# Research Papers — 2025-11 · bundle page 21 of 197

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### UNION: A Lightweight Target Representation for Efficient Zero-Shot Image-Guided Retrieval with Optional Textual Queries

Authors: Hoang-Bao Le, Allie Tran, Binh T. Nguyen, Liting Zhou, Cathal Gurrin
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.IR, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22253v1

Image-Guided Retrieval with Optional Text (IGROT) is a general retrieval setting where a query consists of an anchor image, with or without accompanying text, aiming to retrieve semantically relevant target images. This formulation unifies two major tasks: Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) and Sketch-Based Image Retrieval (SBIR). In this work, we address IGROT under low-data supervision by introducing UNION, a lightweight and generalisable target representation that fuses the image embedding with a null-text prompt. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on fixed target features, UNION enhances semantic alignment with multimodal queries while requiring no architectural modifications to pretrained vision-language models. With only 5,000 training samples - from LlavaSCo for CIR and Training-Sketchy for SBIR - our method achieves competitive results across benchmarks, including CIRCO mAP@50 of 38.5 and Sketchy mAP@200 of 82.7, surpassing many heavily supervised baselines. This demonstrates the robustness and efficiency of UNION in bridging vision and language across diverse query types.

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### ColonAdapter: Geometry Estimation Through Foundation Model Adaptation for Colonoscopy

Authors: Zhiyi Jiang, Yifu Wang, Xuelian Cheng, Zongyuan Ge
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22250v1

Estimating 3D geometry from monocular colonoscopy images is challenging due to non-Lambertian surfaces, moving light sources, and large textureless regions. While recent 3D geometric foundation models eliminate the need for multi-stage pipelines, their performance deteriorates in clinical scenes. These models are primarily trained on natural scene datasets and struggle with specularity and homogeneous textures typical in colonoscopy, leading to inaccurate geometry estimation. In this paper, we present ColonAdapter, a self-supervised fine-tuning framework that adapts geometric foundation models for colonoscopy geometry estimation. Our method leverages pretrained geometric priors while tailoring them to clinical data. To improve performance in low-texture regions and ensure scale consistency, we introduce a Detail Restoration Module (DRM) and a geometry consistency loss. Furthermore, a confidence-weighted photometric loss enhances training stability in clinical environments. Experiments on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in camera pose estimation, monocular depth prediction, and dense 3D point map reconstruction, without requiring ground-truth intrinsic parameters.

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### Toward Diffusible High-Dimensional Latent Spaces: A Frequency Perspective

Authors: Bolin Lai, Xudong Wang, Saketh Rambhatla, James M. Rehg, Zsolt Kira, Rohit Girdhar, Ishan Misra
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22249v1

Latent diffusion has become the default paradigm for visual generation, yet we observe a persistent reconstruction-generation trade-off as latent dimensionality increases: higher-capacity autoencoders improve reconstruction fidelity but generation quality eventually declines. We trace this gap to the different behaviors in high-frequency encoding and decoding. Through controlled perturbations in both RGB and latent domains, we analyze encoder/decoder behaviors and find that decoders depend strongly on high-frequency latent components to recover details, whereas encoders under-represent high-frequency contents, yielding insufficient exposure and underfitting in high-frequency bands for diffusion model training. To address this issue, we introduce FreqWarm, a plug-and-play frequency warm-up curriculum that increases early-stage exposure to high-frequency latent signals during diffusion or flow-matching training -- without modifying or retraining the autoencoder. Applied across several high-dimensional autoencoders, FreqWarm consistently improves generation quality: decreasing gFID by 14.11 on Wan2.2-VAE, 6.13 on LTX-VAE, and 4.42 on DC-AE-f32, while remaining architecture-agnostic and compatible with diverse backbones. Our study shows that explicitly managing frequency exposure can successfully turn high-dimensional latent spaces into more diffusible targets.

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### FIGROTD: A Friendly-to-Handle Dataset for Image Guided Retrieval with Optional Text

Authors: Hoang-Bao Le, Allie Tran, Binh T. Nguyen, Liting Zhou, Cathal Gurrin
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.IR, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22247v1

Image-Guided Retrieval with Optional Text (IGROT) unifies visual retrieval (without text) and composed retrieval (with text). Despite its relevance in applications like Google Image and Bing, progress has been limited by the lack of an accessible benchmark and methods that balance performance across subtasks. Large-scale datasets such as MagicLens are comprehensive but computationally prohibitive, while existing models often favor either visual or compositional queries. We introduce FIGROTD, a lightweight yet high-quality IGROT dataset with 16,474 training triplets and 1,262 test triplets across CIR, SBIR, and CSTBIR. To reduce redundancy, we propose the Variance Guided Feature Mask (VaGFeM), which selectively enhances discriminative dimensions based on variance statistics. We further adopt a dual-loss design (InfoNCE + Triplet) to improve compositional reasoning. Trained on FIGROTD, VaGFeM achieves competitive results on nine benchmarks, reaching 34.8 mAP@10 on CIRCO and 75.7 mAP@200 on Sketchy, outperforming stronger baselines despite fewer triplets.

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### An interpretable unsupervised representation learning for high precision measurement in particle physics

Authors: Xing-Jian Lv, De-Xing Miao, Zi-Jun Xu, Jian-Chun Wang
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: hep-ex, cs.AI, physics.ins-det
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22246v2

Unsupervised learning has been widely applied to various tasks in particle physics. However, existing models lack precise control over their learned representations, limiting physical interpretability and hindering their use for accurate measurements. We propose the Histogram AutoEncoder (HistoAE), an unsupervised representation learning network featuring a custom histogram-based loss that enforces a physically structured latent space. Applied to silicon microstrip detectors, HistoAE learns an interpretable two-dimensional latent space corresponding to the particle's charge and impact position. After simple post-processing, it achieves a charge resolution of $0.25\,e$ and a position resolution of $3\,μ\mathrm{m}$ on beam-test data, comparable to the conventional approach. These results demonstrate that unsupervised deep learning models can enable physically meaningful and quantitatively precise measurements. Moreover, the generative capacity of HistoAE enables straightforward extensions to fast detector simulations.

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### Anchor to Expand: Semantic Anchoring for Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Authors: Seoyun Yang, Gihoon Kim, Taesup Kim
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22245v3

Personalizing text-to-image diffusion models extends pretrained models to represent novel user-specific concepts from only a few reference images. However, learning a new concept while building on the prior knowledge of the pretrained model remains a key challenge. When personalization focuses on learning the target concept, the model tends to overfit the reference examples and degrade its general capability. In contrast, emphasizing prior preservation can hinder capturing distinctive personalized attributes. In this paper, we address this challenge by viewing a personalized concept as an underrepresented concept whose semantic counterpart is well represented in the pretrained model. Rather than treating the learning of a new concept and prior preservation as separate objectives, we reformulate them as a single anchored learning problem. We therefore introduce Semantic Anchoring Personalization (SAP), which keeps concept learning grounded in the pretrained semantic structure while capturing subject-specific attributes. The proposed objective offers a simple yet effective formulation that can be applied across different model backbones without architectural modifications or auxiliary networks. Extensive experiments across various settings demonstrate that SAP achieves a better balance between subject fidelity and text-image alignment than baseline methods. Further ablation studies validate the contribution of semantic anchoring to personalization.

