# Research Papers — 2025-11 · bundle page 163 of 197

> Full-text markdown of papers #8101–8150 of 9830 published in 2025-11, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 9830-paper 2025-11 archive (50 papers per file).

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### Multi-agent Coordination via Flow Matching

Authors: Dongsu Lee, Daehee Lee, Amy Zhang
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.05005v2

This work presents MAC-Flow, a simple yet expressive framework for multi-agent coordination. We argue that requirements of effective coordination are twofold: (i) a rich representation of the diverse joint behaviors present in offline data and (ii) the ability to act efficiently in real time. However, prior approaches often sacrifice one for the other, i.e., denoising diffusion-based solutions capture complex coordination but are computationally slow, while Gaussian policy-based solutions are fast but brittle in handling multi-agent interaction. MAC-Flow addresses this trade-off by first learning a flow-based representation of joint behaviors, and then distilling it into decentralized one-step policies that preserve coordination while enabling fast execution. Across four different benchmarks, including $12$ environments and $34$ datasets, MAC-Flow alleviates the trade-off between performance and computational cost, specifically achieving about $\boldsymbol{\times14.5}$ faster inference compared to diffusion-based MARL methods, while maintaining good performance. At the same time, its inference speed is similar to that of prior Gaussian policy-based offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methods.

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### Query Generation Pipeline with Enhanced Answerability Assessment for Financial Information Retrieval

Authors: Hyunkyu Kim, Yeeun Yoo, Youngjun Kwak
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.05000v1

As financial applications of large language models (LLMs) gain attention, accurate Information Retrieval (IR) remains crucial for reliable AI services. However, existing benchmarks fail to capture the complex and domain-specific information needs of real-world banking scenarios. Building domain-specific IR benchmarks is costly and constrained by legal restrictions on using real customer data. To address these challenges, we propose a systematic methodology for constructing domain-specific IR benchmarks through LLM-based query generation. As a concrete implementation of this methodology, our pipeline combines single and multi-document query generation with an enhanced and reasoning-augmented answerability assessment method, achieving stronger alignment with human judgments than prior approaches. Using this methodology, we construct KoBankIR, comprising 815 queries derived from 204 official banking documents. Our experiments show that existing retrieval models struggle with the complex multi-document queries in KoBankIR, demonstrating the value of our systematic approach for domain-specific benchmark construction and underscoring the need for improved retrieval techniques in financial domains.

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### BiPETE: A Bi-Positional Embedding Transformer Encoder for Risk Assessment of Alcohol and Substance Use Disorder with Electronic Health Records

Authors: Daniel S. Lee, Mayra S. Haedo-Cruz, Chen Jiang, Oshin Miranda, LiRong Wang
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, q-bio.QM
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04998v1

Transformer-based deep learning models have shown promise for disease risk prediction using electronic health records(EHRs), but modeling temporal dependencies remains a key challenge due to irregular visit intervals and lack of uniform structure. We propose a Bi-Positional Embedding Transformer Encoder or BiPETE for single-disease prediction, which integrates rotary positional embeddings to encode relative visit timing and sinusoidal embeddings to preserve visit order. Without relying on large-scale pretraining, BiPETE is trained on EHR data from two mental health cohorts-depressive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)-to predict the risk of alcohol and substance use disorders (ASUD). BiPETE outperforms baseline models, improving the area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) by 34% and 50% in the depression and PTSD cohorts, respectively. An ablation study further confirms the effectiveness of the dual positional encoding strategy. We apply the Integrated Gradients method to interpret model predictions, identifying key clinical features associated with ASUD risk and protection, such as abnormal inflammatory, hematologic, and metabolic markers, as well as specific medications and comorbidities. Overall, these key clinical features identified by the attribution methods contribute to a deeper understanding of the risk assessment process and offer valuable clues for mitigating potential risks. In summary, our study presents a practical and interpretable framework for disease risk prediction using EHR data, which can achieve strong performance.

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### Enhancing Public Speaking Skills in Engineering Students Through AI

Authors: Amol Harsh, Brainerd Prince, Siddharth Siddharth, Deepan Raj Prabakar Muthirayan, Kabir S Bhalla, Esraaj Sarkar Gupta, Siddharth Sahu
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04995v1

This research-to-practice full paper was inspired by the persistent challenge in effective communication among engineering students. Public speaking is a necessary skill for future engineers as they have to communicate technical knowledge with diverse stakeholders. While universities offer courses or workshops, they are unable to offer sustained and personalized training to students. Providing comprehensive feedback on both verbal and non-verbal aspects of public speaking is time-intensive, making consistent and individualized assessment impractical. This study integrates research on verbal and non-verbal cues in public speaking to develop an AI-driven assessment model for engineering students. Our approach combines speech analysis, computer vision, and sentiment detection into a multi-modal AI system that provides assessment and feedback. The model evaluates (1) verbal communication (pitch, loudness, pacing, intonation), (2) non-verbal communication (facial expressions, gestures, posture), and (3) expressive coherence, a novel integration ensuring alignment between speech and body language. Unlike previous systems that assess these aspects separately, our model fuses multiple modalities to deliver personalized, scalable feedback. Preliminary testing demonstrated that our AI-generated feedback was moderately aligned with expert evaluations. Among the state-of-the-art AI models evaluated, all of which were Large Language Models (LLMs), including Gemini and OpenAI models, Gemini Pro emerged as the best-performing, showing the strongest agreement with human annotators. By eliminating reliance on human evaluators, this AI-driven public speaking trainer enables repeated practice, helping students naturally align their speech with body language and emotion, crucial for impactful and professional communication.

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### Acquiring Common Chinese Emotional Events Using Large Language Model

Authors: Ya Wang, Guangzheng Zhu, Cungen Cao, Jingjing Li, He Li, Xin Huang
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04989v1

Knowledge about emotional events is an important kind of knowledge which has been applied to improve the effectiveness of different applications. However, emotional events cannot be easily acquired, especially common or generalized emotional events that are context-independent. The goal of this paper is to obtain common emotional events in Chinese language such as "win a prize" and "be criticized". Our approach begins by collecting a comprehensive list of Chinese emotional event indicators. Then, we generate emotional events by prompting a Chinese large language model (LLM) using these indicators. To ensure the quality of these emotional events, we train a filter to discard invalid generated results. We also classify these emotional events as being positive events and negative events using different techniques. Finally, we harvest a total of 102,218 high-quality common emotional events with sentiment polarity labels, which is the only large-scale commonsense knowledge base of emotional events in Chinese language. Intrinsic evaluation results show that the proposed method in this paper can be effectively used to acquire common Chinese emotional events. An extrinsic use case also demonstrates the strong potential of common emotional events in the field of emotion cause extraction (ECE). Related resources including emotional event indicators and emotional events will be released after the publication of this paper.

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### A Hybrid Deep Learning based Carbon Price Forecasting Framework with Structural Breakpoints Detection and Signal Denoising

Authors: Runsheng Ren, Jing Li, Yanxiu Li, Shixun Huang, Jun Shen, Wanqing Li, John Le, Sheng Wang
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04988v2

Accurately forecasting carbon prices is essential for informed energy market decision-making, guiding sustainable energy planning, and supporting effective decarbonization strategies. However, it remains challenging due to structural breaks and high-frequency noise caused by frequent policy interventions and market shocks. Existing studies, including the most recent baseline approaches, have attempted to incorporate breakpoints but often treat denoising and modeling as separate processes and lack systematic evaluation across advanced deep learning architectures, limiting the robustness and the generalization capability. To address these gaps, this paper proposes a comprehensive hybrid framework that integrates structural break detection (Bai-Perron, ICSS, and PELT algorithms), wavelet signal denoising, and three state-of-the-art deep learning models (LSTM, GRU, and TCN). Using European Union Allowance (EUA) spot prices from 2007 to 2024 and exogenous features such as energy prices and policy indicators, the framework constructs univariate and multivariate datasets for comparative evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed PELT-WT-TCN achieves the highest prediction accuracy, reducing forecasting errors by 22.35% in RMSE and 18.63% in MAE compared to the state-of-the-art baseline model (Breakpoints with Wavelet and LSTM), and by 70.55% in RMSE and 74.42% in MAE compared to the original LSTM without decomposition from the same baseline study. These findings underscore the value of integrating structural awareness and multiscale decomposition into deep learning architectures to enhance accuracy and interpretability in carbon price forecasting and other nonstationary financial time series.

