# Research Papers — 2025-11 · bundle page 15 of 197 > Full-text markdown of papers #701–750 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/15 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-11/page/14.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-11/page/16.md) ### NeuMatC: A General Neural Framework for Fast Parametric Matrix Operation Authors: Chuan Wang, Xi-le Zhao, Zhilong Han, Liang Li, Deyu Meng, Michael K. Ng Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22934v1 Matrix operations (e.g., inversion and singular value decomposition (SVD)) are fundamental in science and engineering. In many emerging real-world applications (such as wireless communication and signal processing), these operations must be performed repeatedly over matrices with parameters varying continuously. However, conventional methods tackle each matrix operation independently, underexploring the inherent low-rankness and continuity along the parameter dimension, resulting in significantly redundant computation. To address this challenge, we propose \textbf{\textit{Neural Matrix Computation Framework} (NeuMatC)}, which elegantly tackles general parametric matrix operation tasks by leveraging the underlying low-rankness and continuity along the parameter dimension. Specifically, NeuMatC unsupervisedly learns a low-rank and continuous mapping from parameters to their corresponding matrix operation results. Once trained, NeuMatC enables efficient computations at arbitrary parameters using only a few basic operations (e.g., matrix multiplications and nonlinear activations), significantly reducing redundant computations. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the promising performance of NeuMatC, exemplified by over $3\times$ speedup in parametric inversion and $10\times$ speedup in parametric SVD compared to the widely used NumPy baseline in wireless communication, while maintaining acceptable accuracy. --- ### Artwork Interpretation with Vision Language Models: A Case Study on Emotions and Emotion Symbols Authors: Sebastian Padó, Kerstin Thomas Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22929v1 Emotions are a fundamental aspect of artistic expression. Due to their abstract nature, there is a broad spectrum of emotion realization in artworks. These are subject to historical change and their analysis requires expertise in art history. In this article, we investigate which aspects of emotional expression can be detected by current (2025) vision language models (VLMs). We present a case study of three VLMs (Llava-Llama and two Qwen models) in which we ask these models four sets of questions of increasing complexity about artworks (general content, emotional content, expression of emotions, and emotion symbols) and carry out a qualitative expert evaluation. We find that the VLMs recognize the content of the images surprisingly well and often also which emotions they depict and how they are expressed. The models perform best for concrete images but fail for highly abstract or highly symbolic images. Reliable recognition of symbols remains fundamentally difficult. Furthermore, the models continue to exhibit the well-known LLM weakness of providing inconsistent answers to related questions. --- ### MAS-Shield: A Defense Framework for Secure and Efficient LLM MAS Authors: Kaixiang Wang, Zhaojiacheng Zhou, Bunyod Suvonov, Jiong Lou, Zihan Wang, Yuxiang Zheng, Yidan Lin, Wutong Zhang, Xianghan Kong, Chentao Wu, Jie Li Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.MA, cs.AI, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22924v3 Large Language Model (LLM)-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are susceptible to linguistic attacks that can trigger cascading failures across the network. Existing defenses face a fundamental dilemma: lightweight single-auditor methods are prone to single points of failure, while robust committee-based approaches incur prohibitive computational costs in multi-turn interactions. To address this challenge, we propose \textbf{MAS-Shield}, a secure and efficient defense framework designed with a coarse-to-fine filtering pipeline. Rather than applying uniform scrutiny, MAS-Shield dynamically allocates defense resources through a three-stage protocol: (1) \textbf{Critical Agent Selection } strategically targets high-influence nodes to narrow the defense surface; (2) \textbf{Light Auditing} employs lightweight sentry models to rapidly filter the majority of benign cases; and (3) \textbf{Global Consensus Auditing} escalates only suspicious or ambiguous signals to a heavyweight committee for definitive arbitration. This hierarchical design effectively optimizes the security-efficiency trade-off. Experiments demonstrate that MAS-Shield achieves a 92.5\% recovery rate against diverse adversarial scenarios and reduces defense latency by over 70\% compared to existing methods. --- ### Optical diffraction neural networks assisted computational ghost imaging through dynamic scattering media Authors: Yue-Gang Li, Ze Zheng, Jun-jie Wang, Ming He, Jianping Fan, Tailong Xiao, Guihua Zeng Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: physics.optics, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22913v1 Ghost imaging leverages a single-pixel detector with no spatial resolution to acquire object echo intensity signals, which are correlated with illumination patterns to reconstruct an image. This architecture inherently mitigates scattering interference between the object and the detector but sensitive to scattering between the light source and the object. To address this challenge, we propose an optical diffraction neural networks (ODNNs) assisted ghost imaging method for imaging through dynamic scattering media. In our scheme, a set of fixed ODNNs, trained on simulated datasets, is incorporated into the experimental optical path to actively correct random distortions induced by dynamic scattering media. Experimental validation using rotating single-layer and double-layer ground glass confirms the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, our scheme can also be combined with physics-prior-based reconstruction algorithms, enabling high-quality imaging under undersampled conditions. This work demonstrates a novel strategy for imaging through dynamic scattering media, which can be extended to other imaging systems. --- ### MICCAI STS 2024 Challenge: Semi-Supervised Instance-Level Tooth Segmentation in Panoramic X-ray and CBCT Images Authors: Yaqi Wang, Zhi Li, Chengyu Wu, Jun Liu, Yifan Zhang, Jiaxue Ni, Qian Luo, Jialuo Chen, Hongyuan Zhang, Jin Liu, Can Han, Kaiwen Fu et al. Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: eess.IV, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22911v1 Orthopantomogram (OPGs) and Cone-Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) are vital for dentistry, but creating large datasets for automated tooth segmentation is hindered by the labor-intensive process of manual instance-level annotation. This research aimed to benchmark and advance semi-supervised learning (SSL) as a solution for this data scarcity problem. We organized the 2nd Semi-supervised Teeth Segmentation (STS 2024) Challenge at MICCAI 2024. We provided a large-scale dataset comprising over 90,000 2D images and 3D axial slices, which includes 2,380 OPG images and 330 CBCT scans, all featuring detailed instance-level FDI annotations on part of the data. The challenge attracted 114 (OPG) and 106 (CBCT) registered teams. To ensure algorithmic excellence and full transparency, we rigorously evaluated the valid, open-source submissions from the top 10 (OPG) and top 5 (CBCT) teams, respectively. All successful submissions were deep learning-based SSL methods. The winning semi-supervised models demonstrated impressive performance gains over a fully-supervised nnU-Net baseline trained only on the labeled data. For the 2D OPG track, the top method improved the Instance Affinity (IA) score by over 44 percentage points. For the 3D CBCT track, the winning approach boosted the Instance Dice score by 61 percentage points. This challenge confirms the substantial benefit of SSL for complex, instance-level medical image segmentation tasks where labeled data is scarce. The most effective approaches consistently leveraged hybrid semi-supervised frameworks that combined knowledge from foundational models like SAM with multi-stage, coarse-to-fine refinement pipelines. Both the challenge dataset and the participants' submitted code have been made publicly available on GitHub (https://github.com/ricoleehduu/STS-Challenge-2024), ensuring transparency and reproducibility. --- ### ViGG: Robust RGB-D Point Cloud Registration using Visual-Geometric Mutual Guidance Authors: Congjia Chen, Shen Yan, Yufu Qu Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22908v1 Point cloud registration is a fundamental task in 3D vision. Most existing methods only use geometric information for registration. Recently proposed RGB-D registration methods primarily focus on feature fusion or improving feature learning, which limits their ability to exploit image information and hinders their practical applicability. In this paper, we propose ViGG, a robust RGB-D registration method using mutual guidance. First, we solve clique alignment in a visual-geometric combination form, employing a geometric guidance design to suppress ambiguous cliques. Second, to mitigate accuracy degradation caused by noise in visual matches, we propose a visual-guided geometric matching method that utilizes visual priors to determine the search space, enabling the extraction of high-quality, noise-insensitive correspondences. This mutual guidance strategy brings our method superior robustness, making it applicable for various RGB-D registration tasks. The experiments on 3DMatch, ScanNet and KITTI datasets show that our method outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods in both learning-free and learning-based settings. Code is available at https://github.com/ccjccjccj/ViGG. --- ### See, Rank, and Filter: Important Word-Aware Clip Filtering via Scene Understanding for Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection Authors: YuEun Lee, Jung Uk Kim Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22906v1 Video moment retrieval (MR) and highlight detection (HD) with natural language queries aim to localize relevant moments and key highlights in a video clips. However, existing methods overlook the importance of individual words, treating the entire text query and video clips as a black-box, which hinders contextual understanding. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that enables fine-grained clip filtering by identifying and prioritizing important words in the query. Our method integrates image-text scene understanding through Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and enhances the semantic understanding of video clips. We introduce a feature enhancement module (FEM) to capture important words from the query and a ranking-based filtering module (RFM) to iteratively refine video clips based on their relevance to these important words. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior performance in both MR and HD tasks. Our code is available at: https://github.com/VisualAIKHU/SRF. --- ### Language-conditioned world model improves policy generalization by reading environmental descriptions Authors: Anh Nguyen, Stefan Lee Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22904v1 To interact effectively with humans in the real world, it is important for agents to understand language that describes the dynamics of the environment--that is, how the environment behaves--rather than just task instructions specifying "what to do". Understanding this dynamics-descriptive language is important for human-agent interaction and agent behavior. Recent work address this problem using a model-based approach: language is incorporated into a world model, which is then used to learn a behavior policy. However, these existing methods either do not demonstrate policy generalization to unseen games or rely on limiting assumptions. For instance, assuming that the latency induced by inference-time planning is tolerable for the target task or expert demonstrations are available. Expanding on this line of research, we focus on improving policy generalization from a language-conditioned world model while dropping these assumptions. We propose a model-based reinforcement learning approach, where a language-conditioned world model is trained through interaction with the environment, and a policy is learned from this model--without planning or expert demonstrations. Our method proposes Language-aware Encoder for Dreamer World Model (LED-WM) built on top of DreamerV3. LED-WM features an observation encoder that uses an attention mechanism to explicitly ground language descriptions to entities in the observation. We show that policies trained with LED-WM generalize more effectively to unseen games described by novel dynamics and language compared to other baselines in several settings in two environments: MESSENGER and MESSENGER-WM.To highlight how the policy can leverage the trained world model before real-world deployment, we demonstrate the policy can be improved through fine-tuning on synthetic test trajectories generated by the world model. --- ### Leveraging Textual Compositional Reasoning for Robust Change Captioning Authors: Kyu Ri Park, Jiyoung Park, Seong Tae Kim, Hong Joo Lee, Jung Uk Kim Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22903v1 Change captioning aims to describe changes between a pair of images. However, existing works rely on visual features alone, which often fail to capture subtle but meaningful changes because they lack the ability to represent explicitly structured information such as object relationships and compositional semantics. To alleviate this, we present CORTEX (COmpositional Reasoning-aware TEXt-guided), a novel framework that integrates complementary textual cues to enhance change understanding. In addition to capturing cues from pixel-level differences, CORTEX utilizes scene-level textual knowledge provided by Vision Language Models (VLMs) to extract richer image text signals that reveal underlying compositional reasoning. CORTEX consists of three key modules: (i) an Image-level Change Detector that identifies low-level visual differences between paired images, (ii) a Reasoning-aware Text Extraction (RTE) module that use VLMs to generate compositional reasoning descriptions implicit in visual features, and (iii) an Image-Text Dual Alignment (ITDA) module that aligns visual and textual features for fine-grained relational reasoning. This enables CORTEX to reason over visual and textual features and capture changes that are otherwise ambiguous in visual features alone. --- ### From Points to Clouds: Learning Robust Semantic Distributions for Multi-modal Prompts Authors: Weiran Li, Yeqiang Liu, Yijie Wei, Mina Han, Xin Liu, Zhenbo Li Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22897v1 Multimodal Prompt Learning (MPL) has emerged as a pivotal technique for adapting large-scale Visual Language Models (VLMs). However, current MPL methods are fundamentally limited by their optimization of a single, static point representation. This paradigm is inherently brittle, leads to overfitting on base classes, and generalizes poorly to novel or ambiguous categories. We challenge this point paradigm, proposing that robust generalization requires learning a semantic cloud (i.e., a distribution over the embedding space). To achieve this, we introduce Points-to-Clouds (P2C), a novel framework inspired by diffusion models that reframes prompt learning as a dynamic denoising task. At the core of P2C is a dual denoising mechanism: a Dynamic Prompt Denoising (DPD) mechanism perturbs text prompts with sophisticated, annealed noise to learn a smoother semantic landscape, while an auxiliary V-L Mapper denoising loss re-tasks the mapper as a denoising autoencoder. This forces the mapper to reconstruct clean visual prompts from noisy text inputs, ensuring robust cross-modal alignment. Extensive experiments across 11 datasets demonstrate that P2C consistently outperforms strong baselines. On the base-to-novel generalization benchmark, our method achieves a Harmonic Mean of 79.7%, representing a relative improvement of 1.4% over the baseline. The code and models are available at https://vranlee.github.io/P2C/. --- ### DM$^3$T: Harmonizing Modalities via Diffusion for Multi-Object Tracking Authors: Weiran Li, Yeqiang Liu, Yijie Wei, Mina Han, Qiannan Guo, Zhenbo Li Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22896v1 Multi-object tracking (MOT) is a fundamental task in computer vision with critical applications in autonomous driving and robotics. Multimodal MOT that integrates visible light and thermal infrared information is particularly essential for robust autonomous driving systems. However, effectively fusing these heterogeneous modalities is challenging. Simple strategies like concatenation or addition often fail to bridge the significant non-linear distribution gap between their feature representations, which can lead to modality conflicts and degrade tracking accuracy. Drawing inspiration from the connection between multimodal MOT and the iterative refinement in diffusion models, this paper proposes DM$^3$T, a novel framework that reformulates multimodal fusion as an iterative feature alignment process to generate accurate and temporally coherent object trajectories. Our approach performs iterative cross-modal harmonization through a proposed Cross-Modal Diffusion Fusion (C-MDF) module. In this process, features from both modalities provide mutual guidance, iteratively projecting them onto a shared, consistent feature manifold. This enables the learning of complementary information and achieves deeper fusion compared to conventional methods. Additionally, we introduce a plug-and-play Diffusion Refiner (DR) to enhance and refine the unified feature representation. To further improve tracking robustness, we design a Hierarchical Tracker that adaptively handles confidence estimation. DM$^3$T unifies object detection, state estimation, and data association into a comprehensive online tracking framework without complex post-processing. Extensive experiments on the VT-MOT benchmark demonstrate that our method achieves 41.7 HOTA, representing a 1.54% relative improvement over existing state-of-the-art methods. The code and models are available at https://vranlee.github.io/DM-3-T/. --- ### Switching-time bioprocess control with pulse-width-modulated optogenetics Authors: Sebastián Espinel-Ríos Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: eess.SY, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22893v2 Biotechnology can benefit from dynamic control to improve production efficiency. In this context, optogenetics enables modulation of gene expression using light as an external input, allowing fine-tuning of protein levels to unlock dynamic metabolic control and regulation of cell growth. Optogenetic systems can be actuated by light intensity. However, relying solely on intensity-driven control (i.e., signal amplitude) may fail to properly tune optogenetic bioprocesses when the dose-response relationship (i.e., light intensity versus gene-expression strength) is steep. In these cases, tunability is effectively constrained to either fully active or fully repressed gene expression, with little intermediate regulation. Pulse-width modulation can alleviate this issue by alternating between fully ON and OFF light intensity within forcing periods, thereby smoothing the average response and enhancing process controllability. Optimizing pulse-width-modulated optogenetics entails a switching-time optimal control problem with a binary input over multiple forcing periods. While this can be formulated as a mixed-integer optimization problem on a refined control grid with monotonic input constraints, the number of decision variables can grow rapidly with increasing control-grid resolution within forcing periods and with the total number of forcing periods, complicating the task. Here, we propose an alternative solution based on reinforcement learning. We parametrize control actions via the duty cycle, a continuous proxy variable that encodes the ON-to-OFF switching time within each forcing period, thereby respecting the intrinsic binary nature of the light intensity while avoiding fine-grid binary decision variables. --- ### ClearGCD: Mitigating Shortcut Learning For Robust Generalized Category Discovery Authors: Kailin