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### Rethinking Test Time Scaling for Flow-Matching Generative Models

Authors: Qingtao Yu, Changlin Song, Minghao Sun, Zhengyang Yu, Vinay Kumar Verma, Soumya Roy, Sumit Negi, Hongdong Li, Dylan Campbell
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22242v3

The performance of text-to-image diffusion models may be improved at test-time by scaling computation to search for a generated image that maximizes a given reward function. While existing trajectory level exploration methods improve the effectiveness of test-time scaling for standard diffusion models, they are largely incompatible with modern flow matching models, which use deterministic sampling. This imposes significant computational overhead on local trajectory search, making the trade-offs less favorable compared to global search. However, global search strategies like trajectory pruning face two critical challenges: the sharp, low-diversity distributions characteristic of scaled flow models that restrict the candidate search space, and the bias of reward models in the early denoising process. To overcome these limitations, we propose Repel, a token-level mechanism that encourages sample diversity, and NARF, a noise-aware reward fine-tuning strategy to obtain more accurate reward ranking at early denoising stages. Together, these promote more effective test-time scaling resource allocation. Overall, we name our pipeline as \textbf{DOG-Trim}: \textbf{D}iversity enhanced \textbf{O}rder aligned \textbf{G}lobal flow Trimming. The experiments demonstrate that, under the same compute cost, our approach achieves around twice the performance improvement relative to the scaling-free baseline compared to the best existing method. Github: https://github.com/TerrysLearning/DOGTrimTTS.

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### Evaluating Embedding Models and Pipeline Optimization for AI Search Quality

Authors: Philip Zhong, Kent Chen, Don Wang
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22240v1

We evaluate the performance of various text embedding models and pipeline configurations for AI-driven search systems. We compare sentence-transformer and generative embedding models (e.g., All-MPNet, BGE, GTE, and Qwen) at different dimensions, indexing methods (Milvus HNSW/IVF), and chunking strategies. A custom evaluation dataset of 11,975 query-chunk pairs was synthesized from US City Council meeting transcripts using a local large language model (LLM). The data pipeline includes preprocessing, automated question generation per chunk, manual validation, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) integration. We measure retrieval accuracy using reference-based metrics: Top-K Accuracy and Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG). Our results demonstrate that higher-dimensional embeddings significantly boost search quality (e.g., Qwen3-Embedding-8B/4096 achieves Top-3 accuracy about 0.571 versus 0.412 for GTE-large/1024), and that neural re-rankers (e.g., a BGE cross-encoder) further improve ranking accuracy (Top-3 up to 0.527). Finer-grained chunking (512 characters versus 2000 characters) also improves accuracy. We discuss the impact of these factors and outline future directions for pipeline automation and evaluation.

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### DeepPNI: Language- and graph-based model for mutation-driven protein-nucleic acid energetics

Authors: Somnath Mondal, Tinkal Mondal, Soumajit Pramanik, Rukmankesh Mehra
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: q-bio.BM, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22239v1

The interaction between proteins and nucleic acids is crucial for processes that sustain cellular function, including DNA maintenance and the regulation of gene expression and translation. Amino acid mutations in protein-nucleic acid complexes often lead to vital diseases. Experimental techniques have their own specific limitations in predicting mutational effects in protein-nucleic acid complexes. In this study, we compiled a large dataset of 1951 mutations including both protein-DNA and protein-RNA complexes and integrated structural and sequential features to build a deep learning-based regression model named DeepPNI. This model estimates mutation-induced binding free energy changes in protein-nucleic acid complexes. The structural features are encoded via edge-aware RGCN and the sequential features are extracted using protein language model ESM-2. We have achieved a high average Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) of 0.76 in the large dataset via five-fold cross-validation. Consistent performance across individual dataset of protein-DNA, protein-RNA complexes, and different experimental temperature split dataset make the model generalizable. Our model showed good performance in complex-based five-fold cross-validation, which proved its robustness. In addition, DeepPNI outperformed in external dataset validation, and comparison with existing tools

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### Creating Blank Canvas Against AI-enabled Image Forgery

Authors: Qi Song, Ziyuan Luo, Renjie Wan
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22237v1

AIGC-based image editing technology has greatly simplified the realistic-level image modification, causing serious potential risks of image forgery. This paper introduces a new approach to tampering detection using the Segment Anything Model (SAM). Instead of training SAM to identify tampered areas, we propose a novel strategy. The entire image is transformed into a blank canvas from the perspective of neural models. Any modifications to this blank canvas would be noticeable to the models. To achieve this idea, we introduce adversarial perturbations to prevent SAM from ``seeing anything'', allowing it to identify forged regions when the image is tampered with. Due to SAM's powerful perceiving capabilities, naive adversarial attacks cannot completely tame SAM. To thoroughly deceive SAM and make it blind to the image, we introduce a frequency-aware optimization strategy, which further enhances the capability of tamper localization. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

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### Bridging 3D Deep Learning and Curation for Analysis and High-Quality Segmentation in Practice

Authors: Simon Püttmann, Jonathan Jair Sànchez Contreras, Lennart Kowitz, Peter Lampen, Saumya Gupta, Davide Panzeri, Nina Hagemann, Qiaojie Xiong, Dirk M. Hermann, Cao Chen, Jianxu Chen
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22236v1

Accurate 3D microscopy image segmentation is critical for quantitative bioimage analysis but even state-of-the-art foundation models yield error-prone results. Therefore, manual curation is still widely used for either preparing high-quality training data or fixing errors before analysis. We present VessQC, an open-source tool for uncertainty-guided curation of large 3D microscopy segmentations. By integrating uncertainty maps, VessQC directs user attention to regions most likely containing biologically meaningful errors. In a preliminary user study uncertainty-guided correction significantly improved error detection recall from 67% to 94.0% (p=0.007) without a significant increase in total curation time. VessQC thus enables efficient, human-in-the-loop refinement of volumetric segmentations and bridges a key gap in real-world applications between uncertainty estimation and practical human-computer interaction. The software is freely available at github.com/MMV-Lab/VessQC.

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### Training High-Level Schedulers with Execution-Feedback Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon GUI Automation

Authors: Zehao Deng, Tianjie Ju, Zheng Wu, Zhuosheng Zhang, Gongshen Liu
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22235v2

The rapid development of large vision-language model (VLM) has greatly promoted the research of GUI agent. However, GUI agents still face significant challenges in handling long-horizon tasks. First, single-agent models struggle to balance high-level capabilities and low-level execution capability, facing prevalent issues of responsibility coupling and capability conflicts. Second, agents lack awareness of the task state, leading to progress loss in long-horizon tasks. To address these challenges, we propose a staged execution-feedback reinforcement learning algorithm. Unlike training a unified policy model, we focus on training high-level scheduling models. Specifically, we propose and train two agents: a Coordinator, responsible for the strategic planning and task decomposition; and a State Tracker, responsible for context compression and information management to maintain the task's state and coherence. Based on this, we built the Coordinator-Executor-State Tracker (CES) multi-agent framework, which can be integrated with any low-level Executor model, assisting the Executor in solving long-horizon tasks through task scheduling and state management. Experiments on long-horizon task benchmarks demonstrate that CES significantly enhances the system's planning and state management capabilities. Furthermore, analysis confirms that our trained high-level scheduling module is a generalizable, plug-and-play module that significantly enhances the long-horizon capabilities of various Executors. Code can be available at https://github.com/hehehahi4/CES.

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### IE-SRGS: An Internal-External Knowledge Fusion Framework for High-Fidelity 3D Gaussian Splatting Super-Resolution

Authors: Xiang Feng, Tieshi Zhong, Shuo Chang, Weiliu Wang, Chengkai Wang, Yifei Chen, Yuhe Wang, Zhenzhong Kuang, Xuefei Yin, Yanming Zhu
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22233v1

Reconstructing high-resolution (HR) 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) models from low-resolution (LR) inputs remains challenging due to the lack of fine-grained textures and geometry. Existing methods typically rely on pre-trained 2D super-resolution (2DSR) models to enhance textures, but suffer from 3D Gaussian ambiguity arising from cross-view inconsistencies and domain gaps inherent in 2DSR models. We propose IE-SRGS, a novel 3DGS SR paradigm that addresses this issue by jointly leveraging the complementary strengths of external 2DSR priors and internal 3DGS features. Specifically, we use 2DSR and depth estimation models to generate HR images and depth maps as external knowledge, and employ multi-scale 3DGS models to produce cross-view consistent, domain-adaptive counterparts as internal knowledge. A mask-guided fusion strategy is introduced to integrate these two sources and synergistically exploit their complementary strengths, effectively guiding the 3D Gaussian optimization toward high-fidelity reconstruction. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that IE-SRGS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative accuracy and visual fidelity.