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### Peptide2Mol: A Diffusion Model for Generating Small Molecules as Peptide Mimics for Targeted Protein Binding

Authors: Xinheng He, Yijia Zhang, Haowei Lin, Xingang Peng, Xiangzhe Kong, Mingyu Li, Jianzhu Ma
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04984v1

Structure-based drug design has seen significant advancements with the integration of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in the generation of hit and lead compounds. However, most AI-driven approaches neglect the importance of endogenous protein interactions with peptides, which may result in suboptimal molecule designs. In this work, we present Peptide2Mol, an E(3)-equivariant graph neural network diffusion model that generates small molecules by referencing both the original peptide binders and their surrounding protein pocket environments. Trained on large datasets and leveraging sophisticated modeling techniques, Peptide2Mol not only achieves state-of-the-art performance in non-autoregressive generative tasks, but also produces molecules with similarity to the original peptide binder. Additionally, the model allows for molecule optimization and peptidomimetic design through a partial diffusion process. Our results highlight Peptide2Mol as an effective deep generative model for generating and optimizing bioactive small molecules from protein binding pockets.

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### Predicting Cognitive Assessment Scores in Older Adults with Cognitive Impairment Using Wearable Sensors

Authors: Assma Habadi, Milos Zefran, Lijuan Yin, Woojin Song, Maria Caceres, Elise Hu, Naoko Muramatsu
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: q-bio.NC, cs.LG, eess.SP
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04983v1

Background and Objectives: This paper focuses on using AI to assess the cognitive function of older adults with mild cognitive impairment or mild dementia using physiological data provided by a wearable device. Cognitive screening tools are disruptive, time-consuming, and only capture brief snapshots of activity. Wearable sensors offer an attractive alternative by continuously monitoring physiological signals. This study investigated whether physiological data can accurately predict scores on established cognitive tests. Research Design and Methods: We recorded physiological signals from 23 older adults completing three NIH Toolbox Cognitive Battery tests, which assess working memory, processing speed, and attention. The Empatica EmbracePlus, a wearable device, measured blood volume pulse, skin conductance, temperature, and movement. Statistical features were extracted using wavelet-based and segmentation methods. We then applied supervised learning and validated predictions via cross-validation, hold-out testing, and bootstrapping. Results: Our models showed strong performance with Spearman's ρof 0.73-0.82 and mean absolute errors of 0.14-0.16, significantly outperforming a naive mean predictor. Sensor roles varied: heart-related signals combined with movement and temperature best predicted working memory, movement paired with skin conductance was most informative for processing speed, and heart in tandem with skin conductance worked best for attention. Discussion and Implications: These findings suggest that wearable sensors paired with AI tools such as supervised learning and feature engineering can noninvasively track specific cognitive functions in older adults, enabling continuous monitoring. Our study demonstrates how AI can be leveraged when the data sample is small. This approach may support remote assessments and facilitate clinical interventions.

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### Scaling depth capacity via zero/one-layer model expansion

Authors: Zhiqi Bu
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04981v2

Model depth is a double-edged sword in deep learning: deeper models achieve higher accuracy but require higher computational cost. To efficiently train models at scale, progressive training (also known as model expansion) scales up model capacity during training and significantly reduces computation with little performance degradation. In this work, we study the depth expansion of large-scale models through the lens of optimization theory and feature learning, offering insights on the initialization of new layers, hyperparameter transfer, learning rate schedule, and timing of model expansion. Specifically, we propose zero/one-layer progressive training to achieve an optimal tradeoff between computation and loss, with a comprehensive ablations on our expansion strategy. For example, zero/one-layer progressive training on GPT2 can save $\approx 80\%$ compute, or equivalently achieve an $\approx 5\times$ acceleration, while attaining a loss comparable to that of a fully trained 60-layer model with 7B parameters, thus demonstrating a mixing behavior in terms of loss. Furthermore, scaling laws on LLAMA3 and DeepSeekV3 models show a $3\sim 5\times$ improvement in compute efficiency, with an increasing advantage at larger scales.

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### Unlocking the Black Box: A Five-Dimensional Framework for Evaluating Explainable AI in Credit Risk

Authors: Rongbin Ye, Jiaqi Chen
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04980v1

The financial industry faces a significant challenge modeling and risk portfolios: balancing the predictability of advanced machine learning models, neural network models, and explainability required by regulatory entities (such as Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau). This paper intends to fill the gap in the application between these "black box" models and explainability frameworks, such as LIME and SHAP. Authors elaborate on the application of these frameworks on different models and demonstrates the more complex models with better prediction powers could be applied and reach the same level of the explainability, using SHAP and LIME. Beyond the comparison and discussion of performances, this paper proposes a novel five dimensional framework evaluating Inherent Interpretability, Global Explanations, Local Explanations, Consistency, and Complexity to offer a nuanced method for assessing and comparing model explainability beyond simple accuracy metrics. This research demonstrates the feasibility of employing sophisticated, high performing ML models in regulated financial environments by utilizing modern explainability techniques and provides a structured approach to evaluate the crucial trade offs between model performance and interpretability.

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### Scaling Up ROC-Optimizing Support Vector Machines

Authors: Gimun Bae, Seung Jun Shin
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.LG, stat.CO, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04979v2

The ROC-SVM, originally proposed by Rakotomamonjy, directly maximizes the area under the ROC curve (AUC) and has become an attractive alternative of the conventional binary classification under the presence of class imbalance. However, its practical use is limited by high computational cost, as training involves evaluating all $O(n^2)$. To overcome this limitation, we develop a scalable variant of the ROC-SVM that leverages incomplete U-statistics, thereby substantially reducing computational complexity. We further extend the framework to nonlinear classification through a low-rank kernel approximation, enabling efficient training in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces. Theoretical analysis establishes an error bound that justifies the proposed approximation, and empirical results on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves comparable AUC performance to the original ROC-SVM with drastically reduced training time.

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### GSE: Evaluating Sticker Visual Semantic Similarity via a General Sticker Encoder

Authors: Heng Er Metilda Chee, Jiayin Wang, Zhiqiang Guo, Weizhi Ma, Min Zhang
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.CV, cs.MM
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04977v1

Stickers have become a popular form of visual communication, yet understanding their semantic relationships remains challenging due to their highly diverse and symbolic content. In this work, we formally {define the Sticker Semantic Similarity task} and introduce {Triple-S}, the first benchmark for this task, consisting of 905 human-annotated positive and negative sticker pairs. Through extensive evaluation, we show that existing pretrained vision and multimodal models struggle to capture nuanced sticker semantics. To address this, we propose the {General Sticker Encoder (GSE)}, a lightweight and versatile model that learns robust sticker embeddings using both Triple-S and additional datasets. GSE achieves superior performance on unseen stickers, and demonstrates strong results on downstream tasks such as emotion classification and sticker-to-sticker retrieval. By releasing both Triple-S and GSE, we provide standardized evaluation tools and robust embeddings, enabling future research in sticker understanding, retrieval, and multimodal content generation. The Triple-S benchmark and GSE have been publicly released and are available here.

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### Less Is More: Generating Time Series with LLaMA-Style Autoregression in Simple Factorized Latent Spaces

Authors: Siyuan Li, Yifan Sun, Lei Cheng, Lewen Wang, Yang Liu, Weiqing Liu, Jianlong Li, Jiang Bian, Shikai Fang
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04973v1

Generative models for multivariate time series are essential for data augmentation, simulation, and privacy preservation, yet current state-of-the-art diffusion-based approaches are slow and limited to fixed-length windows. We propose FAR-TS, a simple yet effective framework that combines disentangled factorization with an autoregressive Transformer over a discrete, quantized latent space to generate time series. Each time series is decomposed into a data-adaptive basis that captures static cross-channel correlations and temporal coefficients that are vector-quantized into discrete tokens. A LLaMA-style autoregressive Transformer then models these token sequences, enabling fast and controllable generation of sequences with arbitrary length. Owing to its streamlined design, FAR-TS achieves orders-of-magnitude faster generation than Diffusion-TS while preserving cross-channel correlations and an interpretable latent space, enabling high-quality and flexible time series synthesis.

