# Research Papers — 2025-11 · bundle page 189 of 197

> Full-text markdown of papers #9401–9450 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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### Relaxing partition admissibility in Cluster-DAGs: a causal calculus with arbitrary variable clustering

Authors: Clément Yvernes, Emilie Devijver, Adèle H. Ribeiro, Marianne Clausel--Lesourd, Éric Gaussier
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.AI, stat.ME
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01396v1

Cluster DAGs (C-DAGs) provide an abstraction of causal graphs in which nodes represent clusters of variables, and edges encode both cluster-level causal relationships and dependencies arisen from unobserved confounding. C-DAGs define an equivalence class of acyclic causal graphs that agree on cluster-level relationships, enabling causal reasoning at a higher level of abstraction. However, when the chosen clustering induces cycles in the resulting C-DAG, the partition is deemed inadmissible under conventional C-DAG semantics. In this work, we extend the C-DAG framework to support arbitrary variable clusterings by relaxing the partition admissibility constraint, thereby allowing cyclic C-DAG representations. We extend the notions of d-separation and causal calculus to this setting, significantly broadening the scope of causal reasoning across clusters and enabling the application of C-DAGs in previously intractable scenarios. Our calculus is both sound and atomically complete with respect to the do-calculus: all valid interventional queries at the cluster level can be derived using our rules, each corresponding to a primitive do-calculus step.

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### SEPS: Semantic-enhanced Patch Slimming Framework for fine-grained cross-modal alignment

Authors: Xinyu Mao, Junsi Li, Haoji Zhang, Yu Liang, Ming Sun
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.MM
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01390v2

Fine-grained cross-modal alignment aims to establish precise local correspondences between vision and language, forming a cornerstone for visual question answering and related multimodal applications. Current approaches face challenges in addressing patch redundancy and ambiguity, which arise from the inherent information density disparities across modalities. Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have emerged as promising solutions to bridge this gap through their robust semantic generation capabilities. However, the dense textual outputs from MLLMs may introduce conflicts with the original sparse captions. Furthermore, accurately quantifying semantic relevance between rich visual patches and concise textual descriptions remains a core challenge. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the Semantic-Enhanced Patch Slimming (SEPS) framework, which systematically addresses patch redundancy and ambiguity. Our approach employs a two-stage mechanism to integrate unified semantics from both dense and sparse texts, enabling the identification of salient visual patches. Additionally, it leverages relevance-aware selection with mean value computation to highlight crucial patch-word correspondences, thereby improving cross-modal similarity assessment. Comprehensive experiments on Flickr30K and MS-COCO datasets validate that SEPS achieves superior performance, surpassing existing approaches by 23\%-86\% in rSum across diverse model architectures, with notable enhancements in text-to-image retrieval scenarios. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/Sweet4tars/seps.git.

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### RAGSmith: A Framework for Finding the Optimal Composition of Retrieval-Augmented Generation Methods Across Datasets

Authors: Muhammed Yusuf Kartal, Suha Kagan Kose, Korhan Sevinç, Burak Aktas
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.IR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01386v1

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) quality depends on many interacting choices across retrieval, ranking, augmentation, prompting, and generation, so optimizing modules in isolation is brittle. We introduce RAGSmith, a modular framework that treats RAG design as an end-to-end architecture search over nine technique families and 46{,}080 feasible pipeline configurations. A genetic search optimizes a scalar objective that jointly aggregates retrieval metrics (recall@k, mAP, nDCG, MRR) and generation metrics (LLM-Judge and semantic similarity). We evaluate on six Wikipedia-derived domains (Mathematics, Law, Finance, Medicine, Defense Industry, Computer Science), each with 100 questions spanning factual, interpretation, and long-answer types. RAGSmith finds configurations that consistently outperform naive RAG baseline by +3.8\% on average (range +1.2\% to +6.9\% across domains), with gains up to +12.5\% in retrieval and +7.5\% in generation. The search typically explores $\approx 0.2\%$ of the space ($\sim 100$ candidates) and discovers a robust backbone -- vector retrieval plus post-generation reflection/revision -- augmented by domain-dependent choices in expansion, reranking, augmentation, and prompt reordering; passage compression is never selected. Improvement magnitude correlates with question type, with larger gains on factual/long-answer mixes than interpretation-heavy sets. These results provide practical, domain-aware guidance for assembling effective RAG systems and demonstrate the utility of evolutionary search for full-pipeline optimization.

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### Memory-Efficient Training with In-Place FFT Implementation

Authors: Xinyu Ding, Bangtian Liu, Siyu Liao, Zhongfeng Wang
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01385v2

Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT) are widely used to reduce memory and computational costs in deep learning. However, existing implementations, including standard FFT and real FFT (rFFT), cannot achieve true in-place computation. In particular, rFFT maps an input of size n to a complex output of size n/2+1, causing dimensional mismatch and requiring additional memory allocation. We propose the first real-domain, fully in-place FFT framework (rdFFT) that preserves input-output memory space consistency. By leveraging butterfly operation symmetry and conjugate properties in the frequency domain, we design an implicit complex encoding scheme that eliminates intermediate cache usage entirely. Experiments on multiple natural language understanding tasks demonstrate the method effectiveness in reducing training memory cost, offering a promising direction for frequency-domain lightweight adaptation.

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### EREBUS: End-to-end Robust Event Based Underwater Simulation

Authors: Hitesh Kyatham, Arjun Suresh, Aadi Palnitkar, Yiannis Aloimonos
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01381v1

The underwater domain presents a vast array of challenges for roboticists and computer vision researchers alike, such as poor lighting conditions and high dynamic range scenes. In these adverse conditions, traditional vision techniques struggle to adapt and lead to suboptimal performance. Event-based cameras present an attractive solution to this problem, mitigating the issues of traditional cameras by tracking changes in the footage on a frame-by-frame basis. In this paper, we introduce a pipeline which can be used to generate realistic synthetic data of an event-based camera mounted to an AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) in an underwater environment for training vision models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our pipeline using the task of rock detection with poor visibility and suspended particulate matter, but the approach can be generalized to other underwater tasks.

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### Confounding Factors in Relating Model Performance to Morphology

Authors: Wessel Poelman, Thomas Bauwens, Miryam de Lhoneux
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01380v1

The extent to which individual language characteristics influence tokenization and language modeling is an open question. Differences in morphological systems have been suggested as both unimportant and crucial to consider (Cotterell et al., 2018; Gerz et al., 2018a; Park et al., 2021, inter alia). We argue this conflicting evidence is due to confounding factors in experimental setups, making it hard to compare results and draw conclusions. We identify confounding factors in analyses trying to answer the question of whether, and how, morphology relates to language modeling. Next, we re-assess three hypotheses by Arnett & Bergen (2025) for why modeling agglutinative languages results in higher perplexities than fusional languages: they look at morphological alignment of tokenization, tokenization efficiency, and dataset size. We show that each conclusion includes confounding factors. Finally, we introduce token bigram metrics as an intrinsic way to predict the difficulty of causal language modeling, and find that they are gradient proxies for morphological complexity that do not require expert annotation. Ultimately, we outline necessities to reliably answer whether, and how, morphology relates to language modeling.

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### Protecting the Neural Networks against FGSM Attack Using Machine Unlearning

Authors: Amir Hossein Khorasani, Ali Jahanian, Maryam Rastgarpour
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01377v1

Machine learning is a powerful tool for building predictive models. However, it is vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) attacks are a common type of adversarial attack that adds small perturbations to input data to trick a model into misclassifying it. In response to these attacks, researchers have developed methods for "unlearning" these attacks, which involves retraining a model on the original data without the added perturbations. Machine unlearning is a technique that tries to "forget" specific data points from the training dataset, to improve the robustness of a machine learning model against adversarial attacks like FGSM. In this paper, we focus on applying unlearning techniques to the LeNet neural network, a popular architecture for image classification. We evaluate the efficacy of unlearning FGSM attacks on the LeNet network and find that it can significantly improve its robustness against these types of attacks.