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### From Compound Figures to Medical Multi-image Reasoning: Scaling Multimodal Large Language Models with Biomedical Literature

Authors: Zhen Chen, Yihang Fu, Rong Zhou, Serina Applebaum, Min Kyu Kim, Aidan Gilson, Morten Lee, Salahudeen Mirza, Gabriel Madera, Mauro Giuffre, Yuanting Pan, Roy Jiang et al.
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22232v2

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly capable in medical imaging, yet most focus on single-image settings. Clinical interpretation often requires integrating evidence across multiple images, such as different modalities, views, or time points. However, large-scale medical multi-image data and training strategies for such reasoning remain limited. We construct PMC-MI, a large-scale resource comprising 234,956 instruction instances derived from biomedical compound figures, with 10,555 multi-subimage instances structured for reinforcement learning and assessed by medical reviewers. We also introduce PMC-MI-Bench, a manually reviewed benchmark separated at the source-article level. We further propose a three-stage training framework, instantiated as M3LLM, combining supervised fine-tuning on multi-image instructions, selection-aware reinforcement learning for question-conditioned visual-evidence selection, and supervised consolidation on a broader instruction mixture. Evaluating M3LLM on PMC-MI-Bench, two public medical benchmarks, longitudinal chest radiographs, and a retrospective dermatology cohort reveals it achieves the highest performance among representative MLLMs. On PMC-MI-Bench, M3LLM scored 81.6, 84.6, and 85.2 on single-subimage, multi-subimage, and relative-position tasks, respectively, outperforming the strongest baselines (75.6, 79.1, and 77.6). It also set new records on the provenance-screened OmniMedVQA (88.6%) and MMMU-Med (68.0%), alongside top performance in two clinical settings after task-specific adaptation. These findings support using literature-derived multi-image supervision and targeted post-training for medical multi-image MLLMs. Data and code are publicly available.

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### 3D-Consistent Multi-View Editing by Correspondence Guidance

Authors: Josef Bengtson, David Nilsson, Dong In Lee, Yaroslava Lochman, Fredrik Kahl
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22228v3

Recent advancements in diffusion and flow models have greatly improved text-based image editing, yet methods that edit images independently often produce geometrically and photometrically inconsistent results across different views of the same scene. Such inconsistencies are particularly problematic for editing of 3D representations such as NeRFs or Gaussian splat models. We propose a training-free guidance framework that enforces multi-view consistency during the image editing process. The key idea is that corresponding points should look similar after editing. To achieve this, we introduce a consistency loss that guides the denoising process toward coherent edits. The framework is flexible and can be combined with widely varying image editing methods, supporting both dense and sparse multi-view editing setups. Experimental results show that our approach significantly improves 3D consistency compared to existing multi-view editing methods. We also show that this increased consistency enables high-quality Gaussian splat editing with sharp details and strong fidelity to user-specified text prompts. Please refer to our project page for video results: https://3d-consistent-editing.github.io/

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### Embedded Universal Predictive Intelligence: a coherent framework for multi-agent learning

Authors: Alexander Meulemans, Rajai Nasser, Maciej Wołczyk, Marissa A. Weis, Seijin Kobayashi, Blake Richards, Guillaume Lajoie, Angelika Steger, Marcus Hutter, James Manyika, Rif A. Saurous, João Sacramento et al.
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22226v3

The standard theory of model-free reinforcement learning assumes that the environment dynamics are stationary and that agents are decoupled from their environment, such that policies are treated as being separate from the world they inhabit. This leads to theoretical challenges in the multi-agent setting where the non-stationarity induced by the learning of other agents demands prospective learning based on prediction models. To accurately model other agents, an agent must account for the fact that those other agents are, in turn, forming beliefs about it to predict its future behavior, motivating agents to model themselves as part of the environment. Here, building upon foundational work on universal artificial intelligence (AIXI), we introduce a mathematical framework for prospective learning and embedded agency centered on self-prediction, where Bayesian RL agents predict both future perceptual inputs and their own actions, and must therefore resolve epistemic uncertainty about themselves as part of the universe they inhabit. We show that in multi-agent settings, self-prediction enables agents to reason about others running similar algorithms, leading to new game-theoretic solution concepts and novel forms of cooperation unattainable by classical decoupled agents. Moreover, we extend the theory of AIXI, and study universally intelligent embedded agents which start from a Solomonoff prior. We show that these idealized agents can form consistent mutual predictions and achieve infinite-order theory of mind, potentially setting a gold standard for embedded multi-agent learning.

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### Real-PGDN: A Two-level Classification Method for Full-Process Recognition of Newly Registered Pornographic and Gambling Domain Names

Authors: Hao Wang, Yingshuo Wang, Junang Gan, Yanan Cheng, Jinshuai Zhang
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22215v1

Online pornography and gambling have consistently posed regulatory challenges for governments, threatening both personal assets and privacy. Therefore, it is imperative to research the classification of the newly registered Pornographic and Gambling Domain Names (PGDN). However, scholarly investigation into this topic is limited. Previous efforts in PGDN classification pursue high accuracy using ideal sample data, while others employ up-to-date data from real-world scenarios but achieve lower classification accuracy. This paper introduces the Real-PGDN method, which accomplishes a complete process of timely and comprehensive real-data crawling, feature extraction with feature-missing tolerance, precise PGDN classification, and assessment of application effects in actual scenarios. Our two-level classifier, which integrates CoSENT (BERT-based), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), and traditional classification algorithms, achieves a 97.88% precision. The research process amasses the NRD2024 dataset, which contains continuous detection information over 20 days for 1,500,000 newly registered domain names across 6 directions. Results from our case study demonstrate that this method also maintains a forecast precision of over 70% for PGDN that are delayed in usage after registration.

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### BiCQL-ML: A Bi-Level Conservative Q-Learning Framework for Maximum Likelihood Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Junsung Park
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.LG, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22210v1

Offline inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to recover a reward function that explains expert behavior using only fixed demonstration data, without any additional online interaction. We propose BiCQL-ML, a policy-free offline IRL algorithm that jointly optimizes a reward function and a conservative Q-function in a bi-level framework, thereby avoiding explicit policy learning. The method alternates between (i) learning a conservative Q-function via Conservative Q-Learning (CQL) under the current reward, and (ii) updating the reward parameters to maximize the expected Q-values of expert actions while suppressing over-generalization to out-of-distribution actions. This procedure can be viewed as maximum likelihood estimation under a soft value matching principle. We provide theoretical guarantees that BiCQL-ML converges to a reward function under which the expert policy is soft-optimal. Empirically, we show on standard offline RL benchmarks that BiCQL-ML improves both reward recovery and downstream policy performance compared to existing offline IRL baselines.

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### PULSE-ICU: A Pretrained Unified Long-Sequence Encoder for Multi-task Prediction in Intensive Care Units

Authors: Sejeong Jang, Joo Heung Yoon, Hyo Kyung Lee
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22199v1

Intensive care unit (ICU) data are highly irregular, heterogeneous, and temporally fragmented, posing challenges for generalizable clinical prediction. We present PULSE-ICU, a self-supervised foundation model that learns event-level ICU representations from large-scale EHR sequences without resampling or manual feature engineering. A unified embedding module encodes event identity, continuous values, units, and temporal attributes, while a Longformer-based encoder enables efficient modeling of long trajectories. PULSE-ICU was fine-tuned across 18 prediction tasks, including mortality, intervention forecasting, and phenotype identification, achieving strong performance across task types. External validation on eICU, HiRID, and P12 showed substantial improvements with minimal fine-tuning, demonstrating robustness to domain shift and variable constraints. These findings suggest that foundation-style modeling can improve data efficiency and adaptability, providing a scalable framework for ICU decision support across diverse clinical environments.