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### Challenges in 3D Data Synthesis for Training Neural Networks on Topological Features

Authors: Dylan Peek, Matthew P. Skerritt, Siddharth Pritam, Stephan Chalup
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04972v1

Topological Data Analysis (TDA) involves techniques of analyzing the underlying structure and connectivity of data. However, traditional methods like persistent homology can be computationally demanding, motivating the development of neural network-based estimators capable of reducing computational overhead and inference time. A key barrier to advancing these methods is the lack of labeled 3D data with class distributions and diversity tailored specifically for supervised learning in TDA tasks. To address this, we introduce a novel approach for systematically generating labeled 3D datasets using the Repulsive Surface algorithm, allowing control over topological invariants, such as hole count. The resulting dataset offers varied geometry with topological labeling, making it suitable for training and benchmarking neural network estimators. This paper uses a synthetic 3D dataset to train a genus estimator network, created using a 3D convolutional transformer architecture. An observed decrease in accuracy as deformations increase highlights the role of not just topological complexity, but also geometric complexity, when training generalized estimators. This dataset fills a gap in labeled 3D datasets and generation for training and evaluating models and techniques for TDA.

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### Risk Prediction of Cardiovascular Disease for Diabetic Patients with Machine Learning and Deep Learning Techniques

Authors: Esha Chowdhury
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04971v1

Accurate prediction of cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk is crucial for healthcare institutions. This study addresses the growing prevalence of diabetes and its strong link to heart disease by proposing an efficient CVD risk prediction model for diabetic patients using machine learning (ML) and hybrid deep learning (DL) approaches. The BRFSS dataset was preprocessed by removing duplicates, handling missing values, identifying categorical and numerical features, and applying Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for feature extraction. Several ML models, including Decision Trees (DT), Random Forest (RF), k-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), AdaBoost, and XGBoost, were implemented, with XGBoost achieving the highest accuracy of 0.9050. Various DL models, such as Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Deep Neural Networks (DNN), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM), and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), as well as hybrid models combining CNN with LSTM, BiLSTM, and GRU, were also explored. Some of these models achieved perfect recall (1.00), with the LSTM model achieving the highest accuracy of 0.9050. Our research highlights the effectiveness of ML and DL models in predicting CVD risk among diabetic patients, automating and enhancing clinical decision-making. High accuracy and F1 scores demonstrate these models' potential to improve personalized risk management and preventive strategies.

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### Learning Fourier shapes to probe the geometric world of deep neural networks

Authors: Jian Wang, Yixing Yong, Haixia Bi, Lijun He, Fan Li
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04970v1

While both shape and texture are fundamental to visual recognition, research on deep neural networks (DNNs) has predominantly focused on the latter, leaving their geometric understanding poorly probed. Here, we show: first, that optimized shapes can act as potent semantic carriers, generating high-confidence classifications from inputs defined purely by their geometry; second, that they are high-fidelity interpretability tools that precisely isolate a model's salient regions; and third, that they constitute a new, generalizable adversarial paradigm capable of deceiving downstream visual tasks. This is achieved through an end-to-end differentiable framework that unifies a powerful Fourier series to parameterize arbitrary shapes, a winding number-based mapping to translate them into the pixel grid required by DNNs, and signal energy constraints that enhance optimization efficiency while ensuring physically plausible shapes. Our work provides a versatile framework for probing the geometric world of DNNs and opens new frontiers for challenging and understanding machine perception.

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### Pattern-Aware Diffusion Synthesis of fMRI/dMRI with Tissue and Microstructural Refinement

Authors: Xiongri Shen, Jiaqi Wang, Yi Zhong, Zhenxi Song, Leilei Zhao, Yichen Wei, Lingyan Liang, Shuqiang Wang, Baiying Lei, Demao Deng, Zhiguo Zhang
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04963v1

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), especially functional MRI (fMRI) and diffusion MRI (dMRI), is essential for studying neurodegenerative diseases. However, missing modalities pose a major barrier to their clinical use. Although GAN- and diffusion model-based approaches have shown some promise in modality completion, they remain limited in fMRI-dMRI synthesis due to (1) significant BOLD vs. diffusion-weighted signal differences between fMRI and dMRI in time/gradient axis, and (2) inadequate integration of disease-related neuroanatomical patterns during generation. To address these challenges, we propose PDS, introducing two key innovations: (1) a pattern-aware dual-modal 3D diffusion framework for cross-modality learning, and (2) a tissue refinement network integrated with a efficient microstructure refinement to maintain structural fidelity and fine details. Evaluated on OASIS-3, ADNI, and in-house datasets, our method achieves state-of-the-art results, with PSNR/SSIM scores of 29.83 dB/90.84\% for fMRI synthesis (+1.54 dB/+4.12\% over baselines) and 30.00 dB/77.55\% for dMRI synthesis (+1.02 dB/+2.2\%). In clinical validation, the synthesized data show strong diagnostic performance, achieving 67.92\%/66.02\%/64.15\% accuracy (NC vs. MCI vs. AD) in hybrid real-synthetic experiments. Code is available in \href{https://github.com/SXR3015/PDS}{PDS GitHub Repository}

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### Too Good to be Bad: On the Failure of LLMs to Role-Play Villains

Authors: Zihao Yi, Qingxuan Jiang, Ruotian Ma, Xingyu Chen, Qu Yang, Mengru Wang, Fanghua Ye, Ying Shen, Zhaopeng Tu, Xiaolong Li, Linus
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04962v2

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly tasked with creative generation, including the simulation of fictional characters. However, their ability to portray non-prosocial, antagonistic personas remains largely unexamined. We hypothesize that the safety alignment of modern LLMs creates a fundamental conflict with the task of authentically role-playing morally ambiguous or villainous characters. To investigate this, we introduce the Moral RolePlay benchmark, a new dataset featuring a four-level moral alignment scale and a balanced test set for rigorous evaluation. We task state-of-the-art LLMs with role-playing characters from moral paragons to pure villains. Our large-scale evaluation reveals a consistent, monotonic decline in role-playing fidelity as character morality decreases. We find that models struggle most with traits directly antithetical to safety principles, such as ``Deceitful'' and ``Manipulative'', often substituting nuanced malevolence with superficial aggression. Furthermore, we demonstrate that general chatbot proficiency is a poor predictor of villain role-playing ability, with highly safety-aligned models performing particularly poorly. Our work provides the first systematic evidence of this critical limitation, highlighting a key tension between model safety and creative fidelity. Our benchmark and findings pave the way for developing more nuanced, context-aware alignment methods.

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### Training and Testing with Multiple Splits: A Central Limit Theorem for Split-Sample Estimators

Authors: Bruno Fava
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: econ.EM, math.ST, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04957v2

As predictive algorithms grow in popularity, using the same dataset to both train and test a new model has become routine across research, policy, and industry. Sample-splitting attains valid inference on model properties by using separate subsamples to estimate the model and to evaluate it. However, this approach has two drawbacks, since each task uses only part of the data, and different splits can lead to widely different estimates. Averaging across multiple splits, I develop an inference approach that uses more data for training, uses the entire sample for testing, and improves reproducibility. I address the statistical dependence from reusing observations across splits by proving a new central limit theorem for a large class of split-sample estimators under arguably mild and general conditions. Importantly, I make no restrictions on model complexity or convergence rates. I show that confidence intervals based on the normal approximation are valid for many applications, but may undercover in important cases of interest, such as comparing the performance between two models. I develop a new inference approach for such cases, explicitly accounting for the dependence across splits. Moreover, I provide a measure of reproducibility for p-values obtained from split-sample estimators. Finally, I apply my results to two important problems in development and public economics: predicting poverty and learning heterogeneous treatment effects in randomized experiments. I show that my inference approach with repeated cross-fitting achieves better power than existing alternatives, often enough to reveal statistical significance that would otherwise be missed.