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### Align to Misalign: Automatic LLM Jailbreak with Meta-Optimized LLM Judges

Authors: Hamin Koo, Minseon Kim, Jaehyung Kim
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01375v2

Identifying the vulnerabilities of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for improving their safety by addressing inherent weaknesses. Jailbreaks, in which adversaries bypass safeguards with crafted input prompts, play a central role in red-teaming by probing LLMs to elicit unintended or unsafe behaviors. Recent optimization-based jailbreak approaches iteratively refine attack prompts by leveraging LLMs. However, they often rely heavily on either binary attack success rate (ASR) signals, which are sparse, or manually crafted scoring templates, which introduce human bias and uncertainty in the scoring outcomes. To address these limitations, we introduce AMIS (Align to MISalign), a meta-optimization framework that jointly evolves jailbreak prompts and scoring templates through a bi-level structure. In the inner loop, prompts are refined using fine-grained and dense feedback from a fixed scoring template. In the outer loop, the template is optimized using an ASR alignment score, gradually evolving to better reflect true attack outcomes across queries. This co-optimization process yields progressively stronger jailbreak prompts and more calibrated scoring signals. Evaluations on AdvBench and JBB-Behaviors demonstrate that AMIS achieves state-of-the-art performance, including 88.0% ASR on Claude-3.5-Haiku and 100.0% ASR on Claude-4-Sonnet, outperforming existing baselines by substantial margins.

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### Learning Intractable Multimodal Policies with Reparameterization and Diversity Regularization

Authors: Ziqi Wang, Jiashun Liu, Ling Pan
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01374v1

Traditional continuous deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms employ deterministic or unimodal Gaussian actors, which cannot express complex multimodal decision distributions. This limitation can hinder their performance in diversity-critical scenarios. There have been some attempts to design online multimodal RL algorithms based on diffusion or amortized actors. However, these actors are intractable, making existing methods struggle with balancing performance, decision diversity, and efficiency simultaneously. To overcome this challenge, we first reformulate existing intractable multimodal actors within a unified framework, and prove that they can be directly optimized by policy gradient via reparameterization. Then, we propose a distance-based diversity regularization that does not explicitly require decision probabilities. We identify two diversity-critical domains, namely multi-goal achieving and generative RL, to demonstrate the advantages of multimodal policies and our method, particularly in terms of few-shot robustness. In conventional MuJoCo benchmarks, our algorithm also shows competitive performance. Moreover, our experiments highlight that the amortized actor is a promising policy model class with strong multimodal expressivity and high performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/PneuC/DrAC

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### The Ouroboros of Benchmarking: Reasoning Evaluation in an Era of Saturation

Authors: İbrahim Ethem Deveci, Duygu Ataman
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01365v1

The rapid rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) has been accompanied by an equally rapid increase of benchmarks used to assess them. However, due to both improved model competence resulting from scaling and novel training advances as well as likely many of these datasets being included in pre or post training data, results become saturated, driving a continuous need for new and more challenging replacements. In this paper, we discuss whether surpassing a benchmark truly demonstrates reasoning ability or are we simply tracking numbers divorced from the capabilities we claim to measure? We present an investigation focused on three model families, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, and how their reasoning capabilities across different benchmarks evolve over the years. We also analyze performance trends over the years across different reasoning tasks and discuss the current situation of benchmarking and remaining challenges. By offering a comprehensive overview of benchmarks and reasoning tasks, our work aims to serve as a first reference to ground future research in reasoning evaluation and model development.

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### A semantic-based deep learning approach for mathematical expression retrieval

Authors: Pavan Kumar Perepu
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.IR, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01364v1

Mathematical expressions (MEs) have complex two-dimensional structures in which symbols can be present at any nested depth like superscripts, subscripts, above, below etc. As MEs are represented using LaTeX format, several text retrieval methods based on string matching, vector space models etc., have also been applied for ME retrieval problem in the literature. As these methods are based on syntactic similarity, recently deep learning approaches based on embedding have been used for semantic similarity. In our present work, we have focused on the retrieval of mathematical expressions using deep learning approaches. In our approach, semantic features are extracted from the MEs using a deep recurrent neural network (DRNN) and these features have been used for matching and retrieval. We have trained the network for a classification task which determines the complexity of an ME. ME complexity has been quantified in terms of its nested depth. Based on the nested depth, we have considered three complexity classes of MEs: Simple, Medium and Complex. After training the network, outputs just before the the final fully connected layer are extracted for all the MEs. These outputs form the semantic features of MEs and are stored in a database. For a given ME query, its semantic features are computed using the trained DRNN and matched against the semantic feature database. Matching is performed based on the standard euclidean distance and top 'k' nearest matches are retrieved, where 'k' is a user-defined parameter. Our approach has been illustrated on a database of 829 MEs.

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### Automatic Minds: Cognitive Parallels Between Hypnotic States and Large Language Model Processing

Authors: Giuseppe Riva, Brenda K. Wiederhold, Fabrizia Mantovani
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01363v1

The cognitive processes of the hypnotized mind and the computational operations of large language models (LLMs) share deep functional parallels. Both systems generate sophisticated, contextually appropriate behavior through automatic pattern-completion mechanisms operating with limited or unreliable executive oversight. This review examines this convergence across three principles: automaticity, in which responses emerge from associative rather than deliberative processes; suppressed monitoring, leading to errors such as confabulation in hypnosis and hallucination in LLMs; and heightened contextual dependency, where immediate cues (for example, the suggestion of a therapist or the prompt of the user) override stable knowledge. These mechanisms reveal an observer-relative meaning gap: both systems produce coherent but ungrounded outputs that require an external interpreter to supply meaning. Hypnosis and LLMs also exemplify functional agency - the capacity for complex, goal-directed, context-sensitive behavior - without subjective agency, the conscious awareness of intention and ownership that defines human action. This distinction clarifies how purposive behavior can emerge without self-reflective consciousness, governed instead by structural and contextual dynamics. Finally, both domains illuminate the phenomenon of scheming: automatic, goal-directed pattern generation that unfolds without reflective awareness. Hypnosis provides an experimental model for understanding how intention can become dissociated from conscious deliberation, offering insights into the hidden motivational dynamics of artificial systems. Recognizing these parallels suggests that the future of reliable AI lies in hybrid architectures that integrate generative fluency with mechanisms of executive monitoring, an approach inspired by the complex, self-regulating architecture of the human mind.

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### Safer in Translation? Presupposition Robustness in Indic Languages

Authors: Aadi Palnitkar, Arjun Suresh, Rishi Rajesh, Puneet Puli
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01360v1

Increasingly, more and more people are turning to large language models (LLMs) for healthcare advice and consultation, making it important to gauge the efficacy and accuracy of the responses of LLMs to such queries. While there are pre-existing medical benchmarks literature which seeks to accomplish this very task, these benchmarks are almost universally in English, which has led to a notable gap in existing literature pertaining to multilingual LLM evaluation. Within this work, we seek to aid in addressing this gap with Cancer-Myth-Indic, an Indic language benchmark built by translating a 500-item subset of Cancer-Myth, sampled evenly across its original categories, into five under-served but widely used languages from the subcontinent (500 per language; 2,500 translated items total). Native-speaker translators followed a style guide for preserving implicit presuppositions in translation; items feature false presuppositions relating to cancer. We evaluate several popular LLMs under this presupposition stress.