Lyu, Jianwei He, Long Xiao, Jianing Zeng, Liang Fan, Lin Shu, Jie Hao Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22892v1 In open-world scenarios, Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) requires identifying both known and novel categories within unlabeled data. However, existing methods often suffer from prototype confusion caused by shortcut learning, which undermines generalization and leads to forgetting of known classes. We propose ClearGCD, a framework designed to mitigate reliance on non-semantic cues through two complementary mechanisms. First, Semantic View Alignment (SVA) generates strong augmentations via cross-class patch replacement and enforces semantic consistency using weak augmentations. Second, Shortcut Suppression Regularization (SSR) maintains an adaptive prototype bank that aligns known classes while encouraging separation of potential novel ones. ClearGCD can be seamlessly integrated into parametric GCD approaches and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple benchmarks. --- ### ORION: Teaching Language Models to Reason Efficiently in the Language of Thought Authors: Kumar Tanmay, Kriti Aggarwal, Paul Pu Liang, Subhabrata Mukherjee Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22891v1 Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve strong performance in mathematics, code generation, and task planning, but their reliance on long chains of verbose "thinking" tokens leads to high latency, redundancy, and incoherent reasoning paths. Inspired by the Language of Thought Hypothesis, which posits that human reasoning operates over a symbolic, compositional mental language called Mentalese, we introduce a framework that trains models to reason in a similarly compact style. Mentalese encodes abstract reasoning as ultra-compressed, structured tokens, enabling models to solve complex problems with far fewer steps. To improve both efficiency and accuracy, we propose SHORTER LENGTH PREFERENCE OPTIMIZATION (SLPO), a reinforcement learning method that rewards concise solutions that stay correct, while still allowing longer reasoning when needed. Applied to Mentalese-aligned models, SLPO yields significantly higher compression rates by enabling concise reasoning that preserves the benefits of detailed thinking without the computational overhead. Across benchmarks including AIME 2024 and 2025, MinervaMath, OlympiadBench, Math500, and AMC, our ORION models produce reasoning traces with 4-16x fewer tokens, achieve up to 5x lower inference latency, and reduce training costs by 7-9x relative to the DeepSeek R1 Distilled model, while maintaining 90-98% of its accuracy. ORION also surpasses Claude and ChatGPT-4o by up to 5% in accuracy while maintaining 2x compression. These results show that Mentalese-style compressed reasoning offers a step toward human-like cognitive efficiency, enabling real-time, cost-effective reasoning without sacrificing accuracy. --- ### Adversarial Training for Process Reward Models Authors: Gurusha Juneja, Deepak Nathani, William Yang Wang Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22888v1 Process Reward Models (PRMs) enhance reasoning ability of LLMs by providing step-level supervision. However, their widespread adoption is limited due to expensive manual step-level annotation and poor generalization of static training data to novel errors. We introduce Adversarially Trained PRMs (\texttt{APRM}), where a Generator ($G$) learns to produce reasoning errors to deceive a PRM ($R$), while $R$ concurrently learns to detect them. This interaction yields progressively harder negatives for $R$, improving its robustness and generalization to novel errors without requiring manual step-level labels. Averaged across diverse mathematical reasoning benchmarks, \texttt{APRM} improves solver accuracy by $+3.4$ percentage points (pp) over the strongest PRM baseline. \texttt{APRM} achieves gains of $+5.3$ pp on out-of-distribution tasks. --- ### Modeling Chaotic Pedestrian Behavior Using Chaos Indicators and Supervised Learning Authors: Md. Muhtashim Shahrier, Nazmul Haque, Md Asif Raihan, Md. Hadiuzzaman Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22887v1 As cities around the world aim to improve walkability and safety, understanding the irregular and unpredictable nature of pedestrian behavior has become increasingly important. This study introduces a data-driven framework for modeling chaotic pedestrian movement using empirically observed trajectory data and supervised learning. Videos were recorded during both daytime and nighttime conditions to capture pedestrian dynamics under varying ambient and traffic contexts. Pedestrian trajectories were extracted through computer vision techniques, and behavioral chaos was quantified using four chaos metrics: Approximate Entropy and Lyapunov Exponent, each computed for both velocity and direction change. A Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was then applied to consolidate these indicators into a unified chaos score. A comprehensive set of individual, group-level, and contextual traffic features was engineered and used to train Random Forest and CatBoost regression models. CatBoost models consistently achieved superior performance. The best daytime PCA-based CatBoost model reached an R^2 of 0.8319, while the nighttime PCA-based CatBoost model attained an R^2 of 0.8574. SHAP analysis highlighted that features such as distance travel, movement duration, and speed variability were robust contributors to chaotic behavior. The proposed framework enables practitioners to quantify and anticipate behavioral instability in real-world settings. Planners and engineers can use chaos scores to identify high-risk pedestrian zones, apprise infrastructure improvements, and calibrate realistic microsimulation models. The approach also supports adaptive risk assessment in automated vehicle systems by capturing short-term motion unpredictability grounded in observable, interpretable features. --- ### InsightEval: An Expert-Curated Benchmark for Assessing Insight Discovery in LLM-Driven Data Agents Authors: Zhenghao Zhu, Yuanfeng Song, Xin Chen, Chengzhong Liu, Yakun Cui, Caleb Chen Cao, Sirui Han, Yike Guo Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22884v2 Data analysis has become an indispensable part of scientific research. To discover the latent knowledge and insights hidden within massive datasets, we need to perform deep exploratory analysis to realize their full value. With the advent of large language models (LLMs) and multi-agent systems, more and more researchers are making use of these technologies for insight discovery. However, there are few benchmarks for evaluating insight discovery capabilities. As one of the most comprehensive existing frameworks, InsightBench also suffers from many critical flaws: format inconsistencies, poorly conceived objectives, and redundant insights. These issues may significantly affect the quality of data and the evaluation of agents. To address these issues, we thoroughly investigate shortcomings in InsightBench and propose essential criteria for a high-quality insight benchmark. Regarding this, we develop a data-curation pipeline to construct a new dataset named InsightEval. We further introduce a novel metric to measure the exploratory performance of agents. Through extensive experiments on InsightEval, we highlight prevailing challenges in automated insight discovery and raise some key findings to guide future research in this promising direction. --- ### FEANEL: A Benchmark for Fine-Grained Error Analysis in K-12 English Writing Authors: Jingheng Ye, Shen Wang, Jiaqi Chen, Hebin Wang, Deqing Zou, Yanyu Zhu, Jiwei Tang, Hai-Tao Zheng, Ruitong Liu, Haoyang Li, Yanfeng Wang, Qingsong Wen Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22883v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed artificial intelligence, offering profound opportunities for educational applications. However, their ability to provide fine-grained educational feedback for K-12 English writing remains underexplored. In this paper, we challenge the error analysis and pedagogical skills of LLMs by introducing the problem of Fine-grained Error Analysis for English Learners and present the Fine-grained Error ANalysis for English Learners (FEANEL) Benchmark. The benchmark comprises 1,000 essays written by elementary and secondary school students, and a well-developed English writing error taxonomy. Each error is annotated by language education experts and categorized by type, severity, and explanatory feedback, using a part-of-speech-based taxonomy they co-developed. We evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs on the FEANEL Benchmark to explore their error analysis and pedagogical abilities. Experimental results reveal significant gaps in current LLMs' ability to perform fine-grained error analysis, highlighting the need for advancements in particular methods for educational applications. --- ### Normalizing Flows on Quotient Manifolds via Boundary Quotients Authors: William Ghanem, Benjamin Cai Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.LG, math.PR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22882v3 We introduce boundary quotients and present a framework for learning densities on manifolds that arise as boundary quotients of simpler domains. We show that this framework can be used to construct normalizing flows on quotient manifolds $N/G$, where a discrete group $G$ acts on $N$. We instantiate this construction for genus-$g$ surfaces $Σ_g$. When $G$ is finite, we show applicability to symmetry aware learning; we demonstrate this on cyclic quotients of the 3-sphere. Experiments on lens spaces show that simple pre-quotient RealNVP models can achieve strong results while being substantially cheaper to evaluate. --- ### Serving Heterogeneous LoRA Adapters in Distributed LLM Inference Systems Authors: Shashwat Jaiswal, Shrikara Arun, Anjaly Parayil, Ankur Mallick, Spyros Mastorakis, Alind Khare, Chloi Alverti, Renee St Amant, Chetan Bansal, Victor Rühle, Josep Torrellas Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.DC, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22880v1 Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has become the de facto method for parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs), enabling