# Research Papers — 2025-11 · bundle page 31 of 197 > Full-text markdown of papers #1501–1550 of 9830 published in 2025-11, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 9830-paper 2025-11 archive (50 papers per file). Canonical page: https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-11/page/31 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-11/page/30.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-11/page/32.md) ### ICPO: Intrinsic Confidence-Driven Group Relative Preference Optimization for Efficient Reinforcement Learning Authors: Jinpeng Wang, Chao Li, Ting Ye, Mengyuan Zhang, Wei Liu, Jian Luan Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: cs.AI, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21005v5 Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) demonstrates significant potential in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing RLVR methods are often constrained by issues such as coarse-grained rewards, reward noise, and inefficient exploration, which lead to unstable training and entropy collapse. To address this challenge, we propose the Intrinsic Confidence-Driven Group Relative Preference Optimization method (ICPO). The intuition behind it lies in the fact that the probabilities of an LLM generating different responses can inherently and directly reflect its self-assessment of the reasoning process. Inspired by the idea of preference modeling, ICPO calculates a preference advantage score for each response by comparing the relative generation probabilities of multiple responses under the same input prompt, and integrates this score with verifiable rewards to guide the exploration process. We have discovered that the preference advantage score not only alleviates the issues of coarse-grained rewards and reward noise but also effectively curbs overconfident errors, enhances the relative superiority of undervalued high-quality responses, and prevents the model from overfitting to specific strategies. Comprehensive experiments across four general-domain benchmarks and three mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that ICPO steadily boosts reasoning compared to GRPO. --- ### Knowledge Completes the Vision: A Multimodal Entity-aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework for News Image Captioning Authors: Xiaoxing You, Qiang Huang, Lingyu Li, Chi Zhang, Xiaopeng Liu, Min Zhang, Jun Yu Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21002v1 News image captioning aims to produce journalistically informative descriptions by combining visual content with contextual cues from associated articles. Despite recent advances, existing methods struggle with three key challenges: (1) incomplete information coverage, (2) weak cross-modal alignment, and (3) suboptimal visual-entity grounding. To address these issues, we introduce MERGE, the first Multimodal Entity-aware Retrieval-augmented GEneration framework for news image captioning. MERGE constructs an entity-centric multimodal knowledge base (EMKB) that integrates textual, visual, and structured knowledge, enabling enriched background retrieval. It improves cross-modal alignment through a multistage hypothesis-caption strategy and enhances visual-entity matching via dynamic retrieval guided by image content. Extensive experiments on GoodNews and NYTimes800k show that MERGE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, with CIDEr gains of +6.84 and +1.16 in caption quality, and F1-score improvements of +4.14 and +2.64 in named entity recognition. Notably, MERGE also generalizes well to the unseen Visual News dataset, achieving +20.17 in CIDEr and +6.22 in F1-score, demonstrating strong robustness and domain adaptability. --- ### FANoise: Singular Value-Adaptive Noise Modulation for Robust Multimodal Representation Learning Authors: Jiaoyang Li, Jun Fang, Tianhao Gao, Xiaohui Zhang, Zhiyuan Liu, Chao Liu, Pengzhang Liu, Qixia Jiang Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20997v1 Representation learning is fundamental to modern machine learning, powering applications such as text retrieval and multimodal understanding. However, learning robust and generalizable representations remains challenging. While prior work has demonstrated that active noise injection, a form of data augmentation, can enhance encoding performance, most existing methods rely on heuristic or static noise, overlooking the dynamic nature of feature distributions during training. In this work, we systematically study the role of noise in representation learning from both gradient-based and feature distribution perspectives, using InfoNCE loss as a representative example. Focusing on multimodal representation learning, we propose FANoise, a novel feature-adaptive noise injection strategy. By leveraging the dynamics of contrastive learning, FANoise effectively mitigates the negative impacts of noise while preserving its benefits. Under this theoretically grounded framework, comprehensive experiments demonstrate that FANoise consistently improves overall performance on multimodal tasks across various base VLM models. --- ### From Inpainting to Layer Decomposition: Repurposing Generative Inpainting Models