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### PrefixNLI: Detecting Factual Inconsistencies as Soon as They Arise

Authors: Sapir Harary, Eran Hirsch, Aviv Slobodkin, David Wan, Mohit Bansal, Ido Dagan
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01359v1

Natural Language Inference (NLI) models have been used in various ways to improve the factuality of LLM outputs. This is typically done by applying an NLI model to judge whether the model output is entailed from the supposed evidence, triggering some corrective actions, such as beam reranking at inference time or RL rewards during training. While NLI models are trained to detect factual inconsistencies over complete sentences, decisions in the common autoregressive generation architecture are made for each evolving text prefix, during decoding. Addressing this setting, we generalize the entailment detection task to apply over arbitrary text prefixes, and suggest its utility for improving generation faithfulness. Providing suitable evaluation and training datasets for this task, we train MiniTruePrefixes, a novel specialized model that better detects factual inconsistencies over text prefixes, outperforming comparable baseline NLI models by 5-14 F1 points in prefix-level entailment. We further demonstrate that integrating MiniTruePrefixes into a controlled decoding framework substantially improves factual consistency in abstractive summarization. When guided by MiniTruePrefixes, LLaMA-3.2-3B-Instruct matches the faithfulness and runtime of the 8B model from the same model family, while using only half the memory.

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### CMI-MTL: Cross-Mamba interaction based multi-task learning for medical visual question answering

Authors: Qiangguo Jin, Xianyao Zheng, Hui Cui, Changming Sun, Yuqi Fang, Cong Cong, Ran Su, Leyi Wei, Ping Xuan, Junbo Wang
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01357v1

Medical visual question answering (Med-VQA) is a crucial multimodal task in clinical decision support and telemedicine. Recent self-attention based methods struggle to effectively handle cross-modal semantic alignments between vision and language. Moreover, classification-based methods rely on predefined answer sets. Treating this task as a simple classification problem may make it unable to adapt to the diversity of free-form answers and overlook the detailed semantic information of free-form answers. In order to tackle these challenges, we introduce a Cross-Mamba Interaction based Multi-Task Learning (CMI-MTL) framework that learns cross-modal feature representations from images and texts. CMI-MTL comprises three key modules: fine-grained visual-text feature alignment (FVTA), cross-modal interleaved feature representation (CIFR), and free-form answer-enhanced multi-task learning (FFAE). FVTA extracts the most relevant regions in image-text pairs through fine-grained visual-text feature alignment. CIFR captures cross-modal sequential interactions via cross-modal interleaved feature representation. FFAE leverages auxiliary knowledge from open-ended questions through free-form answer-enhanced multi-task learning, improving the model's capability for open-ended Med-VQA. Experimental results show that CMI-MTL outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods on three Med-VQA datasets: VQA-RAD, SLAKE, and OVQA. Furthermore, we conduct more interpretability experiments to prove the effectiveness. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/BioMedIA-repo/CMI-MTL.

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### Verifiable Split Learning via zk-SNARKs

Authors: Rana Alaa, Darío González-Ferreiro, Carlos Beis-Penedo, Manuel Fernández-Veiga, Rebeca P. Díaz-Redondo, Ana Fernández-Vilas
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01356v1

Split learning is an approach to collaborative learning in which a deep neural network is divided into two parts: client-side and server-side at a cut layer. The client side executes its model using its raw input data and sends the intermediate activation to the server side. This configuration architecture is very useful for enabling collaborative training when data or resources are separated between devices. However, split learning lacks the ability to verify the correctness and honesty of the computations that are performed and exchanged between the parties. To this purpose, this paper proposes a verifiable split learning framework that integrates a zk-SNARK proof to ensure correctness and verifiability. The zk-SNARK proof and verification are generated for both sides in forward propagation and backward propagation on the server side, guaranteeing verifiability on both sides. The verifiable split learning architecture is compared to a blockchain-enabled system for the same deep learning network, one that records updates but without generating the zero-knowledge proof. From the comparison, it can be deduced that applying the zk-SNARK test achieves verifiability and correctness, while blockchains are lightweight but unverifiable.

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### Expanding the Content-Style Frontier: a Balanced Subspace Blending Approach for Content-Style LoRA Fusion

Authors: Linhao Huang
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01355v1

Recent advancements in text-to-image diffusion models have significantly improved the personalization and stylization of generated images. However, previous studies have only assessed content similarity under a single style intensity. In our experiments, we observe that increasing style intensity leads to a significant loss of content features, resulting in a suboptimal content-style frontier. To address this, we propose a novel approach to expand the content-style frontier by leveraging Content-Style Subspace Blending and a Content-Style Balance loss. Our method improves content similarity across varying style intensities, significantly broadening the content-style frontier. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing techniques in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, achieving superior content-style trade-off with significantly lower Inverted Generational Distance (IGD) and Generational Distance (GD) scores compared to current methods.

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### Thinking with DistilQwen: A Tale of Four Distilled Reasoning and Reward Model Series

Authors: Wenrui Cai, Chengyu Wang, Junbing Yan, Jun Huang, Xiangzhong Fang
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01354v1

Recently, the demand for small and efficient reasoning models to support real-world applications has driven the development of knowledge distillation techniques that balance reasoning performance and inference speed. In this paper, we further extend the DistilQwen model family, initialized from the Qwen models, by introducing four model series specifically designed to meet industrial requirements. The distilled model collection comprises: (1) slow-thinking models, optimized for reasoning tasks that require high accuracy; (2) two series of adaptive-thinking models, which dynamically adjust reasoning strategies based on input tasks to maximize efficiency across diverse scenarios; and (3) distilled reward models, which enable further reinforcement learning of reasoning models using distilled knowledge. Comprehensive evaluations across multiple benchmarks demonstrate both high inference efficiency and strong reasoning performance for these models, as well as the practical utility of distilled reward models. We further show that these models support industry practitioners by providing scalable training and inference functionalities on the Alibaba Cloud PAI (Platform for Artificial Intelligence) platform.

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### AI Literacy in UAE Libraries: Assessing Competencies, Training Needs, and Ethical Considerations for the Digital Age

Authors: Zafar Imam Khan
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.DL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01353v1

The study explores the current state of artificial intelligence (AI) literacy levels among library professionals employing a quantitative approach consisting of 92 surveys of LIS professionals in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Findings of the study revealed the presence of strong cognitive competencies, while there were gaps observed in behavioral and normative competencies, especially related to AI biases, AI-powered learning, and ethical considerations. There was a disconnect observed between the perceived importance of AI skills and the effectiveness of the current training programs.

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### MiniFool -- Physics-Constraint-Aware Minimizer-Based Adversarial Attacks in Deep Neural Networks

Authors: Lucie Flek, Oliver Janik, Philipp Alexander Jung, Akbar Karimi, Timo Saala, Alexander Schmidt, Matthias Schott, Philipp Soldin, Matthias Thiesmeyer, Christopher Wiebusch, Ulrich Willemsen
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.LG, astro-ph.HE, astro-ph.IM, hep-ex, physics.data-an
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01352v2

In this paper, we present a new algorithm, MiniFool, that implements physics-inspired adversarial attacks for testing neural network-based classification tasks in particle and astroparticle physics. While we initially developed the algorithm for the search for astrophysical tau neutrinos with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, we apply it to further data from other science domains, thus demonstrating its general applicability. Here, we apply the algorithm to the well-known MNIST data set and furthermore, to Open Data data from the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. The algorithm is based on minimizing a cost function that combines a $χ^2$ based test-statistic with the deviation from the desired target score. The test statistic quantifies the probability of the perturbations applied to the data based on the experimental uncertainties. For our studied use cases, we find that the likelihood of a flipped classification differs for both the initially correctly and incorrectly classified events. When testing changes of the classifications as a function of an attack parameter that scales the experimental uncertainties, the robustness of the network decision can be quantified. Furthermore, this allows testing the robustness of the classification of unlabeled experimental data.