rapid adaptation to diverse domains. In production, LoRA-based models are served at scale, creating multi-tenant environments with hundreds of adapters sharing a base model. However, state-of-the-art serving systems co-batch heterogeneous adapters without accounting for rank (size) variability, leading to severe performance skew, which ultimately requires adding more GPUs to satisfy service-level objectives (SLOs). Existing optimizations, focused on loading, caching, and kernel execution, ignore this heterogeneity, leaving GPU resources underutilized. We present LoRAServe, a workload-aware dynamic adapter placement and routing framework designed to tame rank diversity in LoRA serving. By dynamically rebalancing adapters across GPUs and leveraging GPU Direct RDMA for remote access, LoRAServe maximizes throughput and minimizes tail latency under real-world workload drift. Evaluations on production traces from Company X show that LoRAServe elicits up to 2$\times$ higher throughput, up to 9$\times$ lower TTFT, while using up to 50% fewer GPUs under SLO constraints compared to state-of-the-art systems. --- ### CNN-Based Framework for Pedestrian Age and Gender Classification Using Far-View Surveillance in Mixed-Traffic Intersections Authors: Shisir Shahriar Arif, Md. Muhtashim Shahrier, Nazmul Haque, Md Asif Raihan, Md. Hadiuzzaman Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.CV, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22873v1 Pedestrian safety remains a pressing concern in congested urban intersections, particularly in low- and middle-income countries where traffic is multimodal, and infrastructure often lacks formal control. Demographic factors like age and gender significantly influence pedestrian vulnerability, yet real-time monitoring systems rarely capture this information. To address this gap, this study proposes a deep learning framework that classifies pedestrian age group and gender from far-view intersection footage using convolutional neural networks (CNNs), without relying on facial recognition or high-resolution imagery. The classification is structured as a unified six-class problem, distinguishing adult, teenager, and child pedestrians for both males and females, based on full-body visual cues. Video data was collected from three high-risk intersections in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Two CNN architectures were implemented: ResNet50, a deep convolutional neural network pretrained on ImageNet, and a custom lightweight CNN optimized for computational efficiency. Eight model variants explored combinations of pooling strategies and optimizers. ResNet50 with Max Pooling and SGD achieved the highest accuracy (86.19%), while the custom CNN performed comparably (84.15%) with fewer parameters and faster training. The model's efficient design enables real-time inference on standard surveillance feeds. For practitioners, this system provides a scalable, cost-effective tool to monitor pedestrian demographics at intersections using existing camera infrastructure. Its outputs can shape intersection design, optimize signal timing, and enable targeted safety interventions for vulnerable groups such as children or the elderly. By offering demographic insights often missing in conventional traffic data, the framework supports more inclusive, data-driven planning in mixed-traffic environments. --- ### Scalable Diffusion Transformer for Conditional 4D fMRI Synthesis Authors: Jungwoo Seo, David Keetae Park, Shinjae Yoo, Jiook Cha Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.CV, q-bio.NC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22870v1 Generating whole-brain 4D fMRI sequences conditioned on cognitive tasks remains challenging due to the high-dimensional, heterogeneous BOLD dynamics across subjects/acquisitions and the lack of neuroscience-grounded validation. We introduce the first diffusion transformer for voxelwise 4D fMRI conditional generation, combining 3D VQ-GAN latent compression with a CNN-Transformer backbone and strong task conditioning via AdaLN-Zero and cross-attention. On HCP task fMRI, our model reproduces task-evoked activation maps, preserves the inter-task representational structure observed in real data (RSA), achieves perfect condition specificity, and aligns ROI time-courses with canonical hemodynamic responses. Performance improves predictably with scale, reaching task-evoked map correlation of 0.83 and RSA of 0.98, consistently surpassing a U-Net baseline on all metrics. By coupling latent diffusion with a scalable backbone and strong conditioning, this work establishes a practical path to conditional 4D fMRI synthesis, paving the way for future applications such as virtual experiments, cross-site harmonization, and principled augmentation for downstream neuroimaging models. --- ### JBE-QA: Japanese Bar Exam QA Dataset for Assessing Legal Domain Knowledge Authors: Zhihan Cao, Fumihito Nishino, Hiroaki Yamada, Nguyen Ha Thanh, Yusuke Miyao, Ken Satoh Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22869v1 We introduce JBE-QA, a Japanese Bar Exam Question-Answering dataset to evaluate large language models' legal knowledge. Derived from the multiple-choice (tanto-shiki) section of the Japanese bar exam (2015-2024), JBE-QA provides the first comprehensive benchmark for Japanese legal-domain evaluation of LLMs. It covers the Civil Code, the Penal Code, and the Constitution, extending beyond the Civil Code focus of prior Japanese resources. Each question is decomposed into independent true/false judgments with structured contextual fields. The dataset contains 3,464 items with balanced labels. We evaluate 26 LLMs, including proprietary, open-weight, Japanese-specialised, and reasoning models. Our results show that proprietary models with reasoning enabled perform best, and the Constitution questions are generally easier than the Civil Code or the Penal Code questions. --- ### ARM-Explainer -- Explaining and improving graph neural network predictions for the maximum clique problem using node features and association rule mining Authors: Bharat Sharman, Elkafi Hassini Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.LG, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22866v1 Numerous graph neural network (GNN)-based algorithms have been proposed to solve graph-based combinatorial optimization problems (COPs), but methods to explain their predictions remain largely undeveloped. We introduce ARM-Explainer, a post-hoc, model-level explainer based on association rule mining, and demonstrate it on the predictions of the hybrid geometric scattering (HGS) GNN for the maximum clique problem (MCP), a canonical NP-hard graph-based COP. The eight most explanatory association rules discovered by ARM-Explainer achieve high median lift and confidence values of 2.42 and 0.49, respectively, on test instances from the TWITTER and BHOSLIB-DIMACS benchmark datasets. ARM-Explainer identifies the most important node features, together with their value ranges, that influence the GNN's predictions on these datasets. Furthermore, augmenting the GNN with informative node features substantially improves its performance on the MCP, increasing the median largest-found clique size by 22% (from 29.5 to 36) on large graphs from the BHOSLIB-DIMACS dataset. --- ### SUPER-AD: Semantic Uncertainty-aware Planning for End-to-End Robust Autonomous Driving Authors: Wonjeong Ryu, Seungjun Yu, Seokha Moon, Hojun Choi, Junsung Park, Jinkyu Kim, Hyunjung Shim Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22865v1 End-to-End (E2E) planning has become a powerful paradigm for autonomous driving, yet current systems remain fundamentally uncertainty-blind. They assume perception outputs are fully reliable, even in ambiguous or poorly observed scenes, leaving the planner without an explicit measure of uncertainty. To address this limitation, we propose a camera-only E2E framework that estimates aleatoric uncertainty directly in BEV space and incorporates it into planning. Our method produces a dense, uncertainty-aware drivability map that captures both semantic structure and geometric layout at pixel-level resolution. To further promote safe and rule-compliant behavior, we introduce a lane-following regularization that encodes lane structure and traffic norms. This prior stabilizes trajectory planning under normal conditions while preserving the flexibility needed for maneuvers such as overtaking or lane changes. Together, these components enable robust and interpretable trajectory planning, even under challenging uncertainty conditions. Evaluated on the NAVSIM benchmark, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering substantial gains on both the challenging NAVHARD and NAVSAFE subsets. These results demonstrate that our principled aleatoric uncertainty modeling combined with driving priors significantly advances the safety and reliability of camera-only E2E autonomous driving. --- ### CoordSpeaker: Exploiting Gesture Captioning for Coordinated Caption-Empowered Co-Speech Gesture Generation Authors: Fengyi Fang, Sicheng Yang, Wenming Yang Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22863v1 Co-speech gesture generation has significantly advanced human-computer interaction, yet speaker movements remain constrained due to the omission of text-driven non-spontaneous gestures (e.g., bowing while talking). Existing methods face two key challenges: 1) the semantic prior gap due to the lack of descriptive text annotations in gesture datasets, and 2) the difficulty in achieving coordinated multimodal control over gesture generation. To address these challenges, this paper introduces CoordSpeaker, a comprehensive framework that enables coordinated caption-empowered co-speech gesture synthesis. Our approach first bridges the semantic prior gap through a novel gesture captioning framework, leveraging a motion-language model to generate descriptive captions at multiple granularities. Building upon this, we propose a conditional latent diffusion model with unified cross-dataset motion representation and a hierarchically controlled denoiser to achieve highly controlled, coordinated gesture generation. CoordSpeaker pioneers the first exploration of gesture understanding and captioning to tackle the semantic gap in gesture generation while offering a novel perspective of bidirectional gesture-text mapping. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method produces high-quality gestures that are both rhythmically synchronized with speeches and semantically coherent with arbitrary captions, achieving superior performance with higher efficiency compared to existing approaches. --- ### Bridging Modalities via Progressive Re-alignment for Multimodal Test-Time Adaptation Authors: Jiacheng Li, Songhe Feng Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22862v2 Test-time adaptation (TTA) enables online model adaptation using only unlabeled test data, aiming to bridge the gap between source and target distributions. However, in multimodal scenarios, varying degrees of distribution shift across different modalities give rise to a complex coupling effect of unimodal shallow feature shift and cross-modal high-level semantic misalignment, posing a major obstacle to extending existing TTA methods to the multimodal field. To address this challenge, we propose a novel multimodal test-time adaptation (MMTTA) framework, termed as Bridging Modalities via Progressive Re-alignment (BriMPR). BriMPR, consisting of two progressively enhanced modules, tackles the coupling effect with a divide-and-conquer strategy. Specifically, we first decompose MMTTA into multiple unimodal feature alignment sub-problems. By leveraging the strong function approximation ability of prompt tuning, we calibrate the unimodal global feature distributions to their respective source distributions, so as to achieve the initial semantic re-alignment across modalities. Subsequently, we assign the credible pseudo-labels to combinations of masked and complete modalities, and introduce inter-modal instance-wise contrastive learning to further enhance the information interaction among modalities and refine the alignment. Extensive experiments on MMTTA tasks, including both corruption-based and real-world domain shift benchmarks, demonstrate the superiority of our method. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Luchicken/BriMPR. --- ### Escaping Barren Plateaus in Variational Quantum Algorithms Using Negative Learning Rate in Quantum Internet of Things Authors: Ratun Rahman, Dinh C. Nguyen Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: quant-ph, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22861v2 Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs) are becoming the primary computational primitive for next-generation quantum computers, particularly those embedded as resource-constrained accelerators in the emerging Quantum Internet of Things (QIoT). However, under such device-constrained execution conditions, the scalability of learning is severely limited by barren plateaus, where gradients collapse to zero and training stalls. This poses a practical challenge to delivering VQA-enabled intelligence on QIoT endpoints, which often have few qubits, constrained shot budgets, and strict latency requirements. In this paper, we present a novel approach for escaping barren plateaus by including negative learning rates into the optimization process in QIoT devices. Our method introduces controlled instability into model training by switching between positive and negative learning phases, allowing recovery of significant gradients and exploring flatter areas in the loss landscape. We theoretically evaluate the effect of negative learning on gradient variance and propose conditions under which it helps escape from barren zones. The experimental findings on typical VQA benchmarks show consistent improvements in both convergence and simulation results over traditional optimizers. By escaping barren plateaus, our approach leads to a novel pathway for robust optimization in quantum-classical hybrid models. --- ### MARVO: Marine-Adaptive Radiance-aware Visual Odometry Authors: Sacchin Sundar, Atman Kikani, Aaliya Alam, Sumukh Shrote, A. Nayeemulla Khan, A. Shahina Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22860v1 Underwater visual localization remains challenging due to wavelength-dependent attenuation, poor texture, and non-Gaussian sensor noise. We introduce MARVO, a physics-aware, learning-integrated odometry framework that fuses underwater image formation modeling, differentiable matching, and reinforcement-learning optimization. At the front-end, we extend transformer-based feature matcher with a Physics Aware Radiance Adapter that compensates for color channel attenuation and contrast loss, yielding geometrically consistent feature correspondences under turbidity. These semi dense matches are combined with inertial and pressure measurements inside a factor-graph backend, where we formulate a keyframe-based visual-inertial-barometric estimator using GTSAM library. Each keyframe introduces (i) Pre-integrated IMU motion factors, (ii) MARVO-derived visual pose factors, and (iii) barometric depth priors, giving a full-state MAP estimate in real time. Lastly, we introduce a Reinforcement-Learningbased Pose-Graph Optimizer that refines global trajectories beyond local minima of classical least-squares solvers by learning optimal retraction actions on SE(2). --- ### RAG System for Supporting Japanese Litigation Procedures: Faithful Response Generation Complying with Legal Norms Authors: Yuya Ishihara, Atsushi Keyaki, Hiroaki Yamada, Ryutaro Ohara, Mihoko Sumida Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.CL, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22858v1 This study discusses the essential components that a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based LLM system should possess in order to support Japanese medical litigation procedures complying with legal norms. In litigation, expert commissioners, such as physicians, architects, accountants, and engineers, provide specialized knowledge to help judges clarify points of dispute. When considering the substitution of these expert roles with a RAG-based LLM system, the constraint of strict adherence to legal norms is imposed. Specifically, three requirements arise: (1) the retrieval module must retrieve appropriate external knowledge relevant to the disputed issues in accordance with the principle prohibiting the use of private knowledge, (2) the responses generated must originate from the context provided by the RAG and remain faithful to that context, and (3) the retrieval module must reference external knowledge with appropriate timestamps corresponding to the issues at hand. This paper discusses the design of a RAG-based LLM system that satisfies these requirements. --- ### GLOW: Global Illumination-Aware Inverse Rendering of Indoor Scenes Captured with Dynamic Co-Located Light & Camera Authors: Jiaye Wu, Saeed Hadadan, Geng Lin, Peihan Tu, Auguste Gezalyan, Matthias Zwicker, David Jacobs, Roni Sengupta Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22857v2 Inverse rendering of indoor scenes remains challenging due to the ambiguity between reflectance and lighting, exacerbated by inter-reflections among multiple objects. While natural illumination-based methods struggle to resolve this ambiguity, co-located light-camera setups offer better disentanglement as lighting can be easily calibrated via Structure-from-Motion. However, such setups introduce additional complexities like strong inter-reflections, dynamic shadows, near-field lighting, and moving specular highlights, which existing approaches fail to handle. We present GLOW, a Global Illumination-aware Inverse Rendering framework designed to address these challenges. GLOW integrates a neural implicit surface representation with a neural radiance cache to approximate global illumination, jointly optimizing geometry and reflectance through carefully designed regularization and initialization. We then introduce a dynamic radiance cache that adapts to sharp lighting discontinuities from near-field motion, and a surface-angle-weighted radiometric loss to suppress specular artifacts common in flashlight captures. Experiments show that GLOW substantially outperforms prior methods in material reflectance estimation under both natural and co-located illumination. --- ### CRAwDAD: Causal Reasoning Augmentation with Dual-Agent Debate Authors: Finn G. Vamosi, Nils D. Forkert Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.LG, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22854v2 When people reason about cause and effect, they often consider many competing "what if" scenarios before deciding which explanation fits best. Analogously, advanced language models capable of causal inference can consider multiple interventions and counterfactuals to judge the validity of causal claims. Crucially, this type of reasoning is less like a single calculation and more like an internal dialogue between alternative hypotheses. In this paper, we make this dialogue explicit through a dual-agent debate framework where one model provides a structured causal inference, and the other critically examines this reasoning for logical flaws. When disagreements arise, the agents attempt to persuade each other, challenging each other's logic and revising their conclusions until they converge on a mutually agreed answer. To take advantage of this deliberative process, we specifically use reasoning language models, whose strengths in both causal inference and adversarial debate remain under-explored relative to standard large language models. We evaluate our approach on the CLadder dataset, a benchmark linking natural language questions to formally defined causal graphs across all three rungs of Pearl's ladder of causation. With Qwen3 and DeepSeek-R1 as debater agents, we demonstrate that multi-agent debate improves DeepSeek-R1's overall accuracy in causal inference from 78.03% to 87.45%, with the counterfactual category specifically improving from 67.94% to 80.04% accuracy. Similarly, Qwen3's overall accuracy improves from 84.16% to 89.41%, and counterfactual questions from 71.53% to 80.35%, showing that even strong models can still benefit greatly from debate with weaker agents. Our results highlight the potential of reasoning models as building blocks for multi-agent systems in causal inference, and demonstrate the importance of diverse perspectives in causal problem-solving. --- ### TARFVAE: Efficient One-Step Generative Time Series Forecasting