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### ORCHID: Orchestrated Retrieval-Augmented Classification with Human-in-the-Loop Intelligent Decision-Making for High-Risk Property

Authors: Maria Mahbub, Vanessa Lama, Sanjay Das, Brian Starks, Christopher Polchek, Saffell Silvers, Lauren Deck, Prasanna Balaprakash, Tirthankar Ghosal
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04956v1

High-Risk Property (HRP) classification is critical at U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) sites, where inventories include sensitive and often dual-use equipment. Compliance must track evolving rules designated by various export control policies to make transparent and auditable decisions. Traditional expert-only workflows are time-consuming, backlog-prone, and struggle to keep pace with shifting regulatory boundaries. We demo ORCHID, a modular agentic system for HRP classification that pairs retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with human oversight to produce policy-based outputs that can be audited. Small cooperating agents, retrieval, description refiner, classifier, validator, and feedback logger, coordinate via agent-to-agent messaging and invoke tools through the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for model-agnostic on-premise operation. The interface follows an Item to Evidence to Decision loop with step-by-step reasoning, on-policy citations, and append-only audit bundles (run-cards, prompts, evidence). In preliminary tests on real HRP cases, ORCHID improves accuracy and traceability over a non-agentic baseline while deferring uncertain items to Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). The demonstration shows single item submission, grounded citations, SME feedback capture, and exportable audit artifacts, illustrating a practical path to trustworthy LLM assistance in sensitive DOE compliance workflows.

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### LoPT: Lossless Parallel Tokenization Acceleration for Long Context Inference of Large Language Model

Authors: Wei Shao, Lingchao Zheng, Pengyu Wang, Peizhen Zheng, Jun Li, Yuwei Fan
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04952v1

Long context inference scenarios have become increasingly important for large language models, yet they introduce significant computational latency. While prior research has optimized long-sequence inference through operators, model architectures, and system frameworks, tokenization remains an overlooked bottleneck. Existing parallel tokenization methods accelerate processing through text segmentation and multi-process tokenization, but they suffer from inconsistent results due to boundary artifacts that occur after merging. To address this, we propose LoPT, a novel Lossless Parallel Tokenization framework that ensures output identical to standard sequential tokenization. Our approach employs character-position-based matching and dynamic chunk length adjustment to align and merge tokenized segments accurately. Extensive experiments across diverse long-text datasets demonstrate that LoPT achieves significant speedup while guaranteeing lossless tokenization. We also provide theoretical proof of consistency and comprehensive analytical studies to validate the robustness of our method.

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### CLM: Removing the GPU Memory Barrier for 3D Gaussian Splatting

Authors: Hexu Zhao, Xiwen Min, Xiaoteng Liu, Moonjun Gong, Yiming Li, Ang Li, Saining Xie, Jinyang Li, Aurojit Panda
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04951v1

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is an increasingly popular novel view synthesis approach due to its fast rendering time, and high-quality output. However, scaling 3DGS to large (or intricate) scenes is challenging due to its large memory requirement, which exceed most GPU's memory capacity. In this paper, we describe CLM, a system that allows 3DGS to render large scenes using a single consumer-grade GPU, e.g., RTX4090. It does so by offloading Gaussians to CPU memory, and loading them into GPU memory only when necessary. To reduce performance and communication overheads, CLM uses a novel offloading strategy that exploits observations about 3DGS's memory access pattern for pipelining, and thus overlap GPU-to-CPU communication, GPU computation and CPU computation. Furthermore, we also exploit observation about the access pattern to reduce communication volume. Our evaluation shows that the resulting implementation can render a large scene that requires 100 million Gaussians on a single RTX4090 and achieve state-of-the-art reconstruction quality.

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### DeepForgeSeal: Latent Space-Driven Semi-Fragile Watermarking for Deepfake Detection Using Adversarial Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Tharindu Fernando, Clinton Fookes, Sridha Sridharan
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04949v2

Rapid advances in generative AI have led to increasingly realistic deepfakes, posing growing challenges for law enforcement and public trust. Existing passive deepfake detectors struggle to keep pace, largely due to their dependence on specific forgery artifacts, which limits their ability to generalize to new deepfake types. Proactive deepfake detection using watermarks has emerged to address the challenge of identifying high-quality synthetic media. However, these methods often struggle to balance robustness against benign distortions with sensitivity to malicious tampering. This paper introduces a novel deep learning framework that harnesses high-dimensional latent space representations and the Adversarial Reinforcement Learning (ARL) paradigm to develop a robust and adaptive watermarking approach. Specifically, we develop a learnable watermark embedder that operates in the latent space, capturing high-level image semantics, while offering precise control over message encoding and extraction. The ARL paradigm empowers the learnable watermarking module to pursue an optimal balance between robustness and fragility. This is achieved through interaction with a dynamic curriculum of benign and malicious image manipulations simulated by an adversarial attacker agent. Comprehensive evaluations on the CelebA and CelebA-HQ benchmarks reveal that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving improvements of over 4.5% on CelebA and more than 5.3% on CelebA-HQ under challenging manipulation scenarios.

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### A benchmark multimodal oro-dental dataset for large vision-language models

Authors: Haoxin Lv, Ijazul Haq, Jin Du, Jiaxin Ma, Binnian Zhu, Xiaobing Dang, Chaoan Liang, Ruxu Du, Yingjie Zhang, Muhammad Saqib
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04948v1

The advancement of artificial intelligence in oral healthcare relies on the availability of large-scale multimodal datasets that capture the complexity of clinical practice. In this paper, we present a comprehensive multimodal dataset, comprising 8775 dental checkups from 4800 patients collected over eight years (2018-2025), with patients ranging from 10 to 90 years of age. The dataset includes 50000 intraoral images, 8056 radiographs, and detailed textual records, including diagnoses, treatment plans, and follow-up notes. The data were collected under standard ethical guidelines and annotated for benchmarking. To demonstrate its utility, we fine-tuned state-of-the-art large vision-language models, Qwen-VL 3B and 7B, and evaluated them on two tasks: classification of six oro-dental anomalies and generation of complete diagnostic reports from multimodal inputs. We compared the fine-tuned models with their base counterparts and GPT-4o. The fine-tuned models achieved substantial gains over these baselines, validating the dataset and underscoring its effectiveness in advancing AI-driven oro-dental healthcare solutions. The dataset is publicly available, providing an essential resource for future research in AI dentistry.

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### Search Is Not Retrieval: Decoupling Semantic Matching from Contextual Assembly in RAG

Authors: Harshit Nainwani, Hediyeh Baban
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04939v2

Retrieval systems are essential to contemporary AI pipelines, although most confuse two separate processes: finding relevant information and giving enough context for reasoning. We introduce the Search-Is-Not-Retrieve (SINR) framework, a dual-layer architecture that distinguishes between fine-grained search representations and coarse-grained retrieval contexts. SINR enhances the composability, scalability, and context fidelity of retrieval systems by directly connecting small, semantically accurate search chunks to larger, contextually complete retrieve chunks, all without incurring extra processing costs. This design changes retrieval from a passive step to an active one, making the system architecture more like how people process information. We discuss the SINR framework's conceptual foundation, formal structure, implementation issues, and qualitative outcomes. This provides a practical foundation for the next generation of AI systems that use retrieval.

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### Structural Properties, Cycloid Trajectories and Non-Asymptotic Guarantees of EM Algorithm for Mixed Linear Regression

Authors: Zhankun Luo, Abolfazl Hashemi
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04937v1

This work investigates the structural properties, cycloid trajectories, and non-asymptotic convergence guarantees of the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm for two-component Mixed Linear Regression (2MLR) with unknown mixing weights and regression parameters. Recent studies have established global convergence for 2MLR with known balanced weights and super-linear convergence in noiseless and high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes. However, the theoretical behavior of EM in the fully unknown setting remains unclear, with its trajectory and convergence order not yet fully characterized. We derive explicit EM update expressions for 2MLR with unknown mixing weights and regression parameters across all SNR regimes and analyze their structural properties and cycloid trajectories. In the noiseless case, we prove that the trajectory of the regression parameters in EM iterations traces a cycloid by establishing a recurrence relation for the sub-optimality angle, while in high SNR regimes we quantify its discrepancy from the cycloid trajectory. The trajectory-based analysis reveals the order of convergence: linear when the EM estimate is nearly orthogonal to the ground truth, and quadratic when the angle between the estimate and ground truth is small at the population level. Our analysis establishes non-asymptotic guarantees by sharpening bounds on statistical errors between finite-sample and population EM updates, relating EM's statistical accuracy to the sub-optimality angle, and proving convergence with arbitrary initialization at the finite-sample level. This work provides a novel trajectory-based framework for analyzing EM in Mixed Linear Regression.