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### The Future of Generative AI in Software Engineering: A Vision from Industry and Academia in the European GENIUS Project

Authors: Robin Gröpler, Steffen Klepke, Jack Johns, Andreas Dreschinski, Klaus Schmid, Benedikt Dornauer, Eray Tüzün, Joost Noppen, Mohammad Reza Mousavi, Yongjian Tang, Johannes Viehmann, Selin Şirin Aslangül et al.
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01348v2

Generative AI (GenAI) has recently emerged as a groundbreaking force in Software Engineering, capable of generating code, identifying bugs, recommending fixes, and supporting quality assurance. While its use in coding tasks shows considerable promise, applying GenAI across the entire Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) has not yet been fully explored. Critical uncertainties in areas such as reliability, accountability, security, and data privacy demand deeper investigation and coordinated action. The GENIUS project, comprising over 30 European industrial and academic partners, aims to address these challenges by advancing AI integration across all SDLC phases. It focuses on GenAI's potential, the development of innovative tools, and emerging research challenges, actively shaping the future of software engineering. This vision paper presents a shared perspective on the future of GenAI-driven software engineering, grounded in cross-sector dialogue as well as experiences and findings within the GENIUS consortium. The paper explores four central elements: (1) a structured overview of current challenges in GenAI adoption across the SDLC; (2) a forward-looking vision outlining key technological and methodological advances expected over the next five years; (3) anticipated shifts in the roles and required skill sets of software professionals; and (4) the contribution of GENIUS in realising this transformation through practical tools and industrial validation. This paper focuses on aligning technical innovation with business relevance. It aims to inform both research agendas and industrial strategies, providing a foundation for reliable, scalable, and industry-ready GenAI solutions for software engineering teams.

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### MIQ-SAM3D: From Single-Point Prompt to Multi-Instance Segmentation via Competitive Query Refinement

Authors: Jierui Qu, Jianchun Zhao
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01345v1

Accurate segmentation of medical images is fundamental to tumor diagnosis and treatment planning. SAM-based interactive segmentation has gained attention for its strong generalization, but most methods follow a single-point-to-single-object paradigm, which limits multi-lesion segmentation. Moreover, ViT backbones capture global context but often miss high-fidelity local details. We propose MIQ-SAM3D, a multi-instance 3D segmentation framework with a competitive query optimization strategy that shifts from single-point-to-single-mask to single-point-to-multi-instance. A prompt-conditioned instance-query generator transforms a single point prompt into multiple specialized queries, enabling retrieval of all semantically similar lesions across the 3D volume from a single exemplar. A hybrid CNN-Transformer encoder injects CNN-derived boundary saliency into ViT self-attention via spatial gating. A competitively optimized query decoder then enables end-to-end, parallel, multi-instance prediction through inter-query competition. On LiTS17 and KiTS21 dataset, MIQ-SAM3D achieved comparable levels and exhibits strong robustness to prompts, providing a practical solution for efficient annotation of clinically relevant multi-lesion cases.

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### CNFP: Optimizing Cloud-Native Network Function Placement with Diffusion Models on the Cloud Continuum

Authors: Álvaro Vázquez Rodríguez, Manuel Fernández-Veiga, Carlos Giraldo-Rodríguez
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01343v2

The placement of Cloud-Native Network Functions across the Cloud-Continuum represents a core challenge in the orchestration of current 5G and future 6G networks. The process entails the implementation of interdependent computing tasks, which are structured as Service Function Chains, over distributed cloud infrastructures. This is achieved while satisfying strict resource, bandwidth, connectivity, and end-to-end latency constraints. It is widely acknowledged that classical approaches, including mixed-integer (non)linear programming, heuristics, and reinforcement learning, face practical limitations in terms of scalability, robust constraint handling, and generalization to unseen network conditions. In this study, a diffusion-based theoretical and algorithmic framework for CNF placement is proposed, based on Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models. The placement process is reconceptualised as a conditional graph-to-assignment generation task. Each scenario is encoded as a heterogeneous graph, capturing infrastructure and service-chain structure. A Graph Neural Network denoiser is trained to iteratively refine noisy CNF-to-cloud assignment matrices. In order to bias the generation process towards valid deployments, the model incorporates constraint-aware penalties during training. At inference, a multitude of candidate placements are sampled, and the best suboptimal, feasible solution is selected. Extensive experimentation on diverse topologies, incorporating out-of-distribution evaluations with larger instances and shifted constraint regimes, demonstrates that the proposed approach consistently generates feasible solutions with considerably accelerated inference compared to other solvers. The findings of this study demonstrate the potential of diffusion-based generative modelling as a scalable tool for constrained network placement and embedding in cloud-continuum orchestration.

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### $\left|\,\circlearrowright\,\boxed{\text{BUS}}\,\right|$: A Large and Diverse Multimodal Benchmark for evaluating the ability of Vision-Language Models to understand Rebus Puzzles

Authors: Trishanu Das, Abhilash Nandy, Khush Bajaj, Deepiha S
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01340v1

Understanding Rebus Puzzles (Rebus Puzzles use pictures, symbols, and letters to represent words or phrases creatively) requires a variety of skills such as image recognition, cognitive skills, commonsense reasoning, multi-step reasoning, image-based wordplay, etc., making this a challenging task for even current Vision-Language Models. In this paper, we present $\left|\,\circlearrowright\,\boxed{\text{BUS}}\,\right|$, a large and diverse benchmark of $1,333$ English Rebus Puzzles containing different artistic styles and levels of difficulty, spread across 18 categories such as food, idioms, sports, finance, entertainment, etc. We also propose $RebusDescProgICE$, a model-agnostic framework which uses a combination of an unstructured description and code-based, structured reasoning, along with better, reasoning-based in-context example selection, improving the performance of Vision-Language Models on $\left|\,\circlearrowright\,\boxed{\text{BUS}}\,\right|$ by $2.1-4.1\%$ and $20-30\%$ using closed-source and open-source models respectively compared to Chain-of-Thought Reasoning.

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### Beyond Permissions: Investigating Mobile Personalization with Simulated Personas

Authors: Ibrahim Khalilov, Chaoran Chen, Ziang Xiao, Tianshi Li, Toby Jia-Jun Li, Yaxing Yao
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01336v1

Mobile applications increasingly rely on sensor data to infer user context and deliver personalized experiences. Yet the mechanisms behind this personalization remain opaque to users and researchers alike. This paper presents a sandbox system that uses sensor spoofing and persona simulation to audit and visualize how mobile apps respond to inferred behaviors. Rather than treating spoofing as adversarial, we demonstrate its use as a tool for behavioral transparency and user empowerment. Our system injects multi-sensor profiles - generated from structured, lifestyle-based personas - into Android devices in real time, enabling users to observe app responses to contexts such as high activity, location shifts, or time-of-day changes. With automated screenshot capture and GPT-4 Vision-based UI summarization, our pipeline helps document subtle personalization cues. Preliminary findings show measurable app adaptations across fitness, e-commerce, and everyday service apps such as weather and navigation. We offer this toolkit as a foundation for privacy-enhancing technologies and user-facing transparency interventions.

