concerning due to their elastic structure and photorealistic appearance, which enable them to closely mimic the victim's facial geometry when worn by an attacker. To reflect real-world smartphone-based usage conditions, we collected the dataset using an iPhone 11 Pro, capturing 3,760 bona fide samples from 100 subjects and 51,281 NFM attack samples across four distinct presentation scenarios involving both humans and mannequins. We benchmark the dataset using five state-of-the-art PAD methods to evaluate their robustness under unseen attack conditions. The results demonstrate significant performance variability across methods, highlighting the challenges posed by NFMs and underscoring the importance of developing PAD techniques that generalise effectively to emerging spoofing threats. --- ### Multimodal LLMs Do Not Compose Skills Optimally Across Modalities Authors: Paula Ontalvilla, Aitor Ormazabal, Gorka Azkune Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08113v3 Skill composition is the ability to combine previously learned skills to solve new tasks. As neural networks acquire increasingly complex skills during their pretraining, it is not clear how successfully they can compose them. In this paper, we focus on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM), and study their ability to compose skills across modalities. To this end, we design three evaluation tasks which can be solved sequentially composing two modality-dependent skills, and evaluate several open MLLMs under two main settings: i) prompting the model to directly solve the task, and ii) using a two-step cascaded inference approach, which manually enforces the composition of the two skills for a given task. Even with these straightforward compositions, we find that all evaluated MLLMs exhibit a significant cross-modality skill composition gap. To mitigate the aforementioned gap, we explore two alternatives: i) use chain-of-thought prompting to explicitly instruct MLLMs for skill composition and ii) a specific fine-tuning recipe to promote skill composition. Although those strategies improve model performance, they still exhibit significant skill composition gaps, suggesting that more research is needed to improve cross-modal skill composition in MLLMs. --- ### Estranged Predictions: Measuring Semantic Category Disruption with Masked Language Modelling Authors: Yuxuan Liu, Haim Dubossarsky, Ruth Ahnert Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08109v1 This paper examines how science fiction destabilises ontological categories by measuring conceptual permeability across the terms human, animal, and machine using masked language modelling (MLM). Drawing on corpora of science fiction (Gollancz SF Masterworks) and general fiction (NovelTM), we operationalise Darko Suvin's theory of estrangement as computationally measurable deviation in token prediction, using RoBERTa to generate lexical substitutes for masked referents and classifying them via Gemini. We quantify conceptual slippage through three metrics: retention rate, replacement rate, and entropy, mapping the stability or disruption of category boundaries across genres. Our findings reveal that science fiction exhibits heightened conceptual permeability, particularly around machine referents, which show significant cross-category substitution and dispersion. Human terms, by contrast, maintain semantic coherence and often anchor substitutional hierarchies. These patterns suggest a genre-specific restructuring within anthropocentric logics. We argue that estrangement in science fiction operates as a controlled perturbation of semantic norms, detectable through probabilistic modelling, and that MLMs, when used critically, serve as interpretive instruments capable of surfacing genre-conditioned ontological assumptions. This study contributes to the methodological repertoire of computational literary studies and offers new insights into the linguistic infrastructure of science fiction. --- ### Improving Industrial Injection Molding Processes with Explainable AI for Quality Classification Authors: Georg Rottenwalter, Marcel Tilly, Victor Owolabi Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08108v1 Machine learning is an essential tool for optimizing industrial quality control processes. However, the complexity of machine learning models often limits their practical applicability due to a lack of interpretability. Additionally, many industrial machines lack comprehensive sensor technology, making data acquisition incomplete and challenging. Explainable Artificial Intelligence offers a solution by providing insights into model decision-making and identifying the most relevant features for classification. In this paper, we investigate the impact of feature reduction using XAI techniques on the quality classification of injection-molded parts. We apply SHAP, Grad-CAM, and LIME to analyze feature importance in a Long Short-Term Memory model trained on real production data. By reducing the original 19 input features to 9 and 6, we evaluate the trade-off between model accuracy, inference speed, and interpretability. Our results show that reducing features can improve generalization while maintaining high classification performance, with an small increase in inference speed. This approach enhances the feasibility of AI-driven quality control, particularly for industrial settings with limited sensor capabilities, and paves the way for more efficient and interpretable machine learning applications in manufacturing. --- ### PerspAct: Enhancing LLM Situated Collaboration Skills through Perspective Taking and Active Vision Authors: Sabrina Patania, Luca Annese, Anita Pellegrini, Silvia Serino, Anna Lambiase, Luca Pallonetto, Silvia Rossi, Simone Colombani, Tom Foulsham, Azzurra Ruggeri, Dimitri Ognibene Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08098v1 Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal foundation models have significantly broadened their application in robotics and collaborative systems. However, effective multi-agent interaction necessitates robust perspective-taking capabilities, enabling models to interpret both physical and epistemic viewpoints. Current training paradigms often neglect these interactive contexts, resulting in challenges when models must reason about the subjectivity of individual perspectives or navigate environments with multiple observers. This study evaluates whether explicitly incorporating diverse points of view using the ReAct framework, an approach that integrates reasoning and acting, can enhance an LLM's ability to understand and ground the demands of other agents. We extend the classic Director task by introducing active visual exploration across a suite of seven scenarios of increasing perspective-taking complexity. These scenarios are designed to challenge the agent's capacity to resolve referential ambiguity based on visual access and interaction, under varying state representations and prompting strategies, including ReAct-style reasoning. Our results demonstrate that explicit perspective cues, combined with active exploration strategies, significantly improve the model's interpretative accuracy and collaborative effectiveness. These findings highlight the potential of integrating active perception with perspective-taking mechanisms in advancing LLMs' application in robotics and multi-agent systems, setting a foundation for future research into adaptive and context-aware AI systems. --- ### Model Predictive Control is almost Optimal for Heterogeneous Restless Multi-armed Bandits Authors: Dheeraj Narasimha, Nicolas Gast Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: math.OC, math.PR, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08097v2 We consider a general infinite horizon Heterogeneous Restless multi-armed Bandit (RMAB). Heterogeneity is a fundamental problem for many real-world systems largely because it resists many concentration arguments. In this paper, we assume that each of the $N$ arms can have different model parameters. Model predictive control is a well-known control strategy that repeatedly solves a finite-horizon optimization problem of length $τ$ to produce a policy that can be applied to an infinite-horizon setting. In this paper, we adopt this approach by repeatedly solving a finite linear program, yielding what we call the LP-update policy for the infinite-horizon problem. Under a mild assumption of uniform ergodicity, we show an $\mathcal{O}\left(\sqrt{1/N}\right)$ suboptimality gap on this well-known algorithm that works very well in practice. In addition to the LP-update policy we are able to derive a finite-horizon policy (LP-update with recomputation) that segments the infinite time horizon into finite horizon problems that allow us to explicitly connect the length of computation time to the acceptable error tolerance. Our simulations demonstrate that our algorithm works extremely well even when this finite-horizon, $τ$, is very small (in our case $5$), which makes it computationally efficient. Our theoretical results draw on techniques from the model predictive control literature by invoking the concept of \emph{dissipativity} and generalize quite easily to the more general weakly coupled heterogeneous Markov Decision Process setting. In addition, we draw a parallel between our own policy and the LP-index policy by showing that the LP-index policy corresponds to $τ=1$. --- ### Stuart-Landau Oscillatory Graph Neural Network Authors: Kaicheng Zhang, David N. Reynolds, Piero Deidda, Francesco Tudisco Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08094v2 Oscillatory Graph Neural Networks (OGNNs) are an emerging class of physics-inspired architectures designed to mitigate oversmoothing and vanishing gradient problems in deep GNNs. In this work, we introduce the Complex-Valued Stuart-Landau Graph Neural