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### Controllable 3D Object Generation with Single Image Prompt

Authors: Jaeseok Lee, Jaekoo Lee
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22194v1

Recently, the impressive generative capabilities of diffusion models have been demonstrated, producing images with remarkable fidelity. Particularly, existing methods for the 3D object generation tasks, which is one of the fastest-growing segments in computer vision, pre-dominantly use text-to-image diffusion models with textual inversion which train a pseudo text prompt to describe the given image. In practice, various text-to-image generative models employ textual inversion to learn concepts or styles of target object in the pseudo text prompt embedding space, thereby generating sophisticated outputs. However, textual inversion requires additional training time and lacks control ability. To tackle this issues, we propose two innovative methods: (1) using an off-the-shelf image adapter that generates 3D objects without textual inversion, offering enhanced control over conditions such as depth, pose, and text. (2) a depth conditioned warmup strategy to enhance 3D consistency. In experimental results, ours show qualitatively and quantitatively comparable performance and improved 3D consistency to the existing text-inversion-based alternatives. Furthermore, we conduct a user study to assess (i) how well results match the input image and (ii) whether 3D consistency is maintained. User study results show that our model outperforms the alternatives, validating the effectiveness of our approaches. Our code is available at GitHub repository:https://github.com/Seooooooogi/Control3D_IP/

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### ARPGNet: Appearance- and Relation-aware Parallel Graph Attention Fusion Network for Facial Expression Recognition

Authors: Yan Li, Yong Zhao, Xiaohan Xia, Dongmei Jiang
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22188v1

The key to facial expression recognition is to learn discriminative spatial-temporal representations that embed facial expression dynamics. Previous studies predominantly rely on pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to learn facial appearance representations, overlooking the relationships between facial regions. To address this issue, this paper presents an Appearance- and Relation-aware Parallel Graph attention fusion Network (ARPGNet) to learn mutually enhanced spatial-temporal representations of appearance and relation information. Specifically, we construct a facial region relation graph and leverage the graph attention mechanism to model the relationships between facial regions. The resulting relational representation sequences, along with CNN-based appearance representation sequences, are then fed into a parallel graph attention fusion module for mutual interaction and enhancement. This module simultaneously explores the complementarity between different representation sequences and the temporal dynamics within each sequence. Experimental results on three facial expression recognition datasets demonstrate that the proposed ARPGNet outperforms or is comparable to state-of-the-art methods.

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### HybridWorldSim: A Scalable and Controllable High-fidelity Simulator for Autonomous Driving

Authors: Qiang Li, Yingwenqi Jiang, Tuoxi Li, Duyu Chen, Xiang Feng, Yucheng Ao, Shangyue Liu, Xingchen Yu, Youcheng Cai, Yumeng Liu, Yuexin Ma, Xin Hu et al.
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22187v4

Realistic and controllable simulation is critical for advancing end-to-end autonomous driving, yet existing approaches often struggle to support novel view synthesis under large viewpoint changes or to ensure geometric consistency. We introduce HybridWorldSim, a hybrid simulation framework that integrates multi-traversal neural reconstruction for static backgrounds with generative modeling for dynamic agents. This unified design addresses key limitations of previous methods, enabling the creation of diverse and high-fidelity driving scenarios with reliable visual and spatial consistency. To facilitate robust benchmarking, we further release a new multi-traversal dataset MIRROR that captures a wide range of routes and environmental conditions across different cities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HybridWorldSim surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods, providing a practical and scalable solution for high-fidelity simulation and a valuable resource for research and development in autonomous driving.

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### Shoe Style-Invariant and Ground-Aware Learning for Dense Foot Contact Estimation

Authors: Daniel Sungho Jung, Kyoung Mu Lee
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22184v2

Foot contact plays a critical role in human interaction with the world, and thus exploring foot contact can advance our understanding of human movement and physical interaction. Despite its importance, existing methods often approximate foot contact using a zero-velocity constraint and focus on joint-level contact, failing to capture the detailed interaction between the foot and the world. Dense estimation of foot contact is crucial for accurately modeling this interaction, yet predicting dense foot contact from a single RGB image remains largely underexplored. There are two main challenges for learning dense foot contact estimation. First, shoes exhibit highly diverse appearances, making it difficult for models to generalize across different styles. Second, ground often has a monotonous appearance, making it difficult to extract informative features. To tackle these issues, we present a FEet COntact estimation (FECO) framework that learns dense foot contact with shoe style-invariant and ground-aware learning. To overcome the challenge of shoe appearance diversity, our approach incorporates shoe style adversarial training that enforces shoe style-invariant features for contact estimation. To effectively utilize ground information, we introduce a ground feature extractor that captures ground properties based on spatial context. As a result, our proposed method achieves robust foot contact estimation regardless of shoe appearance and effectively leverages ground information. The codes are available at https://github.com/dqj5182/FECO_RELEASE.

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### MTR-VP: Towards End-to-End Trajectory Planning through Context-Driven Image Encoding and Multiple Trajectory Prediction

Authors: Maitrayee Keskar, Mohan Trivedi, Ross Greer
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22181v1

We present a method for trajectory planning for autonomous driving, learning image-based context embeddings that align with motion prediction frameworks and planning-based intention input. Within our method, a ViT encoder takes raw images and past kinematic state as input and is trained to produce context embeddings, drawing inspiration from those generated by the recent MTR (Motion Transformer) encoder, effectively substituting map-based features with learned visual representations. MTR provides a strong foundation for multimodal trajectory prediction by localizing agent intent and refining motion iteratively via motion query pairs; we name our approach MTR-VP (Motion Transformer for Vision-based Planning), and instead of the learnable intention queries used in the MTR decoder, we use cross attention on the intent and the context embeddings, which reflect a combination of information encoded from the driving scene and past vehicle states. We evaluate our methods on the Waymo End-to-End Driving Dataset, which requires predicting the agent's future 5-second trajectory in bird's-eye-view coordinates using prior camera images, agent pose history, and routing goals. We analyze our architecture using ablation studies, removing input images and multiple trajectory output. Our results suggest that transformer-based methods that are used to combine the visual features along with the kinetic features such as the past trajectory features are not effective at combining both modes to produce useful scene context embeddings, even when intention embeddings are augmented with foundation-model representations of scene context from CLIP and DINOv2, but that predicting a distribution over multiple futures instead of a single future trajectory boosts planning performance.

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### Enhanced Graph Convolutional Network with Chebyshev Spectral Graph and Graph Attention for Autism Spectrum Disorder Classification

Authors: Adnan Ferdous Ashrafi, Hasanul Kabir
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22178v1

ASD is a complicated neurodevelopmental disorder marked by variation in symptom presentation and neurological underpinnings, making early and objective diagnosis extremely problematic. This paper presents a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) model, incorporating Chebyshev Spectral Graph Convolution and Graph Attention Networks (GAT), to increase the classification accuracy of ASD utilizing multimodal neuroimaging and phenotypic data. Leveraging the ABIDE I dataset, which contains resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI), structural MRI (sMRI), and phenotypic variables from 870 patients, the model leverages a multi-branch architecture that processes each modality individually before merging them via concatenation. Graph structure is encoded using site-based similarity to generate a population graph, which helps in understanding relationship connections across individuals. Chebyshev polynomial filters provide localized spectral learning with lower computational complexity, whereas GAT layers increase node representations by attention-weighted aggregation of surrounding information. The proposed model is trained using stratified five-fold cross-validation with a total input dimension of 5,206 features per individual. Extensive trials demonstrate the enhanced model's superiority, achieving a test accuracy of 74.82\% and an AUC of 0.82 on the entire dataset, surpassing multiple state-of-the-art baselines, including conventional GCNs, autoencoder-based deep neural networks, and multimodal CNNs.