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### Leak@$k$: Unlearning Does Not Make LLMs Forget Under Probabilistic Decoding

Authors: Hadi Reisizadeh, Jiajun Ruan, Yiwei Chen, Soumyadeep Pal, Sijia Liu, Mingyi Hong
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04934v3

Unlearning in large language models (LLMs) is critical for regulatory compliance and for building ethical generative AI systems that avoid producing private, toxic, illegal, or copyrighted content. Despite rapid progress, in this work, we show that \textit{almost all} existing unlearning methods fail to achieve true forgetting in practice. Specifically, while evaluations of these `unlearned' models under deterministic (greedy) decoding often suggest successful knowledge removal using standard benchmarks, we show that sensitive information reliably resurfaces when models are sampled with standard probabilistic decoding. To rigorously capture this vulnerability, we introduce \texttt{leak@$k$}, a new meta-evaluation metric that quantifies the likelihood of forgotten knowledge reappearing when generating $k$ samples from the model under realistic decoding strategies. Using three widely adopted benchmarks, TOFU, MUSE, and WMDP, we conduct the first large-scale, systematic study of unlearning reliability using \texttt{leak@$k$} metric. Our findings demonstrate that knowledge leakage persists across methods and tasks, underscoring that current state-of-the-art (SOTA) unlearning techniques provide only limited forgetting. We propose an algorithm, termed Robust Unlearning under LEak@$k$ metric (\texttt{RULE}) to address this concern. We demonstrate that \texttt{RULE} provides an unlearned model for TOFU benchmark with no information leakage for a large number of generation samples. On the MUSE benchmark, \texttt{RULE} outperforms SOTA unlearning methods under the \texttt{leak@$k$} metric across most sampling budgets $k$. Codes are available at https://github.com/OptimAI-Lab/Leak-k.

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### Diagnosing and Mitigating Semantic Inconsistencies in Wikidata's Classification Hierarchy

Authors: Shixiong Zhao, Hideaki Takeda
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04926v2

Wikidata is currently the largest open knowledge graph on the web, encompassing over 120 million entities. It integrates data from various domain-specific databases and imports a substantial amount of content from Wikipedia, while also allowing users to freely edit its content. This openness has positioned Wikidata as a central resource in knowledge graph research and has enabled convenient knowledge access for users worldwide. However, its relatively loose editorial policy has also led to a degree of taxonomic inconsistency. Building on prior work, this study proposes and applies a novel validation method to confirm the presence of classification errors, over-generalized subclass links, and redundant connections in specific domains of Wikidata. We further introduce a new evaluation criterion for determining whether such issues warrant correction and develop a system that allows users to inspect the taxonomic relationships of arbitrary Wikidata entities-leveraging the platform's crowdsourced nature to its full potential.

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### AgentExpt: Automating AI Experiment Design with LLM-based Resource Retrieval Agent

Authors: Yu Li, Lehui Li, Lin Chen, Qingmin Liao, Fengli Xu, Yong Li
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04921v3

Large language model agents are becoming increasingly capable at web-centric tasks such as information retrieval, complex reasoning. These emerging capabilities have given rise to surge research interests in developing LLM agent for facilitating scientific quest. One key application in AI research is to automate experiment design through agentic dataset and baseline retrieval. However, prior efforts suffer from limited data coverage, as recommendation datasets primarily harvest candidates from public portals and omit many datasets actually used in published papers, and from an overreliance on content similarity that biases model toward superficial similarity and overlooks experimental suitability. Harnessing collective perception embedded in the baseline and dataset citation network, we present a comprehensive framework for baseline and dataset recommendation. First, we design an automated data-collection pipeline that links roughly one hundred thousand accepted papers to the baselines and datasets they actually used. Second, we propose a collective perception enhanced retriever. To represent the position of each dataset or baseline within the scholarly network, it concatenates self-descriptions with aggregated citation contexts. To achieve efficient candidate recall, we finetune an embedding model on these representations. Finally, we develop a reasoning-augmented reranker that exact interaction chains to construct explicit reasoning chains and finetunes a large language model to produce interpretable justifications and refined rankings. The dataset we curated covers 85\% of the datasets and baselines used at top AI conferences over the past five years. On our dataset, the proposed method outperforms the strongest prior baseline with average gains of +5.85\% in Recall@20, +8.30\% in HitRate@5. Taken together, our results advance reliable, interpretable automation of experimental design.

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### Learning to Restore Multi-Degraded Images via Ingredient Decoupling and Task-Aware Path Adaptation

Authors: Hu Gao, Xiaoning Lei, Ying Zhang, Xichen Xu, Guannan Jiang, Lizhuang Ma
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04920v1

Image restoration (IR) aims to recover clean images from degraded observations. Despite remarkable progress, most existing methods focus on a single degradation type, whereas real-world images often suffer from multiple coexisting degradations, such as rain, noise, and haze coexisting in a single image, which limits their practical effectiveness. In this paper, we propose an adaptive multi-degradation image restoration network that reconstructs images by leveraging decoupled representations of degradation ingredients to guide path selection. Specifically, we design a degradation ingredient decoupling block (DIDBlock) in the encoder to separate degradation ingredients statistically by integrating spatial and frequency domain information, enhancing the recognition of multiple degradation types and making their feature representations independent. In addition, we present fusion block (FBlock) to integrate degradation information across all levels using learnable matrices. In the decoder, we further introduce a task adaptation block (TABlock) that dynamically activates or fuses functional branches based on the multi-degradation representation, flexibly selecting optimal restoration paths under diverse degradation conditions. The resulting tightly integrated architecture, termed IMDNet, is extensively validated through experiments, showing superior performance on multi-degradation restoration while maintaining strong competitiveness on single-degradation tasks.

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### BudgetMem: Training-Free Selective Memory for Cost-Efficient Long-Context Processing in Language Models

Authors: Chandra Vamsi Krishna Alla, Harish Naidu Gaddam, Manohar Kommi, Sheikh Nazib Ahmed
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04919v3

Processing long documents with large language models (LLMs) is expensive: a single query over a 100K-token document can cost from tens of cents to over a dollar in API fees, depending on the model, and memory grows linearly with context length. We introduce BudgetMem, a training-free architecture that keeps only high-salience content under an explicit memory budget. Unlike token-level neural compressors such as LLMLingua, BudgetMem makes chunk-level keep-or-discard decisions from interpretable features: entity density, TF-IDF importance, position, numerical density, discourse markers, and question presence. Across four benchmarks, BudgetMem matches the uncompressed baseline on template-generated structured documents (F1 = 0.859 vs. 0.855) while discarding 70% of chunks. As a pre-retrieval filter on the same documents it outperforms LLMLingua-2 by a wide margin (0.859 vs. 0.554), because token-level compression destroys the phrasal structure that retrieval depends on; the advantage holds across model scale and family (Llama-3.2-3B, Qwen2.5-7B), under dense retrieval (0.918 vs. 0.530), and in LLMLingua-2's intended direct-feed mode (0.797 vs. 0.720). On real NLP research papers (Qasper), BudgetMem is competitive but not free, trailing the full baseline by 7.4% and LLMLingua-2 by 5.5% relative F1 at a 72% storage reduction. Removing discourse markers or numerical density hurts most, although TF-IDF alone scores as well on template documents. The pipeline needs no trained models or GPU for compression and runs on a $10/month Colab instance.