via TARFLOW based VAE Authors: Jiawen Wei, Lan Jiang, Pengbo Wei, Ziwen Ye, Teng Song, Chen Chen, Guangrui Ma Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22853v1 Time series data is ubiquitous, with forecasting applications spanning from finance to healthcare. Beyond popular deterministic methods, generative models are gaining attention due to advancements in areas like image synthesis and video generation, as well as their inherent ability to provide probabilistic predictions. However, existing generative approaches mostly involve recurrent generative operations or repeated denoising steps, making the prediction laborious, particularly for long-term forecasting. Most of them only conduct experiments for relatively short-term forecasting, with limited comparison to deterministic methods in long-term forecasting, leaving their practical advantages unclear. This paper presents TARFVAE, a novel generative framework that combines the Transformer-based autoregressive flow (TARFLOW) and variational autoencoder (VAE) for efficient one-step generative time series forecasting. Inspired by the rethinking that complex architectures for extracting time series representations might not be necessary, we add a flow module, TARFLOW, to VAE to promote spontaneous learning of latent variables that benefit predictions. TARFLOW enhances VAE's posterior estimation by breaking the Gaussian assumption, thereby enabling a more informative latent space. TARFVAE uses only the forward process of TARFLOW, avoiding autoregressive inverse operations and thus ensuring fast generation. During generation, it samples from the prior latent space and directly generates full-horizon forecasts via the VAE decoder. With simple MLP modules, TARFVAE achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art deterministic and generative models across different forecast horizons on benchmark datasets while maintaining efficient prediction speed, demonstrating its effectiveness as an efficient and powerful solution for generative time series forecasting. --- ### Resolving Evidence Sparsity: Agentic Context Engineering for Long-Document Understanding Authors: Keliang Liu, Zizhi Chen, Mingcheng Li, Jingqun Tang, Dingkang Yang, Lihua Zhang Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22850v1 Document understanding is a long standing practical task. Vision Language Models (VLMs) have gradually become a primary approach in this domain, demonstrating effective performance on single page tasks. However, their effectiveness diminishes when handling long documents. In such scenarios, clues are often scattered across multiple pages and modalities, and redundancy from lengthy inputs can impair the models judgment. While retrieval augmented generation mitigates this issue by filtering for question relevant content, the retrieved results still contain substantial redundancy. To address these limitations, we propose SLEUTH, a multi agent framework. Concretely, SLEUTH orchestrates a retriever and four collaborative agents in a coarse to fine process. The framework identifies key textual and visual clues within the retrieved pages, filters for salient visual evidence such as tables and charts, and analyzes the query to devise a reasoning strategy. It ultimately synthesizes a distilled, evidence dense multimodal context to generate the final prediction. SLEUTH is model agnostic and scalable. When paired with advanced VLM backbones, it consistently improves performance on multiple long document benchmarks, achieving state of the art results. Ablation studies verify each modules effectiveness and confirm the benefits of our hierarchical refinement paradigm. --- ### PerfMamba: Performance Analysis and Pruning of Selective State Space Models Authors: Abdullah Al Asif, Mobina Kashaniyan, Sixing Yu, Juan Pablo Muñoz, Ali Jannesari Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22849v1 Recent advances in sequence modeling have introduced selective SSMs as promising alternatives to Transformer architectures, offering theoretical computational efficiency and sequence processing advantages. A comprehensive understanding of selective SSMs in runtime behavior, resource utilization patterns, and scaling characteristics still remains unexplored, thus obstructing their optimal deployment and further architectural improvements. This paper presents a thorough empirical study of Mamba-1 and Mamba-2, systematically profiled for performance to assess the design principles that contribute to their efficiency in state-space modeling. A detailed analysis of computation patterns, memory access, I/O characteristics, and scaling properties was performed for sequence lengths ranging from 64 to 16384 tokens. Our findings show that the SSM component, a central part of the selective SSM architecture, demands a significant portion of computational resources compared to other components in the Mamba block. Based on these insights, we propose a pruning technique that selectively removes low-activity states within the SSM component, achieving measurable throughput and memory gains while maintaining accuracy within a moderate pruning regime. This approach results in performance improvements across varying sequence lengths, achieving a 1.14x speedup and reducing memory usage by 11.50\%. These results offer valuable guidance for designing more efficient SSM architectures that can be applied to a wide range of real-world applications. --- ### Breaking the Visual Shortcuts in Multimodal Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering Authors: Dosung Lee, Sangwon Jung, Boyoung Kim, Minyoung Kim, Sungyeon Kim, Junyoung Sung, Paul Hongsuck Seo Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22843v2 Existing Multimodal Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (MKB-VQA) benchmarks suffer from "visual shortcuts", as the query image typically matches the primary subject entity of the target document. We demonstrate that models can exploit these shortcuts, achieving comparable results using visual cues alone. To address this, we introduce Relational Entity Text-Image kNowledge Augmented (RETINA) benchmark, automatically constructed using an LLM-driven pipeline, consisting of 120k training and 2k human-curated test set. RETINA contains queries referencing secondary subjects (i.e. related entities) and pairs them with images of these related entities, removing the visual shortcut. When evaluated on RETINA existing models show significantly degraded performance, confirming their reliance on the shortcut. Furthermore, we propose Multi-Image MultImodal Retriever (MIMIR), which enriches document embeddings by augmenting images of multiple related entities, effectively handling RETINA, unlike prior work that uses only a single image per document. Our experiments validate the limitations of existing benchmarks and demonstrate the effectiveness of RETINA and MIMIR. Our project is available at: Project Page. --- ### CausalProfiler: Generating Synthetic Benchmarks for Rigorous and Transparent Evaluation of Causal Machine Learning Authors: Panayiotis Panayiotou, Audrey Poinsot, Alessandro Leite, Nicolas Chesneau, Marc Schoenauer, Özgür Şimşek Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22842v3 Causal machine learning (Causal ML) aims to answer "what if" questions using machine learning algorithms, making it a promising tool for high-stakes decision-making. Yet, empirical evaluation practices in Causal ML remain limited. Existing benchmarks often rely on a handful of hand-crafted or semi-synthetic datasets, leading to brittle, non-generalizable conclusions. To bridge this gap, we introduce CausalProfiler, a synthetic benchmark generator for Causal ML methods. Based on a set of explicit design choices about the class of causal models, queries, and data considered, the CausalProfiler randomly samples causal models, data, queries, and ground truths constituting the synthetic causal benchmarks. In this way, Causal ML methods can be rigorously and transparently evaluated under a variety of conditions. This work offers the first random generator of synthetic causal benchmarks with coverage guarantees and transparent assumptions operating on the three levels of causal reasoning: observation, intervention, and counterfactual. We demonstrate its utility by evaluating several state-of-the-art methods under diverse conditions and assumptions, both in and out of the identification regime, illustrating the types of analyses and insights the CausalProfiler enables. --- ### Fast dynamical similarity analysis Authors: Arman Behrad, Mitchell Ostrow, Mohammad Taha Fakharian, Ila Fiete, Christian Beste, Shervin Safavi Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.AI, q-bio.NC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22828v2 Understanding how nonlinear dynamical systems (e.g., artificial neural networks and neural circuits) process information requires comparing their underlying dynamics at scale, across diverse architectures and large neural recordings. While many similarity metrics exist, current approaches fall short for large-scale comparisons. Geometric methods are computationally efficient but fail to capture governing dynamics, limiting their accuracy. In contrast, traditional dynamical similarity methods are faithful to system dynamics but are often computationally prohibitive. We bridge this gap by combining the efficiency of geometric approaches with the fidelity of dynamical methods. We introduce fast dynamical similarity analysis (fastDSA), a computationally efficient and accurate metric for measuring (dis)similarity between nonlinear dynamical systems. FastDSA leverages modern computational tools, including random matrix theory to determine optimal system rank, novel optimization pipelines for aligning system flow fields, and Koopman embeddings. Across benchmark nonlinear systems and recurrent network models, fastDSA is robust to arbitrary coordinate choices while remaining sensitive to meaningful dynamical differences, capturing variations in system evolution that geometric methods may miss and traditional methods detect only at high computational cost. To our knowledge, fastDSA is the fastest method that retains accuracy in comparing nonlinear dynamical systems. It enables scalable, statistical analyses across diverse systems, significantly expanding