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### Designing Instance-Level Sampling Schedules via REINFORCE with James-Stein Shrinkage

Authors: Peiyu Yu, Suraj Kothawade, Sirui Xie, Ying Nian Wu, Hongliang Fei
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22177v2

Most post-training methods for text-to-image samplers focus on model weights: either fine-tuning the backbone for alignment or distilling it for few-step efficiency. We take a different route: rescheduling the sampling timeline of a frozen sampler. Instead of a fixed, global schedule, we learn instance-level (prompt- and noise-conditioned) schedules through a single-pass Dirichlet policy. To ensure accurate gradient estimates in high-dimensional policy learning, we introduce a novel reward baseline based on a principled James-Stein estimator; it provably achieves lower estimation errors than commonly used variants and leads to superior performance. Our rescheduled samplers consistently improve text-image alignment including text rendering and compositional control across modern Stable Diffusion and Flux model families. Additionally, a 5-step Flux-Dev sampler with our schedules can attain generation quality comparable to deliberately distilled samplers like Flux-Schnell. We thus position our scheduling framework as an emerging model-agnostic post-training lever that unlocks additional generative potential in pretrained samplers.

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### Focused Chain-of-Thought: Efficient LLM Reasoning via Structured Input Information

Authors: Lukas Struppek, Dominik Hintersdorf, Hannah Struppek, Daniel Neider, Kristian Kersting
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22176v1

Recent large language models achieve strong reasoning performance by generating detailed chain-of-thought traces, but this often leads to excessive token use and high inference latency. Existing efficiency approaches typically focus on model-centric interventions, such as reinforcement learning or supervised fine-tuning, to reduce verbosity. In contrast, we propose a training-free, input-centric approach. Inspired by cognitive psychology, we introduce Focused Chain-of-Thought (F-CoT), which separates information extraction from the reasoning process. F-CoT first organizes the essential information from a query into a concise, structured context and then guides the model to reason exclusively over this context. By preventing attention to irrelevant details, F-CoT naturally produces shorter reasoning paths. On arithmetic word problems, F-CoT reduces generated tokens by 2-3x while maintaining accuracy comparable to standard zero-shot CoT. These results highlight structured input as a simple yet effective lever for more efficient LLM reasoning.

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### RefineBench: Evaluating Refinement Capability of Language Models via Checklists

Authors: Young-Jun Lee, Seungone Kim, Byung-Kwan Lee, Minkyeong Moon, Yechan Hwang, Jong Myoung Kim, Graham Neubig, Sean Welleck, Ho-Jin Choi
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22173v1

Can language models (LMs) self-refine their own responses? This question is increasingly relevant as a wide range of real-world user interactions involve refinement requests. However, prior studies have largely tested LMs' refinement abilities on verifiable tasks such as competition math or symbolic reasoning with simplified scaffolds, whereas users often pose open-ended queries and provide varying degrees of feedback on what they desire. The recent advent of reasoning models that exhibit self-reflection patterns in their chains-of-thought further motivates this question. To analyze this, we introduce RefineBench, a benchmark of 1,000 challenging problems across 11 domains paired with a checklist-based evaluation framework. We evaluate two refinement modes: (1) guided refinement, where an LM is provided natural language feedback, and (2) self-refinement, where LMs attempt to improve without guidance. In the self-refinement setting, even frontier LMs such as Gemini 2.5 Pro and GPT-5 achieve modest baseline scores of 31.3% and 29.1%, respectively, and most models fail to consistently improve across iterations (e.g., Gemini-2.5-Pro gains only +1.8%, while DeepSeek-R1 declines by -0.1%). By contrast, in guided refinement, both proprietary LMs and large open-weight LMs (&gt;70B) can leverage targeted feedback to refine responses to near-perfect levels within five turns. These findings suggest that frontier LMs require breakthroughs to self-refine their incorrect responses, and that RefineBench provides a valuable testbed for tracking progress.

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### Guiding the Inner Eye: A Framework for Hierarchical and Flexible Visual Grounded Reasoning

Authors: Zhaoyang Wei, Wenchao Ding, Yanchao Hao, Xi Chen
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22172v1

Models capable of "thinking with images" by dynamically grounding their reasoning in visual evidence represent a major leap in multimodal AI. However, replicating and advancing this ability is non-trivial, with current methods often trapped between the instability of end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) and the rigidity of supervised fine-tuning (SFT). This leads to models that either struggle to learn or lack the cognitive flexibility required for complex, real-world scenes. To navigate this dilemma, we introduce GRiP (Guided Reasoning and Perception), a novel two-stage training framework that cultivates robust and flexible visual grounded reasoning by explicitly guiding the model's perceptual focus and logical pathways. GRiP's core lies in its cognitive-enhanced RL stage, which features two key innovations: (1) a Salience-Weighted IoU Reward that incentivizes the model to prioritize the localization of mission-critical objects over trivial distractors, and (2) a Multi-Heuristic Reward that encourages cognitive flexibility by rewarding diverse yet logically valid reasoning pathways. Initialized from the Qwen2.5-VL-7B model, GRiP demonstrates significant performance gains across multiple challenging benchmarks. It achieves state-of-the-art results among open-source models on the highly challenging TreeBench and V* Bench, proving its effectiveness in complex visual reasoning. Our work demonstrates that moving beyond simplistic rewards and instead guiding models with cognitively-inspired signals for what to see and how to think is crucial for unlocking the next level of multimodal intelligence. The code will be made publicly available.

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### BrepGPT: Autoregressive B-rep Generation with Voronoi Half-Patch

Authors: Pu Li, Wenhao Zhang, Weize Quan, Biao Zhang, Peter Wonka, Dong-Ming Yan
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CV, cs.GR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22171v1

Boundary representation (B-rep) is the de facto standard for CAD model representation in modern industrial design. The intricate coupling between geometric and topological elements in B-rep structures has forced existing generative methods to rely on cascaded multi-stage networks, resulting in error accumulation and computational inefficiency. We present BrepGPT, a single-stage autoregressive framework for B-rep generation. Our key innovation lies in the Voronoi Half-Patch (VHP) representation, which decomposes B-reps into unified local units by assigning geometry to nearest half-edges and sampling their next pointers. Unlike hierarchical representations that require multiple distinct encodings for different structural levels, our VHP representation facilitates unifying geometric attributes and topological relations in a single, coherent format. We further leverage dual VQ-VAEs to encode both vertex topology and Voronoi Half-Patches into vertex-based tokens, achieving a more compact sequential encoding. A decoder-only Transformer is then trained to autoregressively predict these tokens, which are subsequently mapped to vertex-based features and decoded into complete B-rep models. Experiments demonstrate that BrepGPT achieves state-of-the-art performance in unconditional B-rep generation. The framework also exhibits versatility in various applications, including conditional generation from category labels, point clouds, text descriptions, and images, as well as B-rep autocompletion and interpolation.

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### Partially Shared Concept Bottleneck Models

Authors: Delong Zhao, Qiang Huang, Di Yan, Yiqun Sun, Jun Yu
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22170v1

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) enhance interpretability by introducing a layer of human-understandable concepts between inputs and predictions. While recent methods automate concept generation using Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs), they still face three fundamental challenges: poor visual grounding, concept redundancy, and the absence of principled metrics to balance predictive accuracy and concept compactness. We introduce PS-CBM, a Partially Shared CBM framework that addresses these limitations through three core components: (1) a multimodal concept generator that integrates LLM-derived semantics with exemplar-based visual cues; (2) a Partially Shared Concept Strategy that merges concepts based on activation patterns to balance specificity and compactness; and (3) Concept-Efficient Accuracy (CEA), a post-hoc metric that jointly captures both predictive accuracy and concept compactness. Extensive experiments on eleven diverse datasets show that PS-CBM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art CBMs, improving classification accuracy by 1.0%-7.4% and CEA by 2.0%-9.5%, while requiring significantly fewer concepts. These results underscore PS-CBM's effectiveness in achieving both high accuracy and strong interpretability.