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### Machine Learning Algorithms in Statistical Modelling Bridging Theory and Application

Authors: A. Ganapathi Rao, Sathish Krishna Anumula, Aditya Kumar Singh, Renukhadevi M, Y. Jeevan Nagendra Kumar, Tammineni Rama Tulasi
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04918v1

It involves the completely novel ways of integrating ML algorithms with traditional statistical modelling that has changed the way we analyze data, do predictive analytics or make decisions in the fields of the data. In this paper, we study some ML and statistical model connections to understand ways in which some modern ML algorithms help 'enrich' conventional models; we demonstrate how new algorithms improve performance, scale, flexibility and robustness of the traditional models. It shows that the hybrid models are of great improvement in predictive accuracy, robustness, and interpretability

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### MERaLiON-SER: Robust Speech Emotion Recognition Model for English and SEA Languages

Authors: Hardik B. Sailor, Aw Ai Ti, Chen Fang Yih Nancy, Chiu Ying Lay, Ding Yang, He Yingxu, Jiang Ridong, Li Jingtao, Liao Jingyi, Liu Zhuohan, Lu Yanfeng, Ma Yi et al.
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04914v3

We present MERaLiON-SER, a robust speech emotion recognition model designed for English and Southeast Asian languages. The model is trained using a hybrid objective combining weighted categorical cross-entropy and Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) losses for joint discrete and dimensional emotion modelling. This dual approach enables the model to capture both the distinct categories of emotion (like happy or angry) and the fine-grained, such as arousal (intensity), valence (positivity/negativity), and dominance (sense of control), leading to a more comprehensive and robust representation of human affect. Extensive evaluations across multilingual Singaporean languages (English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil ) and other public benchmarks show that MERaLiON-SER consistently surpasses both open-source speech encoders and large Audio-LLMs. These results underscore the importance of specialised speech-only models for accurate paralinguistic understanding and cross-lingual generalisation. Furthermore, the proposed framework provides a foundation for integrating emotion-aware perception into future agentic audio systems, enabling more empathetic and contextually adaptive multimodal reasoning.

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### SDS KoPub VDR: A Benchmark Dataset for Visual Document Retrieval in Korean Public Documents

Authors: Jaehoon Lee, Sohyun Kim, Wanggeun Park, Geon Lee, Seungkyung Kim, Minyoung Lee
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04910v2

Existing benchmarks for visual document retrieval (VDR) largely overlook non-English languages and the structural complexity of official publications. To address this gap, we introduce SDS KoPub VDR, the first large-scale, public benchmark for retrieving and understanding Korean public documents. The benchmark is built upon 361 real-world documents, including 256 files under the KOGL Type 1 license and 105 from official legal portals, capturing complex visual elements like tables, charts, and multi-column layouts. To establish a reliable evaluation set, we constructed 600 query-page-answer triples. These were initially generated using multimodal models (e.g., GPT-4o) and subsequently underwent human verification to ensure factual accuracy and contextual relevance. The queries span six major public domains and are categorized by the reasoning modality required: text-based, visual-based, and cross-modal. We evaluate SDS KoPub VDR on two complementary tasks: (1) text-only retrieval and (2) multimodal retrieval, which leverages visual features alongside text. This dual-task evaluation reveals substantial performance gaps, particularly in multimodal scenarios requiring cross-modal reasoning, even for state-of-the-art models. As a foundational resource, SDS KoPub VDR enables rigorous and fine-grained evaluation and provides a roadmap for advancing multimodal AI in real-world document intelligence. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/SamsungSDS-Research/SDS-KoPub-VDR-Benchmark.

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### A Dual Perspective on Decision-Focused Learning: Scalable Training via Dual-Guided Surrogates

Authors: Paula Rodriguez-Diaz, Kirk Bansak Elisabeth Paulson
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04909v1

Many real-world decisions are made under uncertainty by solving optimization problems using predicted quantities. This predict-then-optimize paradigm has motivated decision-focused learning, which trains models with awareness of how the optimizer uses predictions, improving the performance of downstream decisions. Despite its promise, scaling is challenging: state-of-the-art methods either differentiate through a solver or rely on task-specific surrogates, both of which require frequent and expensive calls to an optimizer, often a combinatorial one. In this paper, we leverage dual variables from the downstream problem to shape learning and introduce Dual-Guided Loss (DGL), a simple, scalable objective that preserves decision alignment while reducing solver dependence. We construct DGL specifically for combinatorial selection problems with natural one-of-many constraints, such as matching, knapsack, and shortest path. Our approach (a) decouples optimization from gradient updates by solving the downstream problem only periodically; (b) between refreshes, trains on dual-adjusted targets using simple differentiable surrogate losses; and (c) as refreshes become less frequent, drives training cost toward standard supervised learning while retaining strong decision alignment. We prove that DGL has asymptotically diminishing decision regret, analyze runtime complexity, and show on two problem classes that DGL matches or exceeds state-of-the-art DFL methods while using far fewer solver calls and substantially less training time. Code is available at https://github.com/paularodr/Dual-Guided-Learning.

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### Efficient Swap Multicalibration of Elicitable Properties

Authors: Lunjia Hu, Haipeng Luo, Spandan Senapati, Vatsal Sharan
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04907v1

Multicalibration (HJKRR18) is an algorithmic fairness perspective that demands that the predictions of a predictor are correct conditional on themselves and membership in a collection of potentially overlapping subgroups of a population. The work of (NR23) established a surprising connection between multicalibration for an arbitrary property $Γ$ (e.g., mean or median) and property elicitation: a property $Γ$ can be multicalibrated if and only if it is elicitable, where elicitability is the notion that the true property value of a distribution can be obtained by solving a regression problem over the distribution. In the online setting, (NR23) proposed an inefficient algorithm that achieves $\sqrt T$ $\ell_2$-multicalibration error for a hypothesis class of group membership functions and an elicitable property $Γ$, after $T$ rounds of interaction between a forecaster and adversary. In this paper, we generalize multicalibration for an elicitable property $Γ$ from group membership functions to arbitrary bounded hypothesis classes and introduce a stronger notion -- swap multicalibration, following (GKR23). Subsequently, we propose an oracle-efficient algorithm which, when given access to an online agnostic learner, achieves $T^{1/(r+1)}$ $\ell_r$-swap multicalibration error with high probability (for $r\ge2$) for a hypothesis class with bounded sequential Rademacher complexity and an elicitable property $Γ$. For the special case of $r=2$, this implies an oracle-efficient algorithm that achieves $T^{1/3}$ $\ell_2$-swap multicalibration error, which significantly improves on the previously established bounds for the problem (NR23, GMS25, LSS25a), and completely resolves an open question raised in (GJRR24) on the possibility of an oracle-efficient algorithm that achieves $\sqrt{T}$ $\ell_2$-mean multicalibration error by answering it in a strongly affirmative sense.

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### Multi-Agent Craftax: Benchmarking Open-Ended Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning at the Hyperscale

Authors: Bassel Al Omari, Michael Matthews, Alexander Rutherford, Jakob Nicolaus Foerster
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.LG, cs.MA
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04904v1

Progress in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) requires challenging benchmarks that assess the limits of current methods. However, existing benchmarks often target narrow short-horizon challenges that do not adequately stress the long-term dependencies and generalization capabilities inherent in many multi-agent systems. To address this, we first present \textit{Craftax-MA}: an extension of the popular open-ended RL environment, Craftax, that supports multiple agents and evaluates a wide range of general abilities within a single environment. Written in JAX, \textit{Craftax-MA} is exceptionally fast with a training run using 250 million environment interactions completing in under an hour. To provide a more compelling challenge for MARL, we also present \textit{Craftax-Coop}, an extension introducing heterogeneous agents, trading and more mechanics that require complex cooperation among agents for success. We provide analysis demonstrating that existing algorithms struggle with key challenges in this benchmark, including long-horizon credit assignment, exploration and cooperation, and argue for its potential to drive long-term research in MARL.