the practical applicability of dynamical similarity analysis. --- ### Some Modalities are More Equal Than Others: Decoding and Architecting Multimodal Integration in MLLMs Authors: Tianle Chen, Chaitanya Chakka, Arjun Reddy Akula, Xavier Thomas, Deepti Ghadiyaram Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22826v2 Despite remarkable advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), a fundamental question remains: are MLLMs robust to contradicting modalities? To rigorously study this, we introduce MMA-Bench comprising videos and tasks that probe a model's reliance on specific modalities. Using black-box and white-box interpretability techniques, we provide a critical analysis of the brittleness of both open- and closed-sourced MLLMs. We show that current MLLMs struggle under misaligned audio-visual pairs and simple misleading text, thereby lacking robust multi-modal reasoning. Building on these findings, we propose a modality alignment tuning strategy to teach the model when to prioritize, leverage, or ignore specific modality cues. Through extensive experiments and analysis, we show that our alignment tuning yields demonstrably stronger multimodal grounding. This work provides both interpretability tools and a clear path toward developing MLLMs with intrinsically reliable cross-modal reasoning. Code and dataset will be publicly available. --- ### A Unified and Stable Risk Minimization Framework for Weakly Supervised Learning with Theoretical Guarantees Authors: Miao Zhang, Junpeng Li, Changchun Hua, Yana Yang Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22823v2 Weakly supervised learning has emerged as a practical alternative to fully supervised learning when complete and accurate labels are costly or infeasible to acquire. However, many existing methods are tailored to specific supervision patterns -- such as positive-unlabeled (PU), unlabeled-unlabeled (UU), complementary-label (CLL), partial-label (PLL), or similarity-unlabeled annotations -- and rely on post-hoc corrections to mitigate instability induced by indirect supervision. We propose a principled, unified framework that bypasses such post-hoc adjustments by directly formulating a stable surrogate risk grounded in the structure of weakly supervised data. The formulation naturally subsumes diverse settings -- including PU, UU, CLL, PLL, multi-class unlabeled, and tuple-based learning -- under a single optimization objective. We further establish a non-asymptotic generalization bound via Rademacher complexity that clarifies how supervision structure, model capacity, and sample size jointly govern performance. Beyond this, we analyze the effect of class-prior misspecification on the bound, deriving explicit terms that quantify its impact, and we study identifiability, giving sufficient conditions -- most notably via supervision stratification across groups -- under which the target risk is recoverable. Extensive experiments show consistent gains across class priors, dataset scales, and class counts -- without heuristic stabilization -- while exhibiting robustness to overfitting. --- ### Resolving Sharp Gradients of Unstable Singularities to Machine Precision via Neural Networks Authors: Yongji Wang, Tristan Léger, Ching-Yao Lai, Tristan Buckmaster Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: math.AP, cs.LG, physics.flu-dyn arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22819v1 Recent work introduced a robust computational framework combining embedded mathematical structures, advanced optimization, and neural network architecture, leading to the discovery of multiple unstable self-similar solutions for key fluid dynamics equations, including the Incompressible Porous Media (IPM) and 2D Boussinesq systems. While this framework confirmed the existence of these singularities, an accuracy level approaching double-float machine precision was only achieved for stable and 1st unstable solutions of the 1D Córdoba-Córdoba-Fontelos model. For highly unstable solutions characterized by extreme gradients, the accuracy remained insufficient for validation. The primary obstacle is the presence of sharp solution gradients. Those gradients tend to induce large, localized PDE residuals during training, which not only hinder convergence, but also obscure the subtle signals near the origin required to identify the correct self-similar scaling parameter lambda of the solutions. In this work, we introduce a gradient-normalized PDE residual re-weighting scheme to resolve the high-gradient challenge while amplifying the critical residual signals at the origin for lambda identification. Coupled with the multi-stage neural network architecture, the PDE residuals are reduced to the level of round-off error across a wide spectrum of unstable self-similar singularities previously discovered. Furthermore, our method enables the discovery of new highly unstable singularities, i.e. the 4th unstable solution for IPM equations and a novel family of highly unstable solitons for the Nonlinear Schrödinger equations. This results in achieving high-gradient solutions with high precision, providing an important ingredient for bridging the gap between numerical discovery and computer-assisted proofs for unstable phenomena in nonlinear PDEs. --- ### Mitigating Semantic Drift: Evaluating LLMs' Efficacy in Psychotherapy through MI Dialogue Summarization Authors: Vivek Kumar, Pushpraj Singh Rajawat, Eirini Ntoutsi Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22818v1 Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown their potential across both general and domain-specific tasks. However, there is a growing concern regarding their lack of sensitivity, factual incorrectness in responses, inconsistent expressions of empathy, bias, hallucinations, and overall inability to capture the depth and complexity of human understanding, especially in low-resource and sensitive domains such as psychology. To address these challenges, our study employs a mixed-methods approach to evaluate the efficacy of LLMs in psychotherapy. We use LLMs to generate precise summaries of motivational interviewing (MI) dialogues and design a two-stage annotation scheme based on key components of the Motivational Interviewing Treatment Integrity (MITI) framework, namely evocation, collaboration, autonomy, direction, empathy, and a non-judgmental attitude. Using expert-annotated MI dialogues as ground truth, we formulate multi-class classification tasks to assess model performance under progressive prompting techniques, incorporating one-shot and few-shot prompting. Our results offer insights into LLMs' capacity for understanding complex psychological constructs and highlight best practices to mitigate ``semantic drift" in therapeutic settings. Our work contributes not only to the MI community by providing a high-quality annotated dataset to address data scarcity in low-resource domains but also critical insights for using LLMs for precise contextual interpretation in complex behavioral therapy. --- ### Captain Safari: A World Engine with Pose-Aligned 3D Memory Authors: Yu-Cheng Chou, Xingrui Wang, Yitong Li, Jiahao Wang, Hanting Liu, Cihang Xie, Alan Yuille, Junfei Xiao Published: 2025-11-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22815v2 World engines aim to synthesize long, 3D-consistent videos that support interactive exploration of a scene under user-controlled camera motion. However, existing systems struggle under aggressive 6-DoF trajectories and complex outdoor layouts: they lose long-range geometric coherence, deviate from the target path, or collapse into overly conservative motion. To this end, we introduce Captain Safari, a pose-conditioned world engine that generates videos by retrieving from a persistent world memory. Given a camera path, our method maintains a dynamic local memory and uses a retriever to fetch pose-aligned world tokens, which then condition video generation along the trajectory. This design enables the model to maintain stable 3D structure while accurately executing challenging camera maneuvers. To evaluate this setting, we curate OpenSafari, a new in-the-wild FPV dataset containing high-dynamic drone videos with verified camera trajectories, constructed through a multi-stage geometric and kinematic validation pipeline. Across video quality, 3D consistency, and trajectory following, Captain Safari substantially outperforms state-of-the-art camera-controlled generators. It reduces MEt3R from 0.3703 to 0.3690, improves AUC@30 from 0.181 to 0.200, and yields substantially lower FVD than all camera-controlled baselines. More importantly, in a 50-participant, 5-way human study where annotators select the best result among five anonymized models, 67.6% of preferences favor our method across all axes. Our results demonstrate that pose-conditioned world memory is a powerful mechanism for long-horizon, controllable video generation and provide OpenSafari as a challenging new benchmark for future world-engine research. --- ### Unlocking Electronic Health Records: A Hybrid Graph RAG Approach to Safe Clinical AI for Patient QA Authors: Samuel Thio, Matthew Lewis, Spiros Denaxas, Richard JB Dobson Published: 2025-11-27 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00009v1 Electronic health record (EHR) systems present clinicians with vast repositories of clinical information, creating a significant cognitive burden where critical details are easily overlooked. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer transformative potential for data processing, they face significant limitations in clinical settings, particularly regarding context grounding and hallucinations. Current solutions typically isolate retrieval methods focusing either on structured data (SQL/Cypher) or unstructured semantic search but fail to integrate both simultaneously. This work presents MediGRAF (Medical Graph Retrieval Augmented Framework), a novel hybrid Graph RAG system that bridges this gap. By uniquely combining Neo4j Text2Cypher capabilities for structured relationship traversal with vector embeddings for unstructured narrative retrieval, MediGRAF enables natural language querying of the complete patient journey. Using 10 patients from the MIMIC-IV dataset (generating 5,973 nodes and 5,963 relationships), we generated enough nodes and data for patient level question answering (QA), and we evaluated this architecture across varying query complexities. The system demonstrated 100\% recall for factual queries which means all relevant information was retrieved and in the output, while complex inference tasks achieved a mean expert quality score of 4.25/5 with zero safety violations. These results demonstrate that hybrid graph-grounding significantly advances clinical information retrieval, offering a safer, more comprehensive alternative to standard LLM deployments. --- ### On Meta-Evaluation Authors: Hongxiao Li, Chenxi Wang, Fanda Fan, Zihan Wang, Wanling Gao, Lei Wang, Jianfeng Zhan Published: 2025-11-27 Categories: stat.ME, cs.AI, cs.HC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14262v1 Evaluation is the foundation of empirical science, yet the evaluation of evaluation itself -- so-called meta-evaluation -- remains strikingly underdeveloped. While methods such as observational studies, design of experiments (DoE), and randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have shaped modern scientific practice, there has been little systematic inquiry into their comparative validity and utility across domains. Here we introduce a formal framework for meta-evaluation by defining the evaluation space, its structured representation, and a benchmark we call AxiaBench. AxiaBench enables the first large-scale, quantitative comparison of ten widely used evaluation methods across eight representative application domains. Our analysis reveals a fundamental limitation: no existing method simultaneously achieves accuracy and efficiency across diverse scenarios, with DoE and observational designs in particular showing significant deviations from real-world ground truth. We further evaluate a unified method of entire-space stratified sampling from previous evaluatology research, and the results report that it consistently outperforms prior approaches across all tested domains. These results establish meta-evaluation as a scientific object in its own right and provide both a conceptual foundation and a pragmatic tool set for advancing trustworthy evaluation in computational and experimental research. --- ### Cross-Platform Digital Discourse Analysis of the Israel-Hamas Conflict: Sentiment, Topics, and Event Dynamics Authors: Despoina Antonakaki, Sotiris Ioannidis Published: 2025-11-27 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.IR, cs.LG, cs.SI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02367v1 The Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains one of the most polarizing geopolitical issues, with the October 2023 escalation intensifying online debate. Social media platforms, particularly Telegram, have become central to real-time news sharing, advocacy, and propaganda. In this study, we analyze Telegram, Twitter/X, and Reddit to examine how conflict narratives are produced, amplified, and contested across different digital spheres. Building on our previous work on Telegram discourse during the 2023 escalation, we extend the analysis longitudinally and cross-platform using an updated dataset spanning October 2023 to mid-2025. The corpus includes more than 187,000 Telegram messages, 2.1 million Reddit comments, and curated Twitter/X posts. We combine Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), BERTopic, and transformer-based sentiment and emotion models to identify dominant themes, emotional dynamics, and propaganda strategies. Telegram channels provide unfiltered, high-intensity documentation of events; Twitter/X amplifies frames to global audiences; and Reddit hosts more reflective and deliberative discussions. Our findings reveal persistent negative sentiment, strong coupling between humanitarian framing and solidarity expressions, and platform-specific pathways for the diffusion of pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli narratives. This paper offers three contributions: (1) a multi-platform, FAIR-compliant dataset on the Israel-Hamas war, (2) an integrated pipeline combining topic modeling, sentiment and emotion analysis, and spam filtering for large-scale conflict discourse, and (3) empirical insights into how platform affordances and affective publics shape the evolution of digital conflict communication. --- ### PyBangla at BLP-2025 Task 2: Enhancing Bangla-to-Python Code Generation with Iterative Self-Correction and Multilingual Agents Authors: Jahidul Islam, Md Ataullha, Saiful Azad Published: 2025-11-27 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23713v1 LLMs excel at code generation from English prompts, but this progress has not extended to low-resource languages. We address Bangla-to-Python code generation by introducing BanglaCodeAct, an agent-based framework that leverages multi-agent prompting and iterative self-correction. Unlike prior approaches relying on task-specific fine-tuning, BanglaCodeAct employs an open-source multilingual LLM within a Thought-Code-Observation loop, enabling dynamic generation, testing, and refinement of code from Bangla instructions. We benchmark several small-parameter open-source LLMs and evaluate their effectiveness on the mHumanEval dataset for Bangla NL2Code. Our results show that Qwen3-8B, when deployed with BanglaCodeAct, achieves the best performance, with pass@1 accuracy of 94.0\% on the development set and 71.6\% on the blind test set. These results establish a new benchmark for Bangla-to-Python translation and highlight the potential of agent-based reasoning for reliable code generation in low-resource languages. Experimental scripts are publicly available at github.com/jahidulzaid/PyBanglaCodeActAgent. --- ### STED and Consistency Scoring: A Framework for Evaluating LLM Structured Output Reliability Authors: Guanghui Wang, Jinze Yu, Xing Zhang, Dayuan Jiang, Yin Song, Tomal Deb, Xuefeng Liu, Peiyang He Published: 2025-11-27 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23712v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for structured data generation, yet output consistency remains critical for production applications. We introduce a comprehensive framework for evaluating and improving consistency in LLM-generated structured outputs. Our approach combines: (1) STED (Semantic Tree Edit Distance), a novel similarity metric balancing semantic flexibility with structural strictness when comparing JSON outputs, and (2) a consistency scoring framework aggregating multiple STED measurements across repeated generations to quantify reliability. Through systematic experiments on synthetic datasets with controlled schema, expression, and semantic variations, we demonstrate STED achieves superior performance ($0.86-0.90$ similarity for semantic equivalents, $0.0$ for structural breaks) compared to existing metrics including TED, BERTScore, and DeepDiff. Applying our framework to benchmark six LLMs reveals significant variations: Claude-3.7-Sonnet demonstrates exceptional consistency, maintaining near-perfect structural reliability even at high temperatures ($T=0.9$), while models like Claude-3-Haiku and Nova-Pro exhibit substantial degradation requiring careful tuning. Our framework enables practical applications including targeted model selection for structured tasks, iterative prompt refinement for reproducible results, and diagnostic analysis to identify inconsistency root causes. This work provides theoretical foundations and practical tools for ensuring reliable structured output generation in LLM-based production systems. --- ### Supplementary Resources and Analysis for Automatic Speech Recognition Systems Trained on the Loquacious Dataset Authors: Nick Rossenbach, Robin Schmitt, Tina Raissi, Simon Berger, Larissa Kleppel, Ralf Schlüter Published: 2025-11-27 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17915v1 The recently published Loquacious dataset aims to be a replacement for established English automatic speech recognition (ASR) datasets such as LibriSpeech or TED-Lium. The main goal of the Loquacious dataset is to provide properly defined training and test partitions across many acoustic and language domains, with an open license suitable for both academia and industry. To further promote the benchmarking and usability of this new dataset, we present additional resources in the form of n-gram language models (LMs), a grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) model and pronunciation lexica, with open and public access. Utilizing those additional resources we show experimental results across a wide range of ASR architectures with different label units and topologies. Our initial experimental results indicate that the Loquacious dataset offers a valuable study case for a variety of common challenges in ASR. --- ### Q-KVComm: Efficient Multi-Agent Communication Via Adaptive KV Cache Compression Authors: Boris Kriuk, Logic Ng Published: 2025-11-27 Categories: cs.CL, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17914v1 Multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) systems face a critical bottleneck: redundant transmission of contextual information between agents consumes excessive bandwidth and computational resources. Traditional approaches discard internal semantic representations and transmit raw text, forcing receiving agents to recompute similar representations from scratch. We introduce Q-KVComm, a new protocol that enables direct transmission of compressed key-value (KV) cache representations between LLM agents. Q-KVComm combines three key innovations: (1) adaptive layer-wise quantization that allocates variable bit-widths based on sensitivity profiling, (2) hybrid information extraction that preserves critical facts across content domains, and (3) heterogeneous model calibration establishing cross-architecture communication. Extensive experiments across three diverse question-answering datasets demonstrate that Q-KVComm achieves 5-6x compression ratios while maintaining semantic fidelity, with coherence quality scores above 0.77 across all scenarios. The protocol exhibits robust performance across model sizes (1.1B-1.5B parameters) and adapts to real-world applications including conversational QA and multi-hop reasoning. Our work establishes a new paradigm for LLM agent communication, shifting from text-based to representation-based information exchange. ---