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### Embodied Cognition Augmented End2End Autonomous Driving

Authors: Ling Niu, Xiaoji Zheng, Han Wang, Chen Zheng, Ziyuan Yang, Bokui Chen, Jiangtao Gong
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.HC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01334v1

In recent years, vision-based end-to-end autonomous driving has emerged as a new paradigm. However, popular end-to-end approaches typically rely on visual feature extraction networks trained under label supervision. This limited supervision framework restricts the generality and applicability of driving models. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm termed $E^{3}AD$, which advocates for comparative learning between visual feature extraction networks and the general EEG large model, in order to learn latent human driving cognition for enhancing end-to-end planning. In this work, we collected a cognitive dataset for the mentioned contrastive learning process. Subsequently, we investigated the methods and potential mechanisms for enhancing end-to-end planning with human driving cognition, using popular driving models as baselines on publicly available autonomous driving datasets. Both open-loop and closed-loop tests are conducted for a comprehensive evaluation of planning performance. Experimental results demonstrate that the $E^{3}AD$ paradigm significantly enhances the end-to-end planning performance of baseline models. Ablation studies further validate the contribution of driving cognition and the effectiveness of comparative learning process. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to integrate human driving cognition for improving end-to-end autonomous driving planning. It represents an initial attempt to incorporate embodied cognitive data into end-to-end autonomous driving, providing valuable insights for future brain-inspired autonomous driving systems. Our code will be made available at Github

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### RobustVLA: Robustness-Aware Reinforcement Post-Training for Vision-Language-Action Models

Authors: Hongyin Zhang, Shuo Zhang, Junxi Jin, Qixin Zeng, Runze Li, Donglin Wang
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01331v2

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently emerged as powerful general-purpose policies for robotic manipulation, benefiting from large-scale multi-modal pre-training. However, they often fail to generalize reliably in out-of-distribution deployments, where unavoidable disturbances such as observation noise, sensor errors, or actuation perturbations become prevalent. While recent Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based post-training provides a practical means to adapt pre-trained VLA models, existing methods mainly emphasize reward maximization and overlook robustness to environmental uncertainty. In this work, we introduce RobustVLA, a lightweight online RL post-training method designed to explicitly enhance the resilience of VLA models. Through a systematic robustness analysis, we identify two key regularizations: Jacobian regularization, which mitigates sensitivity to observation noise, and smoothness regularization, which stabilizes policies under action perturbations. Extensive experiments across diverse robotic environments demonstrate that RobustVLA significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods in robustness and reliability. Our results highlight the importance of principled robustness-aware RL post-training as a key step toward improving the reliability and robustness of VLA models.

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### Unbiased Platform-Level Causal Estimation for Search Systems: A Competitive Isolation PSM-DID Framework

Authors: Ying Song, Yijing Wang, Hui Yang, Weihan Jin, Jun Xiong, Congyi Zhou, Jialin Zhu, Xiang Gao, Rong Chen, HuaGuang Deng, Ying Dai, Fei Xiao et al.
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01329v1

Evaluating platform-level interventions in search-based two-sided marketplaces is fundamentally challenged by systemic effects such as spillovers and network interference. While widely used for causal inference, the PSM (Propensity Score Matching) - DID (Difference-in-Differences) framework remains susceptible to selection bias and cross-unit interference from unaccounted spillovers. In this paper, we introduced Competitive Isolation PSM-DID, a novel causal framework that integrates propensity score matching with competitive isolation to enable platform-level effect measurement (e.g., order volume, GMV) instead of item-level metrics in search systems. Our approach provides theoretically guaranteed unbiased estimation under mutual exclusion conditions, with an open dataset released to support reproducible research on marketplace interference (github.com/xxxx). Extensive experiments demonstrate significant reductions in interference effects and estimation variance compared to baseline methods. Successful deployment in a large-scale marketplace confirms the framework's practical utility for platform-level causal inference.

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### RDTE-UNet: A Boundary and Detail Aware UNet for Precise Medical Image Segmentation

Authors: Jierui Qu, Jianchun Zhao
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01328v1

Medical image segmentation is essential for computer-assisted diagnosis and treatment planning, yet substantial anatomical variability and boundary ambiguity hinder reliable delineation of fine structures. We propose RDTE-UNet, a segmentation network that unifies local modeling with global context to strengthen boundary delineation and detail preservation. RDTE-UNet employs a hybrid ResBlock detail-aware Transformer backbone and three modules: ASBE for adaptive boundary enhancement, HVDA for fine-grained feature modeling, and EulerFF for fusion weighting guided by Euler's formula. Together, these components improve structural consistency and boundary accuracy across morphology, orientation, and scale. On Synapse and BUSI dataset, RDTE-UNet has achieved a comparable level in terms of segmentation accuracy and boundary quality.

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### AI for Requirements Engineering: Industry adoption and Practitioner perspectives

Authors: Lekshmi Murali Rani, Richard Berntsson Svensson, Robert Feldt
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.HC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01324v3

The integration of AI for Requirements Engineering (RE) presents significant benefits but also poses real challenges. Although RE is fundamental to software engineering, limited research has examined AI adoption in RE. We surveyed 55 software practitioners to map AI usage across four RE phases: Elicitation, Analysis, Specification, and Validation, and four approaches for decision making: human-only decisions, AI validation, Human AI Collaboration (HAIC), and full AI automation. Participants also shared their perceptions, challenges, and opportunities when applying AI for RE tasks. Our data show that 58.2% of respondents already use AI in RE, and 69.1% view its impact as positive or very positive. HAIC dominates practice, accounting for 54.4% of all RE techniques, while full AI automation remains minimal at 5.4%. Passive AI validation (4.4 to 6.2%) lags even further behind, indicating that practitioners value AI's active support over passive oversight. These findings suggest that AI is most effective when positioned as a collaborative partner rather than a replacement for human expertise. It also highlights the need for RE-specific HAIC frameworks along with robust and responsible AI governance as AI adoption in RE grows.

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### DEEPAMBIGQA: Ambiguous Multi-hop Questions for Benchmarking LLM Answer Completeness

Authors: Jiabao Ji, Min Li, Priyanshu Kumar, Shiyu Chang, Saloni Potdar
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01323v1

Large language models (LLMs) with integrated search tools show strong promise in open-domain question answering (QA), yet they often struggle to produce complete answer set to complex questions such as Which actor from the film Heat won at least one Academy Award?, which requires (1) distinguishing between multiple films sharing the same title and (2) reasoning across a large set of actors to gather and integrate evidence. Existing QA benchmarks rarely evaluate both challenges jointly. To address this, we introduce DeepAmbigQAGen, an automatic data generation pipeline that constructs QA tasks grounded in text corpora and linked knowledge graph, generating natural and verifiable questions that systematically embed name ambiguity and multi-step reasoning. Based on this, we build DeepAmbigQA, a dataset of 3,600 questions requiring multi-hop reasoning and half of them explicit name ambiguity resolving. Experiments reveal that, even state-of-the-art GPT-5 show incomplete answers, achieving only 0.13 exact match on ambiguous questions and 0.21 on non-ambiguous questions. These findings highlight the need for more robust QA systems aimed at information gathering and answer completeness.

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### OmniFuser: Adaptive Multimodal Fusion for Service-Oriented Predictive Maintenance

Authors: Ziqi Wang, Hailiang Zhao, Yuhao Yang, Daojiang Hu, Cheng Bao, Mingyi Liu, Kai Di, Schahram Dustdar, Zhongjie Wang, Shuiguang Deng
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01320v1

Accurate and timely prediction of tool conditions is critical for intelligent manufacturing systems, where unplanned tool failures can lead to quality degradation and production downtime. In modern industrial environments, predictive maintenance is increasingly implemented as an intelligent service that integrates sensing, analysis, and decision support across production processes. To meet the demand for reliable and service-oriented operation, we present OmniFuser, a multimodal learning framework for predictive maintenance of milling tools that leverages both visual and sensor data. It performs parallel feature extraction from high-resolution tool images and cutting-force signals, capturing complementary spatiotemporal patterns across modalities. To effectively integrate heterogeneous features, OmniFuser employs a contamination-free cross-modal fusion mechanism that disentangles shared and modality-specific components, allowing for efficient cross-modal interaction. Furthermore, a recursive refinement pathway functions as an anchor mechanism, consistently retaining residual information to stabilize fusion dynamics. The learned representations can be encapsulated as reusable maintenance service modules, supporting both tool-state classification (e.g., Sharp, Used, Dulled) and multi-step force signal forecasting. Experiments on real-world milling datasets demonstrate that OmniFuser consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, providing a dependable foundation for building intelligent industrial maintenance services.