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### Real-Time Long Horizon Air Quality Forecasting via Group-Relative Policy Optimization

Authors: Inha Kang, Eunki Kim, Wonjeong Ryu, Jaeyo Shin, Seungjun Yu, Yoon-Hee Kang, Seongeun Jeong, Eunhye Kim, Soontae Kim, Hyunjung Shim
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22169v2

Accurate long horizon forecasting of particulate matter (PM) concentration fields is essential for operational public health decisions. However, achieving reliable forecasts remains challenging in regions with complex terrain and strong atmospheric dynamics such as East Asia. While foundation models such as Aurora offer global generality, they often miss region-specific dynamics and rely on non-real-time inputs, limiting their practical utility for localized warning systems. To address this gap, we construct and release the real-world observations and high-resolution CMAQ-OBS dataset for East Asia, reducing regional error by 59.5% and enabling real-time 48-120 hour forecasts critical for public health alerts. However, standard point-wise objectives cannot reflect asymmetric operational costs, where false alarms deteriorate public trust while missed severe events endanger populations. This cost mismatch causes SFT models to over-predict and yield high False Alarm Rates. We introduce Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with class-wise rewards and curriculum rollout to align predictions with operational priorities. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework significantly improves the reliability of the forecast. Compared to the SFT-only baseline, our model reduces the False Alarm Rate by 47.3% while achieving a competitive F1-score, proving its effectiveness for practical, real-world air quality forecasting systems on long lead time scenarios. Code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/kaist-cvml/FAKER-Air.

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### IMTalker: Efficient Audio-driven Talking Face Generation with Implicit Motion Transfer

Authors: Bo Chen, Tao Liu, Qi Chen, Xie Chen, Zilong Zheng
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22167v1

Talking face generation aims to synthesize realistic speaking portraits from a single image, yet existing methods often rely on explicit optical flow and local warping, which fail to model complex global motions and cause identity drift. We present IMTalker, a novel framework that achieves efficient and high-fidelity talking face generation through implicit motion transfer. The core idea is to replace traditional flow-based warping with a cross-attention mechanism that implicitly models motion discrepancy and identity alignment within a unified latent space, enabling robust global motion rendering. To further preserve speaker identity during cross-identity reenactment, we introduce an identity-adaptive module that projects motion latents into personalized spaces, ensuring clear disentanglement between motion and identity. In addition, a lightweight flow-matching motion generator produces vivid and controllable implicit motion vectors from audio, pose, and gaze cues. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IMTalker surpasses prior methods in motion accuracy, identity preservation, and audio-lip synchronization, achieving state-of-the-art quality with superior efficiency, operating at 40 FPS for video-driven and 42 FPS for audio-driven generation on an RTX 4090 GPU. We will release our code and pre-trained models to facilitate applications and future research.

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### Lips-Jaw and Tongue-Jaw Articulatory Tradeoff in DYNARTmo

Authors: Bernd J. Kröger
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CL, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22155v1

This paper investigates how the dynamic articulatory model DYNARTmo accounts for articulatory tradeoffs between primary and secondary articulators, with a focus on lips-jaw and tongue-jaw coordination. While DYNARTmo does not implement full task-dynamic second-order biomechanics, it adopts first-order task-space gesture specifications comparable to those used in articulatory phonology and integrates a simplified mechanism for distributing articulatory effort across multiple articulators. We first outline the conceptual relationship between task dynamics and DYNARTmo, emphasizing the distinction between high-level task-space trajectories and their low-level articulatory execution. We then present simulation results for a set of CV syllables that illustrate how jaw displacement varies as a function of both place of articulation (labial, apical, dorsal) and vowel context (/a/, /i/, /u/). The model reproduces empirically attested patterns of articulatory synergy, including jaw-supported apical closures, lower-lip elevation in bilabial stops, tongue-jaw co-movement, and saturation effects in labial constrictions. These results demonstrate that even with computationally simplified assumptions, DYNARTmo can generate realistic spatio-temporal movement patterns that capture key aspects of articulatory tradeoff and synergy across a range of consonant-vowel combinations.

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### WearVQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark for Wearables in Egocentric Authentic Real-world scenarios

Authors: Eun Chang, Zhuangqun Huang, Yiwei Liao, Sagar Ravi Bhavsar, Amogh Param, Tammy Stark, Adel Ahmadyan, Xiao Yang, Jiaqi Wang, Ahsan Abdullah, Giang Nguyen, Akil Iyer et al.
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22154v2

We introduce WearVQA, the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the Visual Question Answering (VQA) capabilities of multi-model AI assistant on wearable devices like smart glasses. Unlike prior benchmarks that focus on high-quality, third-person imagery, WearVQA reflects the unique challenges of ego-centric interaction-where visual inputs may be occluded, poorly lit, unzoomed, or blurry, and questions are grounded in realistic wearable use cases. The benchmark comprises 2,520 carefully curated image-question-answer triplets, spanning 7 diverse image domains including both text-centric and general scenes, 10 cognitive task types ranging from basic recognition to various forms of reasoning, and 6 common wearables-specific image quality issues. All questions are designed to be answerable using only the visual input and common senses. WearVQA is paired with a rigorous LLM-as-a-judge evaluation framework with 96% labeling accuracy. Open-source and proprietary multi-model LLMs achieved a QA accuracy as low as 24-52% on WearVQA, with substantial drops on lower-quality images and reasoning-heavy tasks. These observations position WearVQA as a comprehensive and challenging benchmark for guiding technical advancement towards robust, real-world multi-model wearables AI systems.

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### Simplex-Optimized Hybrid Ensemble for Large Language Model Text Detection Under Generative Distribution Drif

Authors: Sepyan Purnama Kristanto, Lutfi Hakim, Dianni Yusuf
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22153v2

The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) has made it difficult to distinguish human writing from machine-produced text in many real applications. Detectors that were effective for one generation of models tend to degrade when newer models or modified decoding strategies are introduced. In this work, we study this lack of stability and propose a hybrid ensemble that is explicitly designed to cope with changing generator distributions. The ensemble combines three complementary components: a RoBERTa-based classifier fine-tuned for supervised detection, a curvature-inspired score based on perturbing the input and measuring changes in model likelihood, and a compact stylometric model built on hand-crafted linguistic features. The outputs of these components are fused on the probability simplex, and the weights are chosen via validation-based search. We frame this approach in terms of variance reduction and risk under mixtures of generators, and show that the simplex constraint provides a simple way to trade off the strengths and weaknesses of each branch. Experiments on a 30000 document corpus drawn from several LLM families including models unseen during training and paraphrased attack variants show that the proposed method achieves 94.2% accuracy and an AUC of 0.978. The ensemble also lowers false positives on scientific articles compared to strong baselines, which is critical in educational and research settings where wrongly flagging human work is costly

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### A perceptual bias of AI Logical Argumentation Ability in Writing

Authors: Xi Cun, Jifan Ren, Asha Huang, Siyu Li, Ruzhen Song
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22151v1

Can machines think? This is a central question in artificial intelligence research. However, there is a substantial divergence of views on the answer to this question. Why do people have such significant differences of opinion, even when they are observing the same real world performance of artificial intelligence? The ability of logical reasoning like humans is often used as a criterion to assess whether a machine can think. This study explores whether human biases influence evaluations of the reasoning abilities of AI. An experiment was conducted where participants assessed two texts on the same topic, one AI generated and one human written,to test for perceptual biases in evaluating logical reasoning. Based on the experimental findings, a questionnaire was designed to quantify the attitudes toward AI.The results reveal a bias in perception. The evaluations of the logical reasoning ability of AI generated texts are significantly influenced by the preconceived views on the logical reasoning abilities of AI. Furthermore, frequent AI users were less likely to believe that AI usage undermines independent thinking.This study highlights the need to address perceptual biases to improve public understanding of AI's capabilities and foster better human AI interactions.

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### From Topology to Retrieval: Decoding Embedding Spaces with Unified Signatures

Authors: Florian Rottach, William Rudman, Bastian Rieck, Harrisen Scells, Carsten Eickhoff
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL, cs.IR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22150v3

Studying the shape of text embedding spaces enhances our understanding of model behavior and how geometry affects downstream task performance. While a range of topological and geometric metrics have been explored, they are typically analyzed in isolation, and the connections between them remain largely unknown. In this paper, we present Unified Topological Signatures (UTS) for characterizing the structure of embedding spaces. We evaluate our method across a wide range of text embedding models and retrieval datasets, finding that it outperforms individual metrics in downstream performance prediction. Through several experiments, we demonstrate that the signatures characterize embedding spaces more accurately, improve the prediction of model-specific properties and biases, and reveal novel insights into representational similarity that challenge the global claims of the Platonic Representation Hypothesis.