Network (SLGNN), a novel architecture grounded in Stuart-Landau oscillator dynamics. Stuart-Landau oscillators are canonical models of limit-cycle behavior near Hopf bifurcations, which are fundamental to synchronization theory and are widely used in e.g. neuroscience for mesoscopic brain modeling. Unlike harmonic oscillators and phase-only Kuramoto models, Stuart-Landau oscillators retain both amplitude and phase dynamics, enabling rich phenomena such as amplitude regulation and multistable synchronization. The proposed SLGNN generalizes existing phase-centric Kuramoto-based OGNNs by allowing node feature amplitudes to evolve dynamically according to Stuart-Landau dynamics, with explicit tunable hyperparameters (such as the Hopf-parameter and the coupling strength) providing additional control over the interplay between feature amplitudes and network structure. We conduct extensive experiments across node classification, graph classification, and graph regression tasks, demonstrating that SLGNN outperforms existing OGNNs and establishes a novel, expressive, and theoretically grounded framework for deep oscillatory architectures on graphs. --- ### Quantizing Whisper-small: How design choices affect ASR performance Authors: Arthur Söhler, Julian Irigoyen, Andreas Søeborg Kirkedal Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: eess.AS, cs.CL, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08093v2 Large speech recognition models like Whisper-small achieve high accuracy but are difficult to deploy on edge devices due to their high computational demand. To this end, we present a unified, cross-library evaluation of post-training quantization (PTQ) on Whisper-small that disentangles the impact of quantization scheme, method, granularity, and bit-width. Our study is based on four libraries: PyTorch, Optimum-Quanto, HQQ, and bitsandbytes. Experiments on LibriSpeech test-clean and test-other show that dynamic int8 quantization with Quanto offers the best trade-off, reducing model size by 57% while improving on the baseline's word error rate. Static quantization performed worse, likely due to Whisper's Transformer architecture, while more aggressive formats (e.g., nf4, int3) achieved up to 71% compression at the cost of accuracy in noisy conditions. Overall, our results demonstrate that carefully chosen PTQ methods can substantially reduce model size and inference cost without retraining, enabling efficient deployment of Whisper-small on constrained hardware. --- ### Pruning as Regularization: Sensitivity-Aware One-Shot Pruning in ASR Authors: Julian Irigoyen, Arthur Söhler, Andreas Søeborg Kirkedal Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: eess.AS, cs.CL, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08092v2 We challenge the conventional view of neural network pruning as solely a compression technique, demonstrating that one-shot magnitude pruning serves as a powerful implicit regularizer for ASR. Using Whisper-small, we combine gradient- and Fisher-based sensitivity diagnostics with targeted, component-wise pruning. This reveals architectural asymmetries: decoder FFNs are pruning-fragile, whereas decoder self-attention and the last encoder layers contain redundancy that, when removed, improves generalization. Without fine-tuning, pruning 50% of decoder self-attention reduces WER by 2.38% absolute (20.44% relative) on LibriSpeech test-other; pruning the last four encoder layers at 50% instead yields a 1.72% absolute (14.8% relative) improvement. Gains persisted on Common Voice and TED-LIUM datasets. Beyond regularization benefits, our sensitivity-aware approach enables more aggressive one-shot compression. At 40% sparsity, where established global pruning approaches catastrophically fail, our method preserves near-baseline accuracy. This positions pruning as a first-class architectural design tool: knowing where to prune is as important as how much to prune. --- ### Gateways to Tractability for Satisfiability in Pearl's Causal Hierarchy Authors: Robert Ganian, Marlene Gründel, Simon Wietheger Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08091v2 Pearl's Causal Hierarchy (PCH) is a central framework for reasoning about probabilistic, interventional, and counterfactual statements, yet the satisfiability problem for PCH formulas is computationally intractable in almost all classical settings. We revisit this challenge through the lens of parameterized complexity and identify the first gateways to tractability. Our results include fixed-parameter and XP-algorithms for satisfiability in key probabilistic and counterfactual fragments, using parameters such as primal treewidth and the number of variables, together with matching hardness results that map the limits of tractability. Technically, we depart from the dynamic programming paradigm typically employed for treewidth-based algorithms and instead exploit structural characterizations of well-formed causal models, providing a new algorithmic toolkit for causal reasoning. --- ### StableMorph: High-Quality Face Morph Generation with Stable Diffusion Authors: Wassim Kabbani, Kiran Raja, Raghavendra Ramachandra, Christoph Busch Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08090v1 Face morphing attacks threaten the integrity of biometric identity systems by enabling multiple individuals to share a single identity. To develop and evaluate effective morphing attack detection (MAD) systems, we need access to high-quality, realistic morphed images that reflect the challenges posed in real-world scenarios. However, existing morph generation methods often produce images that are blurry, riddled with artifacts, or poorly constructed making them easy to detect and not representative of the most dangerous attacks. In this work, we introduce StableMorph, a novel approach that generates highly realistic, artifact-free morphed face images using modern diffusion-based image synthesis. Unlike prior methods, StableMorph produces full-head images with sharp details, avoids common visual flaws, and offers unmatched control over visual attributes. Through extensive evaluation, we show that StableMorph images not only rival or exceed the quality of genuine face images but also maintain a strong ability to fool face recognition systems posing a greater challenge to existing MAD solutions and setting a new standard for morph quality in research and operational testing. StableMorph improves the evaluation of biometric security by creating more realistic and effective attacks and supports the development of more robust detection systems. --- ### Beyond the Pixels: VLM-based Evaluation of Identity Preservation in Reference-Guided Synthesis Authors: Aditi Singhania, Krutik Malani, Riddhi Dhawan, Arushi Jain, Garv Tandon, Nippun Sharma, Souymodip Chakraborty, Vineet Batra, Ankit Phogat Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08087v1 Evaluating identity preservation in generative models remains a critical yet unresolved challenge. Existing metrics rely on global embeddings or coarse VLM prompting, failing to capture fine-grained identity changes and providing limited diagnostic insight. We introduce Beyond the Pixels, a hierarchical evaluation framework that decomposes identity assessment into feature-level transformations. Our approach guides VLMs through structured reasoning by (1) hierarchically decomposing subjects into (type, style) -> attribute -> feature decision tree, and (2) prompting for concrete transformations rather than abstract similarity scores. This decomposition grounds VLM analysis in verifiable visual evidence, reducing hallucinations and improving consistency. We validate our framework across four state-of-the-art generative models, demonstrating strong alignment with human judgments in measuring identity consistency. Additionally, we introduce a new benchmark specifically designed to stress-test generative models. It comprises 1,078 image-prompt pairs spanning diverse subject types, including underrepresented categories such as anthropomorphic and animated characters, and captures an average of six to seven transformation axes per prompt. --- ### Dynamic Sparsity: Challenging Common Sparsity Assumptions for Learning World Models in Robotic Reinforcement Learning Benchmarks Authors: Muthukumar Pandaram, Jakob Hollenstein, David Drexel, Samuele Tosatto, Antonio Rodríguez-Sánchez, Justus Piater Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08086v2 The use of learned dynamics models, also known as world models, can improve the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning. Recent work suggests that the underlying causal graphs of such dynamics models are sparsely connected, with each of the future state variables depending only on a small subset of the current state variables, and that learning may therefore benefit from sparsity priors. Similarly, temporal sparsity, i.e. sparsely and abruptly changing local dynamics, has also been proposed as a useful inductive bias. In this work, we critically examine these assumptions by analyzing ground-truth dynamics from a set of robotic reinforcement learning environments in the MuJoCo Playground benchmark suite, aiming to determine whether the proposed notions of state and temporal sparsity actually tend to hold in typical reinforcement learning tasks. We study (i) whether the causal graphs of environment dynamics are sparse, (ii) whether such sparsity is state-dependent, and (iii) whether local system dynamics change sparsely. Our results indicate that global sparsity is rare, but instead the tasks show local, state-dependent sparsity in their dynamics and this sparsity exhibits distinct structures, appearing in temporally localized clusters (e.g., during contact events) and affecting specific subsets of state dimensions. These findings challenge common sparsity prior assumptions in dynamics learning, emphasizing