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### A Generative Adversarial Approach to Adversarial Attacks Guided by Contrastive Language-Image Pre-trained Model

Authors: Sampriti Soor, Alik Pramanick, Jothiprakash K, Arijit Sur
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01317v2

The rapid growth of deep learning has brought about powerful models that can handle various tasks, like identifying images and understanding language. However, adversarial attacks, an unnoticed alteration, can deceive models, leading to inaccurate predictions. In this paper, a generative adversarial attack method is proposed that uses the CLIP model to create highly effective and visually imperceptible adversarial perturbations. The CLIP model's ability to align text and image representation helps incorporate natural language semantics with a guided loss to generate effective adversarial examples that look identical to the original inputs. This integration allows extensive scene manipulation, creating perturbations in multi-object environments specifically designed to deceive multilabel classifiers. Our approach integrates the concentrated perturbation strategy from Saliency-based Auto-Encoder (SSAE) with the dissimilar text embeddings similar to Generative Adversarial Multi-Object Scene Attacks (GAMA), resulting in perturbations that both deceive classification models and maintain high structural similarity to the original images. The model was tested on various tasks across diverse black-box victim models. The experimental results show that our method performs competitively, achieving comparable or superior results to existing techniques, while preserving greater visual fidelity.

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### Exploringand Unleashing the Power of Large Language Models in CI/CD Configuration Translation

Authors: Chong Wang, Chen Zhang, Jiajun Wu, Wunan Guo, Jianfeng Qu, Yewen Tian, Yang Liu
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01316v1

Continuous Integration (CI) is a cornerstone of modern collaborative software development, and numerous CI platforms are available. Differences in maintenance overhead, reliability, and integration depth with code-hosting platforms make migration between CI platforms a common practice. A central step in migration is translating CI configurations, which is challenging due to the intrinsic complexity of CI configurations and the need to understand semantic differences and relationships across CI platforms. With the advent of large language models (LLMs), recent advances in software engineering highlight their potential for CI configuration translation. In this paper, we present a study on LLM-based CI configuration translation, focusing on the migration from Travis CI to GitHub Actions. First, using 811 migration records, we quantify the effort involved and find that developers read an average of 38 lines of Travis configuration and write 58 lines of GitHub Actions configuration, with nearly half of the migrations requiring multiple commits. We further analyze translations produced by each of the four LLMs and identify 1,121 issues grouped into four categories: logic inconsistencies (38%), platform discrepancies (32%), environment errors (25%), and syntax errors (5%). Finally, we evaluate three enhancement strategies and show that combining guideline-based prompting with iterative refinement achieves the best performance, reaching a Build Success Rate of 75.5%-nearly a threefold improvement over GPT-4o with a basic prompt.

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### MVSMamba: Multi-View Stereo with State Space Model

Authors: Jianfei Jiang, Qiankun Liu, Hongyuan Liu, Haochen Yu, Liyong Wang, Jiansheng Chen, Huimin Ma
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01315v1

Robust feature representations are essential for learning-based Multi-View Stereo (MVS), which relies on accurate feature matching. Recent MVS methods leverage Transformers to capture long-range dependencies based on local features extracted by conventional feature pyramid networks. However, the quadratic complexity of Transformer-based MVS methods poses challenges to balance performance and efficiency. Motivated by the global modeling capability and linear complexity of the Mamba architecture, we propose MVSMamba, the first Mamba-based MVS network. MVSMamba enables efficient global feature aggregation with minimal computational overhead. To fully exploit Mamba's potential in MVS, we propose a Dynamic Mamba module (DM-module) based on a novel reference-centered dynamic scanning strategy, which enables: (1) Efficient intra- and inter-view feature interaction from the reference to source views, (2) Omnidirectional multi-view feature representations, and (3) Multi-scale global feature aggregation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate MVSMamba outperforms state-of-the-art MVS methods on the DTU dataset and the Tanks-and-Temples benchmark with both superior performance and efficiency. The source code is available at https://github.com/JianfeiJ/MVSMamba.

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### llmSHAP: A Principled Approach to LLM Explainability

Authors: Filip Naudot, Tobias Sundqvist, Timotheus Kampik
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01311v1

Feature attribution methods help make machine learning-based inference explainable by determining how much one or several features have contributed to a model's output. A particularly popular attribution method is based on the Shapley value from cooperative game theory, a measure that guarantees the satisfaction of several desirable principles, assuming deterministic inference. We apply the Shapley value to feature attribution in large language model (LLM)-based decision support systems, where inference is, by design, stochastic (non-deterministic). We then demonstrate when we can and cannot guarantee Shapley value principle satisfaction across different implementation variants applied to LLM-based decision support, and analyze how the stochastic nature of LLMs affects these guarantees. We also highlight trade-offs between explainable inference speed, agreement with exact Shapley value attributions, and principle attainment.

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### Perturb a Model, Not an Image: Towards Robust Privacy Protection via Anti-Personalized Diffusion Models

Authors: Tae-Young Lee, Juwon Seo, Jong Hwan Ko, Gyeong-Moon Park
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01307v1

Recent advances in diffusion models have enabled high-quality synthesis of specific subjects, such as identities or objects. This capability, while unlocking new possibilities in content creation, also introduces significant privacy risks, as personalization techniques can be misused by malicious users to generate unauthorized content. Although several studies have attempted to counter this by generating adversarially perturbed samples designed to disrupt personalization, they rely on unrealistic assumptions and become ineffective in the presence of even a few clean images or under simple image transformations. To address these challenges, we shift the protection target from the images to the diffusion model itself to hinder the personalization of specific subjects, through our novel framework called Anti-Personalized Diffusion Models (APDM). We first provide a theoretical analysis demonstrating that a naive approach of existing loss functions to diffusion models is inherently incapable of ensuring convergence for robust anti-personalization. Motivated by this finding, we introduce Direct Protective Optimization (DPO), a novel loss function that effectively disrupts subject personalization in the target model without compromising generative quality. Moreover, we propose a new dual-path optimization strategy, coined Learning to Protect (L2P). By alternating between personalization and protection paths, L2P simulates future personalization trajectories and adaptively reinforces protection at each step. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance in preventing unauthorized personalization. The code is available at https://github.com/KU-VGI/APDM.

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### DeepSpecs: Expert-Level Questions Answering in 5G

Authors: Aman Ganapathy Manvattira, Yifei Xu, Ziyue Dang, Songwu Lu
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.NI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01305v1

5G technology enables mobile Internet access for billions of users. Answering expert-level questions about 5G specifications requires navigating thousands of pages of cross-referenced standards that evolve across releases. Existing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) frameworks, including telecom-specific approaches, rely on semantic similarity and cannot reliably resolve cross-references or reason about specification evolution. We present DeepSpecs, a RAG system enhanced by structural and temporal reasoning via three metadata-rich databases: SpecDB (clause-aligned specification text), ChangeDB (line-level version diffs), and TDocDB (standardization meeting documents). DeepSpecs explicitly resolves cross-references by recursively retrieving referenced clauses through metadata lookup, and traces specification evolution by mining changes and linking them to Change Requests that document design rationale. We curate two 5G QA datasets: 573 expert-annotated real-world questions from practitioner forums and educational resources, and 350 evolution-focused questions derived from approved Change Requests. Across multiple LLM backends, DeepSpecs outperforms base models and state-of-the-art telecom RAG systems; ablations confirm that explicit cross-reference resolution and evolution-aware retrieval substantially improve answer quality, underscoring the value of modeling the structural and temporal properties of 5G standards.