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### Towards Heterogeneous Quantum Federated Learning: Challenges and Solutions

Authors: Ratun Rahman, Dinh C. Nguyen, Christo Kurisummoottil Thomas, Walid Saad
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: quant-ph, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22148v2

Quantum federated learning (QFL) combines quantum computing and federated learning to enable decentralized model training while maintaining data privacy. QFL can improve computational efficiency and scalability by taking advantage of quantum properties such as superposition and entanglement. However, existing QFL frameworks largely focus on homogeneity among quantum \textcolor{black}{clients, and they do not account} for real-world variances in quantum data distributions, encoding techniques, hardware noise levels, and computational capacity. These differences can create instability during training, slow convergence, and reduce overall model performance. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth examination of heterogeneity in QFL, classifying it into two categories: data or system heterogeneity. Then we investigate the influence of heterogeneity on training convergence and model aggregation. We critically evaluate existing mitigation solutions, highlight their limitations, and give a case study that demonstrates the viability of tackling quantum heterogeneity. Finally, we discuss potential future research areas for constructing robust and scalable heterogeneous QFL frameworks.

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### RemedyGS: Defend 3D Gaussian Splatting against Computation Cost Attacks

Authors: Yanping Li, Zhening Liu, Zijian Li, Zehong Lin, Jun Zhang
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22147v1

As a mainstream technique for 3D reconstruction, 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) has been applied in a wide range of applications and services. Recent studies have revealed critical vulnerabilities in this pipeline and introduced computation cost attacks that lead to malicious resource occupancies and even denial-of-service (DoS) conditions, thereby hindering the reliable deployment of 3DGS. In this paper, we propose the first effective and comprehensive black-box defense framework, named RemedyGS, against such computation cost attacks, safeguarding 3DGS reconstruction systems and services. Our pipeline comprises two key components: a detector to identify the attacked input images with poisoned textures and a purifier to recover the benign images from their attacked counterparts, mitigating the adverse effects of these attacks. Moreover, we incorporate adversarial training into the purifier to enforce distributional alignment between the recovered and original natural images, thereby enhancing the defense efficacy. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework effectively defends against white-box, black-box, and adaptive attacks in 3DGS systems, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both safety and utility.

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### C$^2$DLM: Causal Concept-Guided Diffusion Large Language Models

Authors: Kairong Han, Nuanqiao Shan, Ziyu Zhao, Zijing Hu, Xinpeng Dong, Junjian Ye, Lujia Pan, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22146v1

Autoregressive (AR) language models and Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) constitute the two principal paradigms of large language models. However, both paradigms suffer from insufficient reasoning capabilities. Human reasoning inherently relies on causal knowledge and thought, which are reflected in natural language. But in the AR paradigm, language is modeled as next token prediction (a strictly left-to-right, token-by-token order), whereas natural language itself exhibits more flexible causal structures. In the DLM paradigm, the attention mechanism is fully connected, which entirely disregards causal order. To fill this gap, we propose a \underline{\textbf{C}}ausal \underline{\textbf{C}}oncept-Guided \underline{\textbf{D}}iffusion \underline{\textbf{L}}anguage \underline{\textbf{M}}odel (C$^2$DLM). Starting from DLM's fully connected attention, C$^2$DLM first obtains a concept-level causal graph from the teacher model, and then explicitly guides attention to learn causal relationships between concepts. By focusing on causal relationships and avoiding interference from difficult subgoals involving causal inversion, C$^2$DLM improves 12\% with about 3.2 times training speedup in the COT-OrderPerturb task, and achieves an average gain of 1.31\% across six downstream reasoning tasks. More details in the repository ~\href{https://github.com/Kairong-Han/C-2-DLM}{here}.

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### Stacked Ensemble of Fine-Tuned CNNs for Knee Osteoarthritis Severity Grading

Authors: Adarsh Gupta, Japleen Kaur, Tanvi Doshi, Teena Sharma, Nishchal K. Verma, Shantaram Vasikarla
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22143v1

Knee Osteoarthritis (KOA) is a musculoskeletal condition that can cause significant limitations and impairments in daily activities, especially among older individuals. To evaluate the severity of KOA, typically, X-ray images of the affected knee are analyzed, and a grade is assigned based on the Kellgren-Lawrence (KL) grading system, which classifies KOA severity into five levels, ranging from 0 to 4. This approach requires a high level of expertise and time and is susceptible to subjective interpretation, thereby introducing potential diagnostic inaccuracies. To address this problem a stacked ensemble model of fine-tuned Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) was developed for two classification tasks: a binary classifier for detecting the presence of KOA, and a multiclass classifier for precise grading across the KL spectrum. The proposed stacked ensemble model consists of a diverse set of pre-trained architectures, including MobileNetV2, You Only Look Once (YOLOv8), and DenseNet201 as base learners and Categorical Boosting (CatBoost) as the meta-learner. This proposed model had a balanced test accuracy of 73% in multiclass classification and 87.5% in binary classification, which is higher than previous works in extant literature.

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### SemOD: Semantic Enabled Object Detection Network under Various Weather Conditions

Authors: Aiyinsi Zuo, Zhaoliang Zheng
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CV, eess.SY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22142v1

In the field of autonomous driving, camera-based perception models are mostly trained on clear weather data. Models that focus on addressing specific weather challenges are unable to adapt to various weather changes and primarily prioritize their weather removal characteristics. Our study introduces a semantic-enabled network for object detection in diverse weather conditions. In our analysis, semantics information can enable the model to generate plausible content for missing areas, understand object boundaries, and preserve visual coherency and realism across both filled-in and existing portions of the image, which are conducive to image transformation and object recognition. Specific in implementation, our architecture consists of a Preprocessing Unit (PPU) and a Detection Unit (DTU), where the PPU utilizes a U-shaped net enriched by semantics to refine degraded images, and the DTU integrates this semantic information for object detection using a modified YOLO network. Our method pioneers the use of semantic data for all-weather transformations, resulting in an increase between 1.47\% to 8.80\% in mAP compared to existing methods across benchmark datasets of different weather. This highlights the potency of semantics in image enhancement and object detection, offering a comprehensive approach to improving object detection performance. Code will be available at https://github.com/EnisZuo/SemOD.

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### Bridging the Modality Gap by Similarity Standardization with Pseudo-Positive Samples

Authors: Shuhei Yamashita, Daiki Shirafuji, Tatsuhiko Saito
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22141v1

Advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled effective cross-modality retrieval. However, when both text and images exist in the database, similarity scores would differ in scale by modality. This phenomenon, known as the modality gap, hinders accurate retrieval. Most existing studies address this issue with manually labeled data, e.g., by fine-tuning VLMs on them. In this work, we propose a similarity standardization approach with pseudo data construction. We first compute the mean and variance of the similarity scores between each query and its paired data in text or image modality. Using these modality-specific statistics, we standardize all similarity scores to compare on a common scale across modalities. These statistics are calculated from pseudo pairs, which are constructed by retrieving the text and image candidates with the highest cosine similarity to each query. We evaluate our method across seven VLMs using two multi-modal QA benchmarks (MMQA and WebQA), where each question requires retrieving either text or image data. Our experimental results show that our method significantly improves retrieval performance, achieving average Recall@20 gains of 64% on MMQA and 28% on WebQA when the query and the target data belong to different modalities. Compared to E5-V, which addresses the modality gap through image captioning, we confirm that our method more effectively bridges the modality gap.