the need for grounded inductive biases that reflect the state-dependent sparsity structure of real-world dynamics. --- ### BARD10: A New Benchmark Reveals Significance of Bangla Stop-Words in Authorship Attribution Authors: Abdullah Muhammad Moosa, Nusrat Sultana, Mahdi Muhammad Moosa, Md. Miraiz Hossain Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08085v1 This research presents a comprehensive investigation into Bangla authorship attribution, introducing a new balanced benchmark corpus BARD10 (Bangla Authorship Recognition Dataset of 10 authors) and systematically analyzing the impact of stop-word removal across classical and deep learning models to uncover the stylistic significance of Bangla stop-words. BARD10 is a curated corpus of Bangla blog and opinion prose from ten contemporary authors, alongside the methodical assessment of four representative classifiers: SVM (Support Vector Machine), Bangla BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), XGBoost, and a MLP (Multilayer Perception), utilizing uniform preprocessing on both BARD10 and the benchmark corpora BAAD16 (Bangla Authorship Attribution Dataset of 16 authors). In all datasets, the classical TF-IDF + SVM baseline outperformed, attaining a macro-F1 score of 0.997 on BAAD16 and 0.921 on BARD10, while Bangla BERT lagged by as much as five points. This study reveals that BARD10 authors are highly sensitive to stop-word pruning, while BAAD16 authors remain comparatively robust highlighting genre-dependent reliance on stop-word signatures. Error analysis revealed that high frequency components transmit authorial signatures that are diminished or reduced by transformer models. Three insights are identified: Bangla stop-words serve as essential stylistic indicators; finely calibrated ML models prove effective within short-text limitations; and BARD10 connects formal literature with contemporary web dialogue, offering a reproducible benchmark for future long-context or domain-adapted transformers. --- ### HipKittens: Fast and Furious AMD Kernels Authors: William Hu, Drew Wadsworth, Sean Siddens, Stanley Winata, Daniel Y. Fu, Ryann Swann, Muhammad Osama, Christopher Ré, Simran Arora Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08083v1 AMD GPUs offer state-of-the-art compute and memory bandwidth; however, peak performance AMD kernels are written in raw assembly. To address the difficulty of mapping AI algorithms to hardware, recent work proposes C++ embedded and PyTorch-inspired domain-specific languages like ThunderKittens (TK) to simplify high performance AI kernel development on NVIDIA hardware. We explore the extent to which such primitives -- for explicit tile-based programming with optimized memory accesses and fine-grained asynchronous execution across workers -- are NVIDIA-specific or general. We provide the first detailed study of the programming primitives that lead to performant AMD AI kernels, and we encapsulate these insights in the HipKittens (HK) programming framework. We find that tile-based abstractions used in prior DSLs generalize to AMD GPUs, however we need to rethink the algorithms that instantiate these abstractions for AMD. We validate the HK primitives across CDNA3 and CDNA4 AMD platforms. In evaluations, HK kernels compete with AMD's hand-optimized assembly kernels for GEMMs and attention, and consistently outperform compiler baselines. Moreover, assembly is difficult to scale to the breadth of AI workloads; reflecting this, in some settings HK outperforms all available kernel baselines by $1.2-2.4\times$ (e.g., $d=64$ attention, GQA backwards, memory-bound kernels). These findings help pave the way for a single, tile-based software layer for high-performance AI kernels that translates across GPU vendors. HipKittens is released at: https://github.com/HazyResearch/HipKittens. --- ### Prudential Reliability of Large Language Models in Reinsurance: Governance, Assurance, and Capital Efficiency Authors: Stella C. Dong Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG, econ.GN arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08082v1 This paper develops a prudential framework for assessing the reliability of large language models (LLMs) in reinsurance. A five-pillar architecture--governance, data lineage, assurance, resilience, and regulatory alignment--translates supervisory expectations from Solvency II, SR 11-7, and guidance from EIOPA (2025), NAIC (2023), and IAIS (2024) into measurable lifecycle controls. The framework is implemented through the Reinsurance AI Reliability and Assurance Benchmark (RAIRAB), which evaluates whether governance-embedded LLMs meet prudential standards for grounding, transparency, and accountability. Across six task families, retrieval-grounded configurations achieved higher grounding accuracy (0.90), reduced hallucination and interpretive drift by roughly 40%, and nearly doubled transparency. These mechanisms lower informational frictions in risk transfer and capital allocation, showing that existing prudential doctrines already accommodate reliable AI when governance is explicit, data are traceable, and assurance is verifiable. --- ### Hierarchical Structure-Property Alignment for Data-Efficient Molecular Generation and Editing Authors: Ziyu Fan, Zhijian Huang, Yahan Li, Xiaowen Hu, Siyuan Shen, Yunliang Wang, Zeyu Zhong, Shuhong Liu, Shuning Yang, Shangqian Wu, Min Wu, Lei Deng Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08080v1 Property-constrained molecular generation and editing are crucial in AI-driven drug discovery but remain hindered by two factors: (i) capturing the complex relationships between molecular structures and multiple properties remains challenging, and (ii) the narrow coverage and incomplete annotations of molecular properties weaken the effectiveness of property-based models. To tackle these limitations, we propose HSPAG, a data-efficient framework featuring hierarchical structure-property alignment. By treating SMILES and molecular properties as complementary modalities, the model learns their relationships at atom, substructure, and whole-molecule levels. Moreover, we select representative samples through scaffold clustering and hard samples via an auxiliary variational auto-encoder (VAE), substantially reducing the required pre-training data. In addition, we incorporate a property relevance-aware masking mechanism and diversified perturbation strategies to enhance generation quality under sparse annotations. Experiments demonstrate that HSPAG captures fine-grained structure-property relationships and supports controllable generation under multiple property constraints. Two real-world case studies further validate the editing capabilities of HSPAG. --- ### Constrained and Robust Policy Synthesis with Satisfiability-Modulo-Probabilistic-Model-Checking Authors: Linus Heck, Filip Macák, Milan Češka, Sebastian Junges Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.LO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08078v2 The ability to compute reward-optimal policies for given and known finite Markov decision processes (MDPs) underpins a variety of applications across planning, controller synthesis, and verification. However, we often want policies (1) to be robust, i.e., they perform well on perturbations of the MDP and (2) to satisfy additional structural constraints regarding, e.g., their representation or implementation cost. Computing such robust and constrained policies is indeed computationally more challenging. This paper contributes the first approach to effectively compute robust policies subject to arbitrary structural constraints using a flexible and efficient framework. We achieve flexibility by allowing to express our constraints in a first-order theory over a set of MDPs, while the root for our efficiency lies in the tight integration of satisfiability solvers to handle the combinatorial nature of the problem and probabilistic model checking algorithms to handle the analysis of MDPs. Experiments on a few hundred benchmarks demonstrate the feasibility for constrained and robust policy synthesis and the competitiveness with state-of-the-art methods for various fragments of the problem. --- ### An Integrated Fusion Framework for Ensemble Learning Leveraging Gradient Boosting and Fuzzy Rule-Based Models Authors: Jinbo Li, Peng Liu, Long Chen, Witold Pedrycz, Weiping Ding Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08077v1 The integration of different learning paradigms has long been a focus of machine learning research, aimed at overcoming the inherent limitations of individual methods. Fuzzy rule-based models excel in interpretability and have seen widespread application across diverse fields. However, they face challenges such as complex design specifications and scalability issues with large datasets. The fusion of different techniques and strategies, particularly Gradient Boosting, with Fuzzy Rule-Based Models offers a robust solution to these challenges. This paper proposes an Integrated Fusion Framework that merges the strengths of both paradigms to enhance model performance and interpretability. At each iteration, a Fuzzy Rule-Based Model is constructed and controlled by a dynamic factor to optimize its contribution to the overall ensemble. This control factor serves multiple purposes: it prevents model dominance, encourages diversity, acts as a regularization parameter, and provides a mechanism for dynamic tuning based on model performance, thus mitigating the risk of overfitting. Additionally, the framework incorporates a sample-based correction mechanism that allows for adaptive adjustments based on feedback from a validation set. Experimental results substantiate the efficacy of the presented gradient boosting framework for fuzzy rule-based models, demonstrating performance enhancement, especially in terms of mitigating