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### Positive Semi-definite Latent Factor Grouping-Boosted Cluster-reasoning Instance Disentangled Learning for WSI Representation

Authors: Chentao Li, Behzad Bozorgtabar, Yifang Ping, Pan Huang, Jing Qin
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01304v2

Multiple instance learning (MIL) has been widely used for representing whole-slide pathology images. However, spatial, semantic, and decision entanglements among instances limit its representation and interpretability. To address these challenges, we propose a latent factor grouping-boosted cluster-reasoning instance disentangled learning framework for whole-slide image (WSI) interpretable representation in three phases. First, we introduce a novel positive semi-definite latent factor grouping that maps instances into a latent subspace, effectively mitigating spatial entanglement in MIL. To alleviate semantic entanglement, we employs instance probability counterfactual inference and optimization via cluster-reasoning instance disentangling. Finally, we employ a generalized linear weighted decision via instance effect re-weighting to address decision entanglement. Extensive experiments on multicentre datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms all state-of-the-art models. Moreover, it attains pathologist-aligned interpretability through disentangled representations and a transparent decision-making process.

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### Differentially Private Nonparametric Confidence Intervals Under Minimal Distributional Assumptions

Authors: Tomer Shoham, Moshe Shenfeld, Noa Velner-Harris, Katrina Ligett
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01303v2

We consider the problem of constructing differentially private nonparametric confidence intervals (CIs) for an arbitrary quantity using resampling. A growing body of work has adapted resampling ideas to the private setting, including private bootstrap methods \cite{brawner2018bootstrap, wang2025differentially,dette2025gaussian} and BLB-based subsample-and-aggregate approaches \cite{covington2025unbiased, chadha2024resampling}. However, existing methods typically rely on strong assumptions, such as asymptotic normality, or are tied to specific privacy mechanisms such as noise addition, and can be impractical in finite-sample regimes. We address these problems by introducing a simple, general framework that can convert any differentially private estimator satisfying mild conditions into a differentially private nonparametric CI for arbitrary target quantities. Our method repeatedly subsamples the data, applies the private estimator to each subset, and post-processes the resulting empirical CDF into a CI. The framework is black-box, and does not require a specific limiting distribution. We prove that the empirical CDF induced by our procedure converges to the sampling distribution of the private statistic, which implies that the resulting CI is asymptotically valid and tight, and provide heuristic guidance for choosing the hyperparameters. Empirically, our method outperforms competing general approaches, especially for non-smooth functionals and more challenging distributions.

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### REASON: Probability map-guided dual-branch fusion framework for gastric content assessment

Authors: Nu-Fnag Xiao, De-Xing Huang, Le-Tian Wang, Mei-Jiang Gui, Qi Fu, Xiao-Liang Xie, Shi-Qi Liu, Shuangyi Wang, Zeng-Guang Hou, Ying-Wei Wang, Xiao-Hu Zhou
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01302v1

Accurate assessment of gastric content from ultrasound is critical for stratifying aspiration risk at induction of general anesthesia. However, traditional methods rely on manual tracing of gastric antra and empirical formulas, which face significant limitations in both efficiency and accuracy. To address these challenges, a novel two-stage probability map-guided dual-branch fusion framework (REASON) for gastric content assessment is proposed. In stage 1, a segmentation model generates probability maps that suppress artifacts and highlight gastric anatomy. In stage 2, a dual-branch classifier fuses information from two standard views, right lateral decubitus (RLD) and supine (SUP), to improve the discrimination of learned features. Experimental results on a self-collected dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches by a significant margin. This framework shows great promise for automated preoperative aspiration risk assessment, offering a more robust, efficient, and accurate solution for clinical practice.

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### LSHFed: Robust and Communication-Efficient Federated Learning with Locally-Sensitive Hashing Gradient Mapping

Authors: Guanjie Cheng, Mengzhen Yang, Xinkui Zhao, Shuyi Yu, Tianyu Du, Yangyang Wu, Mengying Zhu, Shuiguang Deng
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01296v1

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across distributed nodes without exposing raw data, but its decentralized nature makes it vulnerable in trust-deficient environments. Inference attacks may recover sensitive information from gradient updates, while poisoning attacks can degrade model performance or induce malicious behaviors. Existing defenses often suffer from high communication and computation costs, or limited detection precision. To address these issues, we propose LSHFed, a robust and communication-efficient FL framework that simultaneously enhances aggregation robustness and privacy preservation. At its core, LSHFed incorporates LSHGM, a novel gradient verification mechanism that projects high-dimensional gradients into compact binary representations via multi-hyperplane locally-sensitive hashing. This enables accurate detection and filtering of malicious gradients using only their irreversible hash forms, thus mitigating privacy leakage risks and substantially reducing transmission overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LSHFed maintains high model performance even when up to 50% of participants are collusive adversaries while achieving up to a 1000x reduction in gradient verification communication compared to full-gradient methods.

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### UniREditBench: A Unified Reasoning-based Image Editing Benchmark

Authors: Feng Han, Yibin Wang, Chenglin Li, Zheming Liang, Dianyi Wang, Yang Jiao, Zhipeng Wei, Chao Gong, Cheng Jin, Jiaqi Wang
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01295v3

Recent advances in multi-modal generative models have driven substantial improvements in image editing. However, current generative models still struggle with handling diverse and complex image editing tasks that require implicit reasoning, underscoring the need for a comprehensive benchmark to systematically assess their performance across various reasoning scenarios. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on single-object attribute transformation in realistic scenarios, which, while effective, encounter two key challenges: (1) they largely overlook multi-object interactions as well as game-world scenarios that involve human-defined rules, which are common in real-life applications; (2) they only rely on textual references to evaluate the generated images, potentially leading to systematic misjudgments, especially in complex reasoning scenarios. To this end, this work proposes UniREditBench, a unified benchmark for reasoning-based image editing evaluation. It comprises 2,700 meticulously curated samples, covering both real- and game-world scenarios across 8 primary dimensions and 18 sub-dimensions. To improve evaluation reliability, we introduce multimodal dual-reference evaluation, providing both textual and ground-truth image references for each sample assessment. Furthermore, we design an automated multi-scenario data synthesis pipeline and construct UniREdit-Data-100K, a large-scale synthetic dataset with high-quality chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning annotations. We fine-tune Bagel on this dataset and develop UniREdit-Bagel, demonstrating substantial improvements in both in-domain and out-of-distribution settings. Through thorough benchmarking of both open-source and closed-source image editing models, we reveal their strengths and weaknesses across various aspects.

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### Kinematify: Open-Vocabulary Synthesis of High-DoF Articulated Objects

Authors: Jiawei Wang, Dingyou Wang, Jiaming Hu, Qixuan Zhang, Jingyi Yu, Lan Xu
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01294v4

A deep understanding of kinematic structures and movable components is essential for enabling robots to manipulate objects and model their own articulated forms. Such understanding is captured through articulated objects, which are essential for tasks such as physical simulation, motion planning, and policy learning. However, creating these models, particularly for objects with high degrees of freedom (DoF), remains a significant challenge. Existing methods typically rely on motion sequences or strong assumptions from hand-curated datasets, which hinders scalability. In this paper, we introduce Kinematify, an automated framework that synthesizes articulated objects directly from arbitrary RGB images or textual descriptions. Our method addresses two core challenges: (i) inferring kinematic topologies for high-DoF objects and (ii) estimating joint parameters from static geometry. To achieve this, we combine MCTS search for structural inference with geometry-driven optimization for joint reasoning, producing physically consistent and functionally valid descriptions. We evaluate Kinematify on diverse inputs from both synthetic and real-world environments, demonstrating improvements in registration and kinematic topology accuracy over prior work.