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### You Need Reasoning to Learn Reasoning: The Limitations of Label-Free RL in Weak Base Models

Authors: Shuvendu Roy, Hossein Hajimirsadeghi, Mengyao Zhai, Golnoosh Samei
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04902v1

Recent advances in large language models have demonstrated the promise of unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) methods for enhancing reasoning capabilities without external supervision. However, the generalizability of these label-free RL approaches to smaller base models with limited reasoning capabilities remains unexplored. In this work, we systematically investigate the performance of label-free RL methods across different model sizes and reasoning strengths, from 0.5B to 7B parameters. Our empirical analysis reveals critical limitations: label-free RL is highly dependent on the base model's pre-existing reasoning capability, with performance often degrading below baseline levels for weaker models. We find that smaller models fail to generate sufficiently long or diverse chain-of-thought reasoning to enable effective self-reflection, and that training data difficulty plays a crucial role in determining success. To address these challenges, we propose a simple yet effective method for label-free RL that utilizes curriculum learning to progressively introduce harder problems during training and mask no-majority rollouts during training. Additionally, we introduce a data curation pipeline to generate samples with predefined difficulty. Our approach demonstrates consistent improvements across all model sizes and reasoning capabilities, providing a path toward more robust unsupervised RL that can bootstrap reasoning abilities in resource-constrained models. We make our code available at https://github.com/BorealisAI/CuMa

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### Association via Entropy Reduction

Authors: Anthony Gamst, Lawrence Wilson
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.IR, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04901v1

Prior to recent successes using neural networks, term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf) was clearly regarded as the best choice for identifying documents related to a query. We provide a different score, aver, and observe, on a dataset with ground truth marking for association, that aver does do better at finding assciated pairs than tf-idf. This example involves finding associated vertices in a large graph and that may be an area where neural networks are not currently an obvious best choice. Beyond this one anecdote, we observe that (1) aver has a natural threshold for declaring pairs as unassociated while tf-idf does not, (2) aver can distinguish between pairs of documents for which tf-idf gives a score of 1.0, (3) aver can be applied to larger collections of documents than pairs while tf-idf cannot, and (4) that aver is derived from entropy under a simple statistical model while tf-idf is a construction designed to achieve a certain goal and hence aver may be more "natural." To be fair, we also observe that (1) writing down and computing the aver score for a pair is more complex than for tf-idf and (2) that the fact that the aver score is naturally scale-free makes it more complicated to interpret aver scores.

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### Real-Time Reasoning Agents in Evolving Environments

Authors: Yule Wen, Yixin Ye, Yanzhe Zhang, Diyi Yang, Hao Zhu
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04898v1

Agents in the real world must make not only logical but also timely judgments. This requires continuous awareness of the dynamic environment: hazards emerge, opportunities arise, and other agents act, while the agent's reasoning is still unfolding. Despite advances in language model reasoning, existing approaches fail to account for this dynamic nature. We introduce real-time reasoning as a new problem formulation for agents in evolving environments and build Real-Time Reasoning Gym to demonstrate it. We study two paradigms for deploying language models in agents: (1) reactive agents, which employ language models with bounded reasoning computation for rapid responses, and (2) planning agents, which allow extended reasoning computation for complex problems. Our experiments show that even state-of-the-art models struggle with making logical and timely judgments in either paradigm. To address this limitation, we propose AgileThinker, which simultaneously engages both reasoning paradigms. AgileThinker consistently outperforms agents engaging only one reasoning paradigm as the task difficulty and time pressure rise, effectively balancing reasoning depth and response latency. Our work establishes real-time reasoning as a critical testbed for developing practical agents and provides a foundation for research in temporally constrained AI systems, highlighting a path toward real-time capable agents.

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### LG-NuSegHop: A Local-to-Global Self-Supervised Pipeline For Nuclei Instance Segmentation

Authors: Vasileios Magoulianitis, Catherine A. Alexander, Jiaxin Yang, C. -C. Jay Kuo
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV, q-bio.BM
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04892v1

Nuclei segmentation is the cornerstone task in histology image reading, shedding light on the underlying molecular patterns and leading to disease or cancer diagnosis. Yet, it is a laborious task that requires expertise from trained physicians. The large nuclei variability across different organ tissues and acquisition processes challenges the automation of this task. On the other hand, data annotations are expensive to obtain, and thus, Deep Learning (DL) models are challenged to generalize to unseen organs or different domains. This work proposes Local-to-Global NuSegHop (LG-NuSegHop), a self-supervised pipeline developed on prior knowledge of the problem and molecular biology. There are three distinct modules: (1) a set of local processing operations to generate a pseudolabel, (2) NuSegHop a novel data-driven feature extraction model and (3) a set of global operations to post-process the predictions of NuSegHop. Notably, even though the proposed pipeline uses { no manually annotated training data} or domain adaptation, it maintains a good generalization performance on other datasets. Experiments in three publicly available datasets show that our method outperforms other self-supervised and weakly supervised methods while having a competitive standing among fully supervised methods. Remarkably, every module within LG-NuSegHop is transparent and explainable to physicians.

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### Beta Distribution Learning for Reliable Roadway Crash Risk Assessment

Authors: Ahmad Elallaf, Nathan Jacobs, Xinyue Ye, Mei Chen, Gongbo Liang
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04886v1

Roadway traffic accidents represent a global health crisis, responsible for over a million deaths annually and costing many countries up to 3% of their GDP. Traditional traffic safety studies often examine risk factors in isolation, overlooking the spatial complexity and contextual interactions inherent in the built environment. Furthermore, conventional Neural Network-based risk estimators typically generate point estimates without conveying model uncertainty, limiting their utility in critical decision-making. To address these shortcomings, we introduce a novel geospatial deep learning framework that leverages satellite imagery as a comprehensive spatial input. This approach enables the model to capture the nuanced spatial patterns and embedded environmental risk factors that contribute to fatal crash risks. Rather than producing a single deterministic output, our model estimates a full Beta probability distribution over fatal crash risk, yielding accurate and uncertainty-aware predictions--a critical feature for trustworthy AI in safety-critical applications. Our model outperforms baselines by achieving a 17-23% improvement in recall, a key metric for flagging potential dangers, while delivering superior calibration. By providing reliable and interpretable risk assessments from satellite imagery alone, our method enables safer autonomous navigation and offers a highly scalable tool for urban planners and policymakers to enhance roadway safety equitably and cost-effectively.

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### Self-Interest and Systemic Benefits: Emergence of Collective Rationality in Mixed Autonomy Traffic Through Deep Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Di Chen, Jia Li, Michael Zhang
Published: 2025-11-07
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04883v1

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are expected to be commercially available in the near future, leading to mixed autonomy traffic consisting of both AVs and human-driven vehicles (HVs). Although numerous studies have shown that AVs can be deployed to benefit the overall traffic system performance by incorporating system-level goals into their decision making, it is not clear whether the benefits still exist when agents act out of self-interest -- a trait common to all driving agents, both human and autonomous. This study aims to understand whether self-interested AVs can bring benefits to all driving agents in mixed autonomy traffic systems. The research is centered on the concept of collective rationality (CR). This concept, originating from game theory and behavioral economics, means that driving agents may cooperate collectively even when pursuing individual interests. Our recent research has proven the existence of CR in an analytical game-theoretical model and empirically in mixed human-driven traffic. In this paper, we demonstrate that CR can be attained among driving agents trained using deep reinforcement learning (DRL) with a simple reward design. We examine the extent to which self-interested traffic agents can achieve CR without directly incorporating system-level objectives. Results show that CR consistently emerges in various scenarios, which indicates the robustness of this property. We also postulate a mechanism to explain the emergence of CR in the microscopic and dynamic environment and verify it based on simulation evidence. This research suggests the possibility of leveraging advanced learning methods (such as federated learning) to achieve collective cooperation among self-interested driving agents in mixed-autonomy systems.

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### A Survey on Improving Human Robot Collaboration through Vision-and-Language Navigation

Authors: Nivedan Yakolli, Avinash Gautam, Abhijit Das, Yuankai Qi, Virendra Singh Shekhawat
Published: 2025-11-06
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.HC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.00027v1

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a multi-modal, cooperative task requiring agents to interpret human instructions, navigate 3D environments, and communicate effectively under ambiguity. This paper presents a comprehensive review of recent VLN advancements in robotics and outlines promising directions to improve multi-robot coordination. Despite progress, current models struggle with bidirectional communication, ambiguity resolution, and collaborative decision-making in the multi-agent systems. We review approximately 200 relevant articles to provide an in-depth understanding of the current landscape. Through this survey, we aim to provide a thorough resource that inspires further research at the intersection of VLN and robotics. We advocate that the future VLN systems should support proactive clarification, real-time feedback, and contextual reasoning through advanced natural language understanding (NLU) techniques. Additionally, decentralized decision-making frameworks with dynamic role assignment are essential for scalable, efficient multi-robot collaboration. These innovations can significantly enhance human-robot interaction (HRI) and enable real-world deployment in domains such as healthcare, logistics, and disaster response.