overfitting and complexity typically associated with many rules. By leveraging an optimal factor to govern the contribution of each model, the framework improves performance, maintains interpretability, and simplifies the maintenance and update of the models. --- ### CLIP is All You Need for Human-like Semantic Representations in Stable Diffusion Authors: Cameron Braunstein, Mariya Toneva, Eddy Ilg Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08075v1 Latent diffusion models such as Stable Diffusion achieve state-of-the-art results on text-to-image generation tasks. However, the extent to which these models have a semantic understanding of the images they generate is not well understood. In this work, we investigate whether the internal representations used by these models during text-to-image generation contain semantic information that is meaningful to humans. To do so, we perform probing on Stable Diffusion with simple regression layers that predict semantic attributes for objects and evaluate these predictions against human annotations. Surprisingly, we find that this success can actually be attributed to the text encoding occurring in CLIP rather than the reverse diffusion process. We demonstrate that groups of specific semantic attributes have markedly different decoding accuracy than the average, and are thus represented to different degrees. Finally, we show that attributes become more difficult to disambiguate from one another during the inverse diffusion process, further demonstrating the strongest semantic representation of object attributes in CLIP. We conclude that the separately trained CLIP vision-language model is what determines the human-like semantic representation, and that the diffusion process instead takes the role of a visual decoder. --- ### Online Linear Regression with Paid Stochastic Features Authors: Nadav Merlis, Kyoungseok Jang, Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08073v1 We study an online linear regression setting in which the observed feature vectors are corrupted by noise and the learner can pay to reduce the noise level. In practice, this may happen for several reasons: for example, because features can be measured more accurately using more expensive equipment, or because data providers can be incentivized to release less private features. Assuming feature vectors are drawn i.i.d. from a fixed but unknown distribution, we measure the learner's regret against the linear predictor minimizing a notion of loss that combines the prediction error and payment. When the mapping between payments and noise covariance is known, we prove that the rate $\sqrt{T}$ is optimal for regret if logarithmic factors are ignored. When the noise covariance is unknown, we show that the optimal regret rate becomes of order $T^{2/3}$ (ignoring log factors). Our analysis leverages matrix martingale concentration, showing that the empirical loss uniformly converges to the expected one for all payments and linear predictors. --- ### Clustering-based Anomaly Detection in Multivariate Time Series Data Authors: Jinbo Li, Hesam Izakian, Witold Pedrycz, Iqbal Jamal Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08072v1 Multivariate time series data come as a collection of time series describing different aspects of a certain temporal phenomenon. Anomaly detection in this type of data constitutes a challenging problem yet with numerous applications in science and engineering because anomaly scores come from the simultaneous consideration of the temporal and variable relationships. In this paper, we propose a clustering-based approach to detect anomalies concerning the amplitude and the shape of multivariate time series. First, we use a sliding window to generate a set of multivariate subsequences and thereafter apply an extended fuzzy clustering to reveal a structure present within the generated multivariate subsequences. Finally, a reconstruction criterion is employed to reconstruct the multivariate subsequences with the optimal cluster centers and the partition matrix. We construct a confidence index to quantify a level of anomaly detected in the series and apply Particle Swarm Optimization as an optimization vehicle for the problem of anomaly detection. Experimental studies completed on several synthetic and six real-world datasets suggest that the proposed methods can detect the anomalies in multivariate time series. With the help of available clusters revealed by the extended fuzzy clustering, the proposed framework can detect anomalies in the multivariate time series and is suitable for identifying anomalous amplitude and shape patterns in various application domains such as health care, weather data analysis, finance, and disease outbreak detection. --- ### Radar-APLANC: Unsupervised Radar-based Heartbeat Sensing via Augmented Pseudo-Label and Noise Contrast Authors: Ying Wang, Zhaodong Sun, Xu Cheng, Zuxian He, Xiaobai Li Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.HC, eess.SP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08071v1 Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radars can measure subtle chest wall oscillations to enable non-contact heartbeat sensing. However, traditional radar-based heartbeat sensing methods face performance degradation due to noise. Learning-based radar methods achieve better noise robustness but require costly labeled signals for supervised training. To overcome these limitations, we propose the first unsupervised framework for radar-based heartbeat sensing via Augmented Pseudo-Label and Noise Contrast (Radar-APLANC). We propose to use both the heartbeat range and noise range within the radar range matrix to construct the positive and negative samples, respectively, for improved noise robustness. Our Noise-Contrastive Triplet (NCT) loss only utilizes positive samples, negative samples, and pseudo-label signals generated by the traditional radar method, thereby avoiding dependence on expensive ground-truth physiological signals. We further design a pseudo-label augmentation approach featuring adaptive noise-aware label selection to improve pseudo-label signal quality. Extensive experiments on the Equipleth dataset and our collected radar dataset demonstrate that our unsupervised method achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art supervised methods. Our code, dataset, and supplementary materials can be accessed from https://github.com/RadarHRSensing/Radar-APLANC. --- ### Information Capacity: Evaluating the Efficiency of Large Language Models via Text Compression Authors: Cheng Yuan, Jiawei Shao, Xuelong Li Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, eess.SP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08066v7 Recent years have witnessed the rapid advancements of large language models (LLMs) and their expanding applications, leading to soaring demands for computational resources. The widespread adoption of test-time scaling further intensifies the tension between model capability and resource consumption. However, a rigorous metric that accurately reflects an LLM's inference efficiency across diverse tokenizers, parameter counts, and model architectures remains absent. Motivated by the correlation between compression and intelligence, we introduce information capacity, a measure of model efficiency based on text compression performance relative to computational complexity. A distinctive feature of information capacity is its incorporation of tokenizer efficiency, which affects inference costs but is often neglected in LLM evaluations. We assess the information capacity of 56 open-source models and observe a consistent information capacity among different-sized models within a series. Experiments on five heterogeneous datasets reveal strong linguistic biases in mainstream LLMs. Empirical results verify the accuracy of performance prediction across model sizes based on information capacity and show the correlation between information capacity and benchmark scores. This metric can be used to quantify improvements in inference efficiency and provide insights into better scaling performance for future LLM development. --- ### I2E: Real-Time Image-to-Event Conversion for High-Performance Spiking Neural Networks Authors: Ruichen Ma, Liwei Meng, Guanchao Qiao, Ning Ning, Yang Liu, Shaogang Hu Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08065v1 Spiking neural networks (SNNs) promise highly energy-efficient computing, but their adoption is hindered by a critical scarcity of event-stream data. This work introduces I2E, an algorithmic framework that resolves this bottleneck by converting static images into high-fidelity event streams. By simulating microsaccadic eye movements with a highly parallelized convolution, I2E achieves a conversion speed over 300x faster than prior methods, uniquely enabling on-the-fly data augmentation for SNN training. The framework's effectiveness is demonstrated on large-scale benchmarks. An SNN trained on the generated I2E-ImageNet dataset achieves a state-of-the-art accuracy of 60.50%. Critically, this work establishes a powerful sim-to-real paradigm where pre-training on synthetic I2E data and fine-tuning on the real-world CIFAR10-DVS dataset yields an unprecedented accuracy of 92.5%. This result validates that synthetic event data can serve as a high-fidelity proxy for real sensor data, bridging a long-standing gap in neuromorphic engineering. By providing a scalable solution to the data problem, I2E offers a foundational toolkit for developing high-performance neuromorphic systems. The open-source algorithm and all generated datasets are provided to accelerate research in the field. --- ### Taming Identity Consistency and Prompt Diversity in Diffusion Models via Latent Concatenation and Masked Conditional Flow Matching Authors: Aditi Singhania, Arushi Jain, Krutik Malani, Riddhi Dhawan, Souymodip