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### Detecting Generated Images by Fitting Natural Image Distributions

Authors: Yonggang Zhang, Jun Nie, Xinmei Tian, Mingming Gong, Kun Zhang, Bo Han
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01293v1

The increasing realism of generated images has raised significant concerns about their potential misuse, necessitating robust detection methods. Current approaches mainly rely on training binary classifiers, which depend heavily on the quantity and quality of available generated images. In this work, we propose a novel framework that exploits geometric differences between the data manifolds of natural and generated images. To exploit this difference, we employ a pair of functions engineered to yield consistent outputs for natural images but divergent outputs for generated ones, leveraging the property that their gradients reside in mutually orthogonal subspaces. This design enables a simple yet effective detection method: an image is identified as generated if a transformation along its data manifold induces a significant change in the loss value of a self-supervised model pre-trained on natural images. Further more, to address diminishing manifold disparities in advanced generative models, we leverage normalizing flows to amplify detectable differences by extruding generated images away from the natural image manifold. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of this method. Code is available at https://github.com/tmlr-group/ConV.

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### Optimal Attention Temperature Improves the Robustness of In-Context Learning under Distribution Shift in High Dimensions

Authors: Samet Demir, Zafer Dogan
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01292v2

Pretrained Transformers can perform in-context learning (ICL) from a few demonstrations, but this ability can fail sharply when the test distribution differs from pretraining, a common deployment setting. We study attention temperature as a simple inference-time control for improving ICL robustness under such shifts. In a high-dimensional linear-regression framework, we analyze a Transformer with "approximate softmax" attention, which preserves softmax's normalization and temperature-dependent selectivity while remaining tractable. We derive a closed-form expression for the ICL generalization error under distribution shift, and show that it is minimized by an explicit optimal attention temperature. This characterization yields interpretable guidance by linking the best temperature to moments of the pre-softmax attention scores, and predicts when temperature adjustment can recover near Bayes-optimal performance. We validate the theory with extensive simulations, and further demonstrate gains on pretrained LLMs (GPT-2 and Llama2-7B) on question-answering benchmarks under distribution shift induced by noisy in-context demonstrations. Overall, attention temperature emerges as a principled, lightweight knob for improving the robustness of ICL in pretrained Transformers.

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### FirstAidQA: A Synthetic Dataset for First Aid and Emergency Response in Low-Connectivity Settings

Authors: Saiyma Sittul Muna, Rezwan Islam Salvi, Mushfiqur Rahman Mushfique, Ajwad Abrar
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01289v1

In emergency situations, every second counts. The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in time-sensitive, low or zero-connectivity environments remains limited. Current models are computationally intensive and unsuitable for low-tier devices often used by first responders or civilians. A major barrier to developing lightweight, domain-specific solutions is the lack of high-quality datasets tailored to first aid and emergency response. To address this gap, we introduce FirstAidQA, a synthetic dataset containing 5,500 high-quality question answer pairs that encompass a wide range of first aid and emergency response scenarios. The dataset was generated using a Large Language Model, ChatGPT-4o-mini, with prompt-based in-context learning, using texts from the Vital First Aid Book (2019). We applied preprocessing steps such as text cleaning, contextual chunking, and filtering, followed by human validation to ensure accuracy, safety, and practical relevance of the QA pairs. FirstAidQA is designed to support instruction-tuning and fine-tuning of LLMs and Small Language Models (SLMs), enabling faster, more reliable, and offline-capable systems for emergency settings. We publicly release the dataset to advance research on safety-critical and resource-constrained AI applications in first aid and emergency response. The dataset is available on Hugging Face at https://huggingface.co/datasets/i-am-mushfiq/FirstAidQA.

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### "Give a Positive Review Only": An Early Investigation Into In-Paper Prompt Injection Attacks and Defenses for AI Reviewers

Authors: Qin Zhou, Zhexin Zhang, Zhi Li, Limin Sun
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.CL, cs.CR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01287v2

With the rapid advancement of AI models, their deployment across diverse tasks has become increasingly widespread. A notable emerging application is leveraging AI models to assist in reviewing scientific papers. However, recent reports have revealed that some papers contain hidden, injected prompts designed to manipulate AI reviewers into providing overly favorable evaluations. In this work, we present an early systematic investigation into this emerging threat. We propose two classes of attacks: (1) static attack, which employs a fixed injection prompt, and (2) iterative attack, which optimizes the injection prompt against a simulated reviewer model to maximize its effectiveness. Both attacks achieve striking performance, frequently inducing full evaluation scores when targeting frontier AI reviewers. Furthermore, we show that these attacks are robust across various settings. To counter this threat, we explore a simple detection-based defense. While it substantially reduces the attack success rate, we demonstrate that an adaptive attacker can partially circumvent this defense. Our findings underscore the need for greater attention and rigorous safeguards against prompt-injection threats in AI-assisted peer review.

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### Koopman-based Prediction of Connectivity for Flying Ad Hoc Networks

Authors: Sivaram Krishnan, Jinho Choi, Jihong Park, Gregory Sherman, Benjamin Campbell
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.LG, eess.SY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01286v1

The application of machine learning (ML) to communication systems is expected to play a pivotal role in future artificial intelligence (AI)-based next-generation wireless networks. While most existing works focus on ML techniques for static wireless environments, they often face limitations when applied to highly dynamic environments, such as flying ad hoc networks (FANETs). This paper explores the use of data-driven Koopman approaches to address these challenges. Specifically, we investigate how these approaches can model UAV trajectory dynamics within FANETs, enabling more accurate predictions and improved network performance. By leveraging Koopman operator theory, we propose two possible approaches -- centralized and distributed -- to efficiently address the challenges posed by the constantly changing topology of FANETs. To demonstrate this, we consider a FANET performing surveillance with UAVs following pre-determined trajectories and predict signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratios (SINRs) to ensure reliable communication between UAVs. Our results show that these approaches can accurately predict connectivity and isolation events that lead to modelled communication outages. This capability could help UAVs schedule their transmissions based on these predictions.

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### Adaptation of Foundation Models for Medical Image Analysis: Strategies, Challenges, and Future Directions

Authors: Karma Phuntsho, Abdullah, Kyungmi Lee, Ickjai Lee, Euijoon Ahn
Published: 2025-11-03
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01284v1

Foundation models (FMs) have emerged as a transformative paradigm in medical image analysis, offering the potential to provide generalizable, task-agnostic solutions across a wide range of clinical tasks and imaging modalities. Their capacity to learn transferable representations from large-scale data has the potential to address the limitations of conventional task-specific models. However, adaptation of FMs to real-world clinical practice remains constrained by key challenges, including domain shifts, limited availability of high-quality annotated data, substantial computational demands, and strict privacy requirements. This review presents a comprehensive assessment of strategies for adapting FMs to the specific demands of medical imaging. We examine approaches such as supervised fine-tuning, domain-specific pretraining, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, self-supervised learning, hybrid methods, and multimodal or cross-modal frameworks. For each, we evaluate reported performance gains, clinical applicability, and limitations, while identifying trade-offs and unresolved challenges that prior reviews have often overlooked. Beyond these established techniques, we also highlight emerging directions aimed at addressing current gaps. These include continual learning to enable dynamic deployment, federated and privacy-preserving approaches to safeguard sensitive data, hybrid self-supervised learning to enhance data efficiency, data-centric pipelines that combine synthetic generation with human-in-the-loop validation, and systematic benchmarking to assess robust generalization under real-world clinical variability. By outlining these strategies and associated research gaps, this review provides a roadmap for developing adaptive, trustworthy, and clinically integrated FMs capable of meeting the demands of real-world medical imaging.

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