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### HiFiNet: Hierarchical Fault Identification in Wireless Sensor Networks via Edge-Based Classification and Graph Aggregation

Authors: Nguyen Tri Nghia, Nguyen Van Son, Nguyen Thi Hanh
Published: 2025-11-06
Categories: cs.NI, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17537v5

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are the backbone of essential monitoring applications, but their deployment in unfavourable conditions increases the risk to data integrity and system reliability. Traditional fault detection methods often struggle to effectively balance accuracy and energy consumption, and they may not fully leverage the complex spatio-temporal correlations inherent in WSN data. In this paper, we introduce HiFiNet, a novel hierarchical fault identification framework that addresses these challenges through a two-stage process. Firstly, edge classifiers with a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) stacked autoencoder perform temporal feature extraction and output initial fault class prediction for individual sensor nodes. Using these results, a Graph Attention Network (GAT) then aggregates information from neighboring nodes to refine the classification by integrating the topology context. Our method is able to produce more accurate predictions by capturing both local temporal patterns and network-wide spatial dependencies. To validate this approach, we constructed synthetic WSN datasets by introducing specific, predefined faults into the Intel Lab Dataset and NASA's MERRA-2 reanalysis data. Experimental results demonstrate that HiFiNet significantly outperforms existing methods in accuracy, F1-score, and precision, showcasing its robustness and effectiveness in identifying diverse fault types. Furthermore, the framework's design allows for a tunable trade-off between diagnostic performance and energy efficiency, making it adaptable to different operational requirements.

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### Quantifying the Role of OpenFold Components in Protein Structure Prediction

Authors: Tyler L. Hayes, Giri P. Krishnan
Published: 2025-11-06
Categories: q-bio.BM, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14781v1

Models such as AlphaFold2 and OpenFold have transformed protein structure prediction, yet their inner workings remain poorly understood. We present a methodology to systematically evaluate the contribution of individual OpenFold components to structure prediction accuracy. We identify several components that are critical for most proteins, while others vary in importance across proteins. We further show that the contribution of several components is correlated with protein length. These findings provide insight into how OpenFold achieves accurate predictions and highlight directions for interpreting protein prediction networks more broadly.

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### Ask WhAI:Probing Belief Formation in Role-Primed LLM Agents

Authors: Keith Moore, Jun W. Kim, David Lyu, Jeffrey Heo, Ehsan Adeli
Published: 2025-11-06
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14780v1

We present Ask WhAI, a systems-level framework for inspecting and perturbing belief states in multi-agent interactions. The framework records and replays agent interactions, supports out-of-band queries into each agent's beliefs and rationale, and enables counterfactual evidence injection to test how belief structures respond to new information. We apply the framework to a medical case simulator notable for its multi-agent shared memory (a time-stamped electronic medical record, or EMR) and an oracle agent (the LabAgent) that holds ground truth lab results revealed only when explicitly queried. We stress-test the system on a multi-specialty diagnostic journey for a child with an abrupt-onset neuropsychiatric presentation. Large language model agents, each primed with strong role-specific priors ("act like a neurologist", "act like an infectious disease specialist"), write to a shared medical record and interact with a moderator across sequential or parallel encounters. Breakpoints at key diagnostic moments enable pre- and post-event belief queries, allowing us to distinguish entrenched priors from reasoning or evidence-integration effects. The simulation reveals that agent beliefs often mirror real-world disciplinary stances, including overreliance on canonical studies and resistance to counterevidence, and that these beliefs can be traced and interrogated in ways not possible with human experts. By making such dynamics visible and testable, Ask WhAI offers a reproducible way to study belief formation and epistemic silos in multi-agent scientific reasoning.

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### The Impact of Prosodic Segmentation on Speech Synthesis of Spontaneous Speech

Authors: Julio Cesar Galdino, Sidney Evaldo Leal, Leticia Gabriella De Souza, Rodrigo de Freitas Lima, Antonio Nelson Fornari Mendes Moreira, Arnaldo Candido Junior, Miguel Oliveira, Edresson Casanova, Sandra M. Aluísio
Published: 2025-11-06
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14779v1

Spontaneous speech presents several challenges for speech synthesis, particularly in capturing the natural flow of conversation, including turn-taking, pauses, and disfluencies. Although speech synthesis systems have made significant progress in generating natural and intelligible speech, primarily through architectures that implicitly model prosodic features such as pitch, intensity, and duration, the construction of datasets with explicit prosodic segmentation and their impact on spontaneous speech synthesis remains largely unexplored. This paper evaluates the effects of manual and automatic prosodic segmentation annotations in Brazilian Portuguese on the quality of speech synthesized by a non-autoregressive model, FastSpeech 2. Experimental results show that training with prosodic segmentation produced slightly more intelligible and acoustically natural speech. While automatic segmentation tends to create more regular segments, manual prosodic segmentation introduces greater variability, which contributes to more natural prosody. Analysis of neutral declarative utterances showed that both training approaches reproduced the expected nuclear accent pattern, but the prosodic model aligned more closely with natural pre-nuclear contours. To support reproducibility and future research, all datasets, source codes, and trained models are publicly available under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

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### Early GVHD Prediction in Liver Transplantation via Multi-Modal Deep Learning on Imbalanced EHR Data

Authors: Yushan Jiang, Shuteng Niu, Dongjin Song, Yichen Wang, Jingna Feng, Xinyue Hu, Liu Yang, Cui Tao
Published: 2025-11-06
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11623v1

Graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) is a rare but often fatal complication in liver transplantation, with a very high mortality rate. By harnessing multi-modal deep learning methods to integrate heterogeneous and imbalanced electronic health records (EHR), we aim to advance early prediction of GVHD, paving the way for timely intervention and improved patient outcomes. In this study, we analyzed pre-transplant electronic health records (EHR) spanning the period before surgery for 2,100 liver transplantation patients, including 42 cases of graft-versus-host disease (GVHD), from a cohort treated at Mayo Clinic between 1992 and 2025. The dataset comprised four major modalities: patient demographics, laboratory tests, diagnoses, and medications. We developed a multi-modal deep learning framework that dynamically fuses these modalities, handles irregular records with missing values, and addresses extreme class imbalance through AUC-based optimization. The developed framework outperforms all single-modal and multi-modal machine learning baselines, achieving an AUC of 0.836, an AUPRC of 0.157, a recall of 0.768, and a specificity of 0.803. It also demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach in capturing complementary information from different modalities, leading to improved performance. Our multi-modal deep learning framework substantially improves existing approaches for early GVHD prediction. By effectively addressing the challenges of heterogeneity and extreme class imbalance in real-world EHR, it achieves accurate early prediction. Our proposed multi-modal deep learning method demonstrates promising results for early prediction of a GVHD in liver transplantation, despite the challenge of extremely imbalanced EHR data.

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### Small Vocabularies, Big Gains: Pretraining and Tokenization in Time Series Models

Authors: Alexis Roger, Gwen Legate, Kashif Rasul, Yuriy Nevmyvaka, Irina Rish
Published: 2025-11-06
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11622v1

Tokenization and transfer learning are two critical components in building state of the art time series foundation models for forecasting. In this work, we systematically study the effect of tokenizer design, specifically scaling and quantization strategies, on model performance, alongside the impact of pretraining versus random initialization. We show that tokenizer configuration primarily governs the representational capacity and stability of the model, while transfer learning influences optimization efficiency and alignment. Using a combination of empirical training experiments and theoretical analyses, we demonstrate that pretrained models consistently leverage well-designed tokenizers more effectively, particularly at smaller vocabulary sizes. Conversely, misaligned tokenization can diminish or even invert the benefits of pretraining. These findings highlight the importance of careful tokenization in time series modeling and suggest that combining small, efficient vocabularies with pretrained weights is especially advantageous in multi-modal forecasting settings, where the overall vocabulary must be shared across modalities. Our results provide concrete guidance for designing tokenizers and leveraging transfer learning in discrete representation learning for continuous signals.

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