Chakraborty, Vineet Batra, Ankit Phogat Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08061v1 Subject-driven image generation aims to synthesize novel depictions of a specific subject across diverse contexts while preserving its core identity features. Achieving both strong identity consistency and high prompt diversity presents a fundamental trade-off. We propose a LoRA fine-tuned diffusion model employing a latent concatenation strategy, which jointly processes reference and target images, combined with a masked Conditional Flow Matching (CFM) objective. This approach enables robust identity preservation without architectural modifications. To facilitate large-scale training, we introduce a two-stage Distilled Data Curation Framework: the first stage leverages data restoration and VLM-based filtering to create a compact, high-quality seed dataset from diverse sources; the second stage utilizes these curated examples for parameter-efficient fine-tuning, thus scaling the generation capability across various subjects and contexts. Finally, for filtering and quality assessment, we present CHARIS, a fine-grained evaluation framework that performs attribute-level comparisons along five key axes: identity consistency, prompt adherence, region-wise color fidelity, visual quality, and transformation diversity. --- ### MSCR: Exploring the Vulnerability of LLMs' Mathematical Reasoning Abilities Using Multi-Source Candidate Replacement Authors: Zhishen Sun, Guang Dai, Haishan Ye Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08055v1 LLMs demonstrate performance comparable to human abilities in complex tasks such as mathematical reasoning, but their robustness in mathematical reasoning under minor input perturbations still lacks systematic investigation. Existing methods generally suffer from limited scalability, weak semantic preservation, and high costs. Therefore, we propose MSCR, an automated adversarial attack method based on multi-source candidate replacement. By combining three information sources including cosine similarity in the embedding space of LLMs, the WordNet dictionary, and contextual predictions from a masked language model, we generate for each word in the input question a set of semantically similar candidates, which are then filtered and substituted one by one to carry out the attack. We conduct large-scale experiments on LLMs using the GSM8K and MATH500 benchmarks. The results show that even a slight perturbation involving only a single word can significantly reduce the accuracy of all models, with the maximum drop reaching 49.89% on GSM8K and 35.40% on MATH500, while preserving the high semantic consistency of the perturbed questions. Further analysis reveals that perturbations not only lead to incorrect outputs but also substantially increase the average response length, which results in more redundant reasoning paths and higher computational resource consumption. These findings highlight the robustness deficiencies and efficiency bottlenecks of current LLMs in mathematical reasoning tasks. --- ### Re$^{\text{2}}$MaP: Macro Placement by Recursively Prototyping and Packing Tree-based Relocating Authors: Yunqi Shi, Xi Lin, Zhiang Wang, Siyuan Xu, Shixiong Kai, Yao Lai, Chengrui Gao, Ke Xue, Mingxuan Yuan, Chao Qian, Zhi-Hua Zhou Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.AR, cs.CV, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08054v1 This work introduces the Re$^{\text{2}}$MaP method, which generates expert-quality macro placements through recursively prototyping and packing tree-based relocating. We first perform multi-level macro grouping and PPA-aware cell clustering to produce a unified connection matrix that captures both wirelength and dataflow among macros and clusters. Next, we use DREAMPlace to build a mixed-size placement prototype and obtain reference positions for each macro and cluster. Based on this prototype, we introduce ABPlace, an angle-based analytical method that optimizes macro positions on an ellipse to distribute macros uniformly near chip periphery, while optimizing wirelength and dataflow. A packing tree-based relocating procedure is then designed to jointly adjust the locations of macro groups and the macros within each group, by optimizing an expertise-inspired cost function that captures various design constraints through evolutionary search. Re$^{\text{2}}$MaP repeats the above process: Only a subset of macro groups are positioned in each iteration, and the remaining macros are deferred to the next iteration to improve the prototype's accuracy. Using a well-established backend flow with sufficient timing optimizations, Re$^{\text{2}}$MaP achieves up to 22.22% (average 10.26%) improvement in worst negative slack (WNS) and up to 97.91% (average 33.97%) improvement in total negative slack (TNS) compared to the state-of-the-art academic placer Hier-RTLMP. It also ranks higher on WNS, TNS, power, design rule check (DRC) violations, and runtime than the conference version ReMaP, across seven tested cases. Our code is available at https://github.com/lamda-bbo/Re2MaP. --- ### Dual-Process Scaffold Reasoning for Enhancing LLM Code Debugging Authors: Po-Chung Hsieh, Chin-Po Chen, Jeng-Lin Li, Ming-Ching Chang Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08052v1 Recent LLMs have demonstrated sophisticated problem-solving capabilities on various benchmarks through advanced reasoning algorithms. However, the key research question of identifying reasoning steps that balance complexity and computational efficiency remains unsolved. Recent research has increasingly drawn upon psychological theories to explore strategies for optimizing cognitive pathways. The LLM's final outputs and intermediate steps are regarded as System 1 and System 2, respectively. However, an in-depth exploration of the System 2 reasoning is still lacking. Therefore, we propose a novel psychologically backed Scaffold Reasoning framework for code debugging, which encompasses the Scaffold Stream, Analytic Stream, and Integration Stream. The construction of reference code within the Scaffold Stream is integrated with the buggy code analysis results produced by the Analytic Stream through the Integration Stream. Our framework achieves an 88.91% pass rate and an average inference time of 5.36 seconds per-problem on DebugBench, outperforming other reasoning approaches across various LLMs in both reasoning accuracy and efficiency. Further analyses elucidate the advantages and limitations of various cognitive pathways across varying problem difficulties and bug types. Our findings also corroborate the alignment of the proposed Scaffold Reasoning framework with human cognitive processes. --- ### CometNet: Contextual Motif-guided Long-term Time Series Forecasting Authors: Weixu Wang, Xiaobo Zhou, Xin Qiao, Lei Wang, Tie Qiu Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.CE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08049v1 Long-term Time Series Forecasting is crucial across numerous critical domains, yet its accuracy remains fundamentally constrained by the receptive field bottleneck in existing models. Mainstream Transformer- and Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP)-based methods mainly rely on finite look-back windows, limiting their ability to model long-term dependencies and hurting forecasting performance. Naively extending the look-back window proves ineffective, as it not only introduces prohibitive computational complexity, but also drowns vital long-term dependencies in historical noise. To address these challenges, we propose CometNet, a novel Contextual Motif-guided Long-term Time Series Forecasting framework. CometNet first introduces a Contextual Motif Extraction module that identifies recurrent, dominant contextual motifs from complex historical sequences, providing extensive temporal dependencies far exceeding limited look-back windows; Subsequently, a Motif-guided Forecasting module is proposed, which integrates the extracted dominant motifs into forecasting. By dynamically mapping the look-back window to its relevant motifs, CometNet effectively harnesses their contextual information to strengthen long-term forecasting capability. Extensive experimental results on eight real-world datasets have demonstrated that CometNet significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, particularly on extended forecast horizons. --- ### Generalized-Scale Object Counting with Gradual Query Aggregation Authors: Jer Pelhan, Alan Lukezic, Matej Kristan Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08048v1 Few-shot detection-based counters estimate the number of instances in the image specified only by a few test-time exemplars. A common approach to localize objects across multiple sizes is to merge backbone features of different resolutions. Furthermore, to enable small object detection in densely populated regions, the input image is commonly upsampled and tiling is applied to cope with the increased computational and memory requirements. Because of these ad-hoc solutions, existing counters struggle with images containing diverse-sized objects and densely populated regions of small objects. We propose GECO2, an end-to-end few-shot counting and detection method that explicitly addresses the object scale issues. A new dense query representation gradually aggregates exemplar-specific feature information across scales that leads to high-resolution dense queries that enable detection of large as well as small objects. GECO2 surpasses state-of-the-art few-shot counters in counting as well as detection accuracy by 10% while running 3x times faster at smaller GPU memory footprint. --- ### ProSona: Prompt-Guided Personalization for Multi-Expert Medical Image Segmentation Authors: Aya Elgebaly, Nikolaos Delopoulos, Juliane Hörner-Rieber, Carolin Rippke, Sebastian Klüter, Luca Boldrini, Lorenzo Placidi, Riccardo Dal Bello, Nicolaus Andratschke, Michael Baumgartl, Claus Belka, Christopher Kurz et al. Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08046v1 Automated medical image segmentation suffers from high inter-observer variability, particularly in tasks such as lung nodule delineation, where experts often disagree. Existing approaches either collapse this variability into a consensus mask or rely on separate model branches for each annotator. We introduce ProSona, a two-stage framework that learns a continuous latent space of annotation styles, enabling controllable personalization via natural language prompts. A probabilistic U-Net backbone captures diverse expert hypotheses, while a prompt-guided projection mechanism navigates this latent space to generate personalized segmentations. A multi-level contrastive objective aligns textual and visual representations, promoting disentangled and interpretable expert styles. Across the LIDC-IDRI lung nodule and multi-institutional prostate MRI datasets, ProSona reduces the Generalized Energy Distance by 17% and improves mean Dice by more than one point compared with DPersona. These results demonstrate that natural-language prompts can provide flexible, accurate, and interpretable control over personalized medical image segmentation. Our implementation is available online 1 . --- ### DynaAct: Large Language Model Reasoning with Dynamic Action Spaces Authors: Xueliang Zhao, Wei Wu, Jian Guan, Qintong Li, Lingpeng Kong Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08043v1 In modern sequential decision-making systems, the construction of an optimal candidate action space is critical to efficient inference. However, existing approaches either rely on manually defined action spaces that lack scalability or utilize unstructured spaces that render exhaustive search computationally prohibitive. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named \textsc{DynaAct} for automatically constructing a compact action space to enhance sequential reasoning in complex problem-solving scenarios. Our method first estimates a proxy for the complete action space by extracting general sketches observed in a corpus covering diverse complex reasoning problems using large language models. We then formulate a submodular function that jointly evaluates candidate actions based on their utility to the current state and their diversity, and employ a greedy algorithm to select an optimal candidate set. Extensive experiments on six diverse standard benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly improves overall performance, while maintaining efficient inference without introducing substantial latency. The implementation is available at https://github.com/zhaoxlpku/DynaAct. --- ### Towards a Standard, Enterprise-Relevant Agentic AI Benchmark: Lessons from 5.5 billion tokens' worth of agentic AI evaluations Authors: JV Roig Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08042v1 Enterprise adoption of agentic AI systems requires reliable evaluation methods that reflect real-world deployment scenarios. Traditional LLM benchmarks suffer from training data contamination and fail to measure agentic capabilities such as multi-step tool use and decision-making under uncertainty. We present the Kamiwaza Agentic Merit Index (KAMI) v0.1, an enterprise-focused benchmark that addresses both contamination resistance and agentic evaluation. Through 170,000 LLM test items processing over 5.5 billion tokens across 35 model configurations, we demonstrate that traditional benchmark rankings poorly predict practical agentic performance. Notably, newer generation models like Llama 4 or Qwen 3 do not always outperform their older generation variants on enterprise-relevant tasks, contradicting traditional benchmark trends. We also present insights on cost-performance tradeoffs, model-specific behavioral patterns, and the impact of reasoning capabilities on token efficiency -- findings critical for enterprises making deployment decisions. --- ### WEDepth: Efficient Adaptation of World Knowledge for Monocular Depth Estimation Authors: Gongshu Wang, Zhirui Wang, Kan Yang Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08036v1 Monocular depth estimation (MDE) has widely applicable but remains highly challenging due to the inherently ill-posed nature of reconstructing 3D scenes from single 2D images. Modern Vision Foundation Models (VFMs), pre-trained on large-scale diverse datasets, exhibit remarkable world understanding capabilities that benefit for various vision tasks. Recent studies have demonstrated significant improvements in MDE through fine-tuning these VFMs. Inspired by these developments, we propose WEDepth, a novel approach that adapts VFMs for MDE without modi-fying their structures and pretrained weights, while effec-tively eliciting and leveraging their inherent priors. Our method employs the VFM as a multi-level feature en-hancer, systematically injecting prior knowledge at differ-ent representation levels. Experiments on NYU-Depth v2 and KITTI datasets show that WEDepth establishes new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, achieving competi-tive results compared to both diffusion-based approaches (which require multiple forward passes) and methods pre-trained on relative depth. Furthermore, we demonstrate our method exhibits strong zero-shot transfer capability across diverse scenarios. --- ### From Sequential to Recursive: Enhancing Decision-Focused Learning with Bidirectional Feedback Authors: Xinyu Wang, Jinxiao Du, Yiyang Peng, Wei Ma Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08035v2 Decision-focused learning (DFL) has emerged as a powerful end-to-end alternative to conventional predict-then-optimize (PTO) pipelines by directly optimizing predictive models through downstream decision losses. Existing DFL frameworks are limited by their strictly sequential structure, referred to as sequential DFL (S-DFL). However, S-DFL fails to capture the bidirectional feedback between prediction and optimization in complex interaction scenarios. In view of this, we first time propose recursive decision-focused learning (R-DFL), a novel framework that introduces bidirectional feedback between downstream optimization and upstream prediction. We further extend two distinct differentiation methods: explicit unrolling via automatic differentiation and implicit differentiation based on fixed-point methods, to facilitate efficient gradient propagation in R-DFL. We rigorously prove that both methods achieve comparable gradient accuracy, with the implicit method offering superior computational efficiency. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets, including the newsvendor problem and the bipartite matching problem, demonstrate that R-DFL not only substantially enhances the final decision quality over sequential baselines but also exhibits robust adaptability across diverse scenarios in closed-loop decision-making problems. --- ### Perceptual Quality Assessment of 3D Gaussian Splatting: A Subjective Dataset and Prediction Metric Authors: Zhaolin Wan, Yining Diao, Jingqi Xu, Hao Wang, Zhiyang Li, Xiaopeng Fan, Wangmeng Zuo, Debin Zhao Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08032v1 With the rapid advancement of 3D visualization, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a leading technique for real-time, high-fidelity rendering. While prior research has emphasized algorithmic performance and visual fidelity, the perceptual quality of 3DGS-rendered content, especially under varying reconstruction conditions, remains largely underexplored. In practice, factors such as viewpoint sparsity, limited training iterations, point downsampling, noise, and color distortions can significantly degrade visual quality, yet their perceptual impact has not been systematically studied. To bridge this gap, we present 3DGS-QA, the first subjective quality assessment dataset for 3DGS. It comprises 225 degraded reconstructions across 15 object types, enabling a controlled investigation of common distortion factors. Based on this dataset, we introduce a no-reference quality prediction model that directly operates on native 3D Gaussian primitives, without requiring rendered images or ground-truth references. Our model extracts spatial and photometric cues from the Gaussian representation to estimate perceived quality in a structure-aware manner. We further benchmark existing quality assessment methods, spanning both traditional and learning-based approaches. Experimental results show that our method consistently achieves superior performance, highlighting its robustness and effectiveness for 3DGS content evaluation. The dataset and code are made publicly available at https://github.com/diaoyn/3DGSQA to facilitate future research in 3DGS quality assessment. --- ### Multi-modal Deepfake Detection and Localization with FPN-Transformer Authors: Chende Zheng, Ruiqi Suo, Zhoulin Ji, Jingyi Deng, Fangbin Yi, Chenhao Lin, Chao Shen Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08031v1 The rapid advancement of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and diffusion models has enabled the creation of highly realistic deepfake content, posing significant threats to digital trust across audio-visual domains. While unimodal detection methods have shown progress in identifying synthetic media, their inability to leverage cross-modal correlations and precisely localize forged segments limits their practicality against sophisticated, fine-grained manipulations. To address this, we introduce a multi-modal deepfake detection and localization framework based on a Feature Pyramid-Transformer (FPN-Transformer), addressing critical gaps in cross-modal generalization and temporal boundary regression. The proposed approach utilizes pre-trained self-supervised models (WavLM for audio, CLIP for video) to extract hierarchical temporal features. A multi-scale feature pyramid is constructed through R-TLM blocks with localized attention mechanisms, enabling joint analysis of cross-context temporal dependencies. The dual-branch prediction head simultaneously predicts forgery probabilities and refines temporal offsets of manipulated segments, achieving frame-level localization precision. We evaluate our approach on the test set of the IJCAI'25 DDL-AV benchmark, showing a good performance with a final score of 0.7535 for cross-modal deepfake detection and localization in challenging environments. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our approach and provide a novel way for generalized deepfake detection. Our code is available at https://github.com/Zig-HS/MM-DDL --- ### BiCA: Effective Biomedical Dense Retrieval with Citation-Aware Hard Negatives Authors: Aarush Sinha, Pavan Kumar S, Roshan Balaji, Nirav Pravinbhai Bhatt Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.IR, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08029v2 Hard negatives are essential for training effective retrieval models. Hard-negative mining typically relies on ranking documents using cross-encoders or static embedding models based on similarity metrics such as cosine distance. Hard negative mining becomes challenging for biomedical and scientific domains due to the difficulty in distinguishing between source and hard negative documents. However, referenced documents naturally share contextual relevance with the source document but are not duplicates, making them well-suited as hard negatives. In this work, we propose BiCA: Biomedical Dense Retrieval with Citation-Aware Hard Negatives, an approach for hard-negative mining by utilizing citation links in 20,000 PubMed articles for improving a domain-specific small dense retriever. We fine-tune the GTE_small and GTE_Base models using these citation-informed negatives and observe consistent improvements in zero-shot dense retrieval using nDCG@10 for both in-domain and out-of-domain tasks on BEIR and outperform baselines on long-tailed topics in LoTTE using Success@5. Our findings highlight the potential of leveraging document link structure to generate highly informative negatives, enabling state-of-the-art performance with minimal fine-tuning and demonstrating a path towards highly data-efficient domain adaptation. --- ### Generalizable Insights for Graph Transformers in Theory and Practice Authors: Timo Stoll, Luis Müller, Christopher Morris Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08028v1 Graph Transformers (GTs) have shown strong empirical performance, yet current architectures vary widely in their use of attention mechanisms, positional embeddings (PEs), and expressivity. Existing expressivity results are often tied to specific design choices and lack comprehensive empirical validation on large-scale data. This leaves a gap between theory and practice, preventing generalizable insights that exceed particular application domains. Here, we propose the Generalized-Distance Transformer (GDT), a GT architecture using standard attention that incorporates many advancements for GTs from recent years, and develop a fine-grained understanding of the GDT's representation power in terms of attention and PEs. Through extensive experiments, we identify design choices that consistently perform well across various applications, tasks, and model scales, demonstrating strong performance in a few-shot transfer setting without fine-tuning. Our evaluation covers over eight million graphs with roughly 270M tokens across diverse domains, including image-based object detection, molecular property prediction, code summarization, and out-of-distribution algorithmic reasoning. We distill our theoretical and practical findings into several generalizable insights about effective GT design, training, and inference. --- ### Knowledge-Augmented Long-CoT Generation for Complex Biomolecular Reasoning Authors: Tianwen Lyu, Xiang Zhuang, Keyan Ding, Xinzhe Cao, Lei Liang, Wei Zhao, Qiang Zhang, Huajun Chen Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08024v1 Understanding complex biomolecular mechanisms requires multi-step reasoning across molecular interactions, signaling cascades, and metabolic pathways. While large language models(LLMs) show promise in such tasks, their application to biomolecular problems is hindered by logical inconsistencies and the lack of grounding in domain knowledge. Existing approaches often exacerbate these issues: reasoning steps may deviate from biological facts or fail to capture long mechanistic dependencies. To address these challenges, we propose a Knowledge-Augmented Long-CoT Reasoning framework that integrates LLMs with knowledge graph-based multi-hop reasoning chains. The framework constructs mechanistic chains via guided multi-hop traversal and pruning on the knowledge graph; these chains are then incorporated into supervised fine-tuning to improve factual grounding and further refined with reinforcement learning to enhance reasoning reliability and consistency. Furthermore, to overcome the shortcomings of existing benchmarks, which are often restricted in scale and scope and lack annotations for deep reasoning chains, we introduce PrimeKGQA, a comprehensive benchmark for biomolecular question answering. Experimental results on both PrimeKGQA and existing datasets demonstrate that although larger closed-source models still perform well on relatively simple tasks, our method demonstrates clear advantages as reasoning depth increases, achieving state-of-the-art performance on multi-hop tasks that demand traversal of structured biological knowledge. These findings highlight the effectiveness of combining structured knowledge with advanced reasoning strategies for reliable and interpretable biomolecular reasoning. --- ### Numerical Sensitivity and Robustness: Exploring the Flaws of Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models Authors: Zhishen Sun, Guang Dai, Ivor Tsang, Haishan Ye Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08022v1 LLMs have made significant progress in the field of mathematical reasoning, but whether they have true the mathematical understanding ability is still controversial. To explore this issue, we propose a new perturbation framework to evaluate LLMs' reasoning ability in complex environments by injecting additional semantically irrelevant perturbation sentences and gradually increasing the perturbation intensity. At the same time, we use an additional perturbation method: core questioning instruction missing, to further analyze the LLMs' problem-solving mechanism. The experimental results show that LLMs perform stably when facing perturbation sentences without numbers, but there is also a robustness boundary. As the perturbation intensity increases, the performance exhibits varying degrees of decline; when facing perturbation sentences with numbers, the performance decreases more significantly, most open source models with smaller parameters decrease by nearly or even more than 10%, and further increasing with the enhancement of perturbation intensity, with the maximum decrease reaching 51.55%. Even the most advanced commercial LLMs have seen a 3%-10% performance drop. By analyzing the reasoning process of LLMs in detail, We find that models are more sensitive to perturbations with numerical information and are more likely to give incorrect answers when disturbed by irrelevant numerical information. The higher the perturbation intensity, the more obvious these defects are. At the same time, in the absence of core questioning instruction, models can still maintain an accuracy of 20%-40%, indicating that LLMs may rely on memory templates or pattern matching to complete the task, rather than logical reasoning. In general, our work reveals the shortcomings and limitations of current LLMs in their reasoning capabilities, which is of great significance for the further development of LLMs. --- ### High-Quality Proposal Encoding and Cascade Denoising for Imaginary Supervised Object Detection Authors: Zhiyuan Chen, Yuelin Guo, Zitong Huang, Haoyu He, Renhao Lu, Weizhe Zhang Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08018v1 Object detection models demand large-scale annotated datasets, which are costly and labor-intensive to create. This motivated Imaginary Supervised Object Detection (ISOD), where models train on synthetic images and test on real images. However, existing methods face three limitations: (1) synthetic datasets suffer from simplistic prompts, poor image quality, and weak supervision; (2) DETR-based detectors, due to their random query initialization, struggle with slow convergence and overfitting to synthetic patterns, hindering real-world generalization; (3) uniform denoising pressure promotes model overfitting to pseudo-label noise. We propose Cascade HQP-DETR to address these limitations. First, we introduce a high-quality data pipeline using LLaMA-3, Flux, and Grounding DINO to generate the FluxVOC and FluxCOCO datasets, advancing ISOD from weak to full supervision. Second, our High-Quality Proposal guided query encoding initializes object queries with image-specific priors from SAM-generated proposals and RoI-pooled features, accelerating convergence while steering the model to learn transferable features instead of overfitting to synthetic patterns. Third, our cascade denoising algorithm dynamically adjusts training weights through progressively increasing IoU thresholds across decoder layers, guiding the model to learn robust boundaries from reliable visual cues rather than overfitting to noisy labels. Trained for just 12 epochs solely on FluxVOC, Cascade HQP-DETR achieves a SOTA 61.04\% mAP@0.5 on PASCAL VOC 2007, outperforming strong baselines, with its competitive real-data performance confirming the architecture's universal applicability. --- ### HyCoRA: Hyper-Contrastive Role-Adaptive Learning for Role-Playing Authors: Shihao Yang, Zhicong Lu, Yong Yang, Bo Lv, Yang Shen, Nayu Liu Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08017v1 Multi-character role-playing aims to equip models with the capability to simulate diverse roles. Existing methods either use one shared parameterized module across all roles or assign a separate parameterized module to each role. However, the role-shared module may ignore distinct traits of each role, weakening personality learning, while the role-specific module may overlook shared traits across multiple roles, hindering commonality modeling. In this paper, we propose a novel HyCoRA: Hyper-Contrastive Role-Adaptive learning framework, which efficiently improves multi-character role-playing ability by balancing the learning of distinct and shared traits. Specifically, we propose a Hyper-Half Low-Rank Adaptation structure, where one half is a role-specific module generated by a lightweight hyper-network, and the other half is a trainable role-shared module. The role-specific module is devised to represent distinct persona signatures, while the role-shared module serves to capture common traits. Moreover, to better reflect distinct personalities across different roles, we design a hyper-contrastive learning mechanism to help the hyper-network distinguish their unique characteristics. Extensive experimental results on both English and Chinese available benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our framework. Further GPT-4 evaluations and visual analyses also verify the capability of HyCoRA to capture role characteristics. --- ### AVOID-JACK: Avoidance of Jackknifing for Swarms of Long Heavy Articulated Vehicles Authors: Adrian Schönnagel, Michael Dubé, Christoph Steup, Felix Keppler, Sanaz Mostaghim Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08016v1 This paper presents a novel approach to avoiding jackknifing and mutual collisions in Heavy Articulated Vehicles (HAVs) by leveraging decentralized swarm intelligence. In contrast to typical swarm robotics research, our robots are elongated and exhibit complex kinematics, introducing unique challenges. Despite its relevance to real-world applications such as logistics automation, remote mining, airport baggage transport, and agricultural operations, this problem has not been addressed in the existing literature. To tackle this new class of swarm robotics problems, we propose a purely reaction-based, decentralized swarm intelligence strategy tailored to automate elongated, articulated vehicles. The method presented in this paper prioritizes jackknifing avoidance and establishes a foundation for mutual collision avoidance. We validate our approach through extensive simulation experiments and provide a comprehensive analysis of its performance. For the experiments with a single HAV, we observe that for 99.8% jackknifing was successfully avoided and that 86.7% and 83.4% reach their first and second goals, respectively. With two HAVs interacting, we observe 98.9%, 79.4%, and 65.1%, respectively, while 99.7% of the HAVs do not experience mutual collisions. --- ### Invisible Triggers, Visible Threats! Road-Style Adversarial Creation Attack for Visual 3D Detection in Autonomous Driving Authors: Jian Wang, Lijun He, Yixing Yong, Haixia Bi, Fan Li Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08015v2 Modern autonomous driving (AD) systems leverage 3D object detection to perceive foreground objects in 3D environments for subsequent prediction and planning. Visual 3D detection based on RGB cameras provides a cost-effective solution compared to the LiDAR paradigm. While achieving promising detection accuracy, current deep neural network-based models remain highly susceptible to adversarial examples. The underlying safety concerns motivate us to investigate realistic adversarial attacks in AD scenarios. Previous work has demonstrated the feasibility of placing adversarial posters on the road surface to induce hallucinations in the detector. However, the unnatural appearance of the posters makes them easily noticeable by humans, and their fixed content can be readily targeted and defended. To address these limitations, we propose the AdvRoad to generate diverse road-style adversarial posters. The adversaries have naturalistic appearances resembling the road surface while compromising the detector to perceive non-existent objects at the attack locations. We employ a two-stage approach, termed Road-Style Adversary Generation and Scenario-Associated Adaptation, to maximize the attack effectiveness on the input scene while ensuring the natural appearance of the poster, allowing the attack to be carried out stealthily without drawing human attention. Extensive experiments show that AdvRoad generalizes well to different detectors, scenes, and spoofing locations. Moreover, physical attacks further demonstrate the practical threats in real-world environments. --- ### DOA Estimation with Lightweight Network on LLM-Aided Simulated Acoustic Scenes Authors: Haowen Li, Zhengding Luo, Dongyuan Shi, Boxiang Wang, Junwei Ji, Ziyi Yang, Woon-Seng Gan Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08012v1 Direction-of-Arrival (DOA) estimation is critical in spatial audio and acoustic signal processing, with wide-ranging applications in real-world. Most existing DOA models are trained on synthetic data by convolving clean speech with room impulse responses (RIRs), which limits their generalizability due to constrained acoustic diversity. In this paper, we revisit DOA estimation using a recently introduced dataset constructed with the assistance of large language models (LLMs), which provides more realistic and diverse spatial audio scenes. We benchmark several representative neural-based DOA methods on this dataset and propose LightDOA, a lightweight DOA estimation model based on depthwise separable convolutions, specifically designed for mutil-channel input in varying environments. Experimental results show that LightDOA achieves satisfactory accuracy and robustness across various acoustic scenes while maintaining low computational complexity. This study not only highlights the potential of spatial audio synthesized with the assistance of LLMs in advancing robust and efficient DOA estimation research, but also highlights LightDOA as efficient solution for resource-constrained applications. --- ### From Noise to Latent: Generating Gaussian Latents for INR-Based Image Compression Authors: Chaoyi Lin, Yaojun Wu, Yue Li, Junru Li, Kai Zhang, Li Zhang Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08009v1 Recent implicit neural representation (INR)-based image compression methods have shown competitive performance by overfitting image-specific latent codes. However, they remain inferior to end-to-end (E2E) compression approaches due to the absence of expressive latent representations. On the other hand, E2E methods rely on transmitting latent codes and requiring complex entropy models, leading to increased decoding complexity. Inspired by the normalization strategy in E2E codecs where latents are transformed into Gaussian noise to demonstrate the removal of spatial redundancy, we explore the inverse direction: generating latents directly from Gaussian noise. In this paper, we propose a novel image compression paradigm that reconstructs image-specific latents from a multi-scale Gaussian noise tensor, deterministically generated using a shared random seed. A Gaussian Parameter Prediction (GPP) module estimates the distribution parameters, enabling one-shot latent generation via reparameterization trick. The predicted latent is then passed through a synthesis network to reconstruct the image. Our method eliminates the need to transmit latent codes while preserving latent-based benefits, achieving competitive rate-distortion performance on Kodak and CLIC dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to explore Gaussian latent generation for learned image compression. --- ### Combining LLM Semantic Reasoning with GNN Structural Modeling for Multi-View Multi-Label Feature Selection Authors: Zhiqi Chen, Yuzhou Liu, Jiarui Liu, Wanfu Gao Published: 2025-11-11 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08008v2 Multi-view multi-label feature selection aims to identify informative features from heterogeneous views, where each sample is associated with multiple interdependent labels. This problem is particularly important in machine learning involving high-dimensional, multimodal data such as social media, bioinformatics or recommendation systems. Existing Multi-View Multi-Label Feature Selection (MVMLFS) methods mainly focus on analyzing statistical information of data, but seldom consider semantic information. In this paper, we aim to use these two types of information jointly and propose a method that combines Large Language Models (LLMs) semantic reasoning with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) structural modeling for MVMLFS. Specifically, the method consists of three main components. (1) LLM is first used as an evaluation agent to assess the latent semantic relevance among feature, view, and label descriptions. (2) A semantic-aware heterogeneous graph with two levels is designed to represent relations among features, views and labels: one is a semantic graph representing semantic relations, and the other is a statistical graph. (3) A lightweight Graph Attention Network (GAT) is applied to learn node embedding in the heterogeneous graph as feature saliency scores for ranking and selection. Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art baselines, and it is still effective when applied to small-scale datasets, showcasing its robustness, flexibility, and generalization ability. ---