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### TinyLLM: Evaluation and Optimization of Small Language Models for Agentic Tasks on Edge Devices

Authors: Mohd Ariful Haque, Fahad Rahman, Kishor Datta Gupta, Khalil Shujaee, Roy George
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22138v1

This paper investigates the effectiveness of small language models (SLMs) for agentic tasks (function/tool/API calling) with a focus on running agents on edge devices without reliance on cloud infrastructure. We evaluate SLMs using the Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard (BFCL) framework and describe parameter-driven optimization strategies that include supervised fine-tuning (SFT), parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), reinforcement learning (RL)-based optimization, preference alignment via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and hybrid methods. We report results for models including TinyAgent, TinyLlama, Qwen, and xLAM across BFCL categories (simple, multiple, parallel, parallel-multiple, and relevance detection), both in live and non-live settings, and in multi-turn evaluations. We additionally detail a DPO training pipeline constructed from AgentBank data (e.g., ALFRED), including our conversion of SFT data to chosen-rejected pairs using TinyLlama responses as rejected outputs and manual validation. Our results demonstrate clear accuracy differences across model scales where medium-sized models (1-3B parameters) significantly outperform ultra-compact models (&lt;1B parameters), achieving up to 65.74% overall accuracy, and 55.62% multi-turn accuracy with hybrid optimization. This study highlights the importance of hybrid optimization strategies that enable small language models to deliver accurate, efficient, and stable agentic AI on edge devices, making privacy-preserving, low-latency autonomous agents practical beyond the cloud.

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### EASL: Multi-Emotion Guided Semantic Disentanglement for Expressive Sign Language Generation

Authors: Yanchao Zhao, Jihao Zhu, Yu Liu, Weizhuo Chen, Yuling Yang, Kun Peng
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22135v1

Large language models have revolutionized sign language generation by automatically transforming text into high-quality sign language videos, providing accessible communication for the Deaf community. However, existing LLM-based approaches prioritize semantic accuracy while overlooking emotional expressions, resulting in outputs that lack naturalness and expressiveness. We propose EASL (Emotion-Aware Sign Language), a multi-emotion-guided generation architecture for fine-grained emotional integration. We introduce emotion-semantic disentanglement modules with progressive training to separately extract semantic and affective features. During pose decoding, the emotional representations guide semantic interaction to generate sign poses with 7-class emotion confidence scores, enabling emotional expression recognition. Experimental results demonstrate that EASL achieves pose accuracy superior to all compared baselines by integrating multi-emotion information and effectively adapts to diffusion models to generate expressive sign language videos.

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### DualVLA: Building a Generalizable Embodied Agent via Partial Decoupling of Reasoning and Action

Authors: Zhen Fang, Zhuoyang Liu, Jiaming Liu, Hao Chen, Yu Zeng, Shiting Huang, Zehui Chen, Lin Chen, Shanghang Zhang, Feng Zhao
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22134v1

To build a generalizable Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model with strong reasoning ability, a common strategy is to first train a specialist VLA on robot demonstrations to acquire reliable manipulation skills, and then incorporate mixed annotated robot data together with multimodal data to restore broader reasoning capabilities. However, we observe that the resulting reasoning VLA often suffers from degraded action performance compared to the specialist model before fine-tuning, a phenomenon we refer to as action degeneration. To address this issue, we propose DualVLA, which enhances action performance through carefully designed post-training while still preserving reasoning capability. We first introduce a dual-layer data pruning method that removes redundant embodied reasoning, preventing it from adversely influencing action learning. To further strengthen action generation, we design a dual-teacher adaptive distillation strategy that assigns different supervision signals to different data domains while maintaining reasoning ability. To fill the evaluation gap for generalist VLAs, we also propose VLA Score, which decouples VLA capability into reasoning, intention, action, and alignment dimensions for a more fine-grained assessment. Experiments show that DualVLA achieves an average success rate of 61.0 in SimplerEnv and an average score of 65.4 across eight competitive multimodal benchmarks, demonstrating a stronger balance between precise action execution and multimodal understanding. Project Website: https://costaliya.github.io/DualVLA/.

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### Probabilistic Digital Twin for Misspecified Structural Dynamical Systems via Latent Force Modeling and Bayesian Neural Networks

Authors: Sahil Kashyap, Rajdip Nayek
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.LG, stat.AP, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22133v1

This work presents a probabilistic digital twin framework for response prediction in dynamical systems governed by misspecified physics. The approach integrates Gaussian Process Latent Force Models (GPLFM) and Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) to enable end-to-end uncertainty-aware inference and prediction. In the diagnosis phase, model-form errors (MFEs) are treated as latent input forces to a nominal linear dynamical system and jointly estimated with system states using GPLFM from sensor measurements. A BNN is then trained on posterior samples to learn a probabilistic nonlinear mapping from system states to MFEs, while capturing diagnostic uncertainty. For prognosis, this mapping is used to generate pseudo-measurements, enabling state prediction via Kalman filtering. The framework allows for systematic propagation of uncertainty from diagnosis to prediction, a key capability for trustworthy digital twins. The framework is demonstrated using four nonlinear examples: a single degree of freedom (DOF) oscillator, a multi-DOF system, and two established benchmarks -- the Bouc-Wen hysteretic system and the Silverbox experimental dataset -- highlighting its predictive accuracy and robustness to model misspecification.

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### Autonomous labeling of surgical resection margins using a foundation model

Authors: Xilin Yang, Musa Aydin, Yuhong Lu, Sahan Yoruc Selcuk, Bijie Bai, Yijie Zhang, Andrew Birkeland, Katjana Ehrlich, Julien Bec, Laura Marcu, Nir Pillar, Aydogan Ozcan
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG, physics.med-ph
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22131v1

Assessing resection margins is central to pathological specimen evaluation and has profound implications for patient outcomes. Current practice employs physical inking, which is applied variably, and cautery artifacts can obscure the true margin on histological sections. We present a virtual inking network (VIN) that autonomously localizes the surgical cut surface on whole-slide images, reducing reliance on inks and standardizing margin-focused review. VIN uses a frozen foundation model as the feature extractor and a compact two-layer multilayer perceptron trained for patch-level classification of cautery-consistent features. The dataset comprised 120 hematoxylin and eosin (H&amp;E) stained slides from 12 human tonsil tissue blocks, resulting in ~2 TB of uncompressed raw image data, where a board-certified pathologist provided boundary annotations. In blind testing with 20 slides from previously unseen blocks, VIN produced coherent margin overlays that qualitatively aligned with expert annotations across serial sections. Quantitatively, region-level accuracy was ~73.3% across the test set, with errors largely confined to limited areas that did not disrupt continuity of the whole-slide margin map. These results indicate that VIN captures cautery-related histomorphology and can provide a reproducible, ink-free margin delineation suitable for integration into routine digital pathology workflows and for downstream measurement of margin distances.

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### Benchmarking In-context Experiential Learning Through Repeated Product Recommendations

Authors: Gilbert Yang, Yaqin Chen, Thomson Yen, Hongseok Namkoong
Published: 2025-11-27
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22130v2

To navigate ever-shifting real-world environments, agents must grapple with incomplete knowledge and adapt their strategies through experience. However, current evaluations of LLM-based agents largely overlook this capability. Crucially, we stress not just the ability to contend with uncertainty within a task (episode), as episode-specific information is progressively revealed across turns, but also the refinement of such adaptive ability across similar episodes, as agents accumulate experiences and infer their shared latent structure. Repeated product recommendation offers a natural setting to isolate this need for experiential learning: within each interaction, an intelligent recommender must elicit unknown customer preferences through questions; across multiple interactions, it should tailor its questioning strategy to the observed customer and product distributions. We instantiate the Benchmark for Experiential Learning and Active exploration (BELA) by combining (1) a rich catalog of real-world products from Amazon, (2) a diverse collection of synthetic customer personas aimed to capture heterogeneous latent preferences, and (3) an LLM-based customer simulator framework that emulate preference-revealing interactions. Rather than aiming to faithfully replicate real consumer behavior, BELA provides a controlled and scalable testbed for whether agents can exploit consistent latent preferences across episodes. Benchmarking current models reveals that they can learn across turns, but struggle to improve across episodes. This underscore the need for frontier models to advance in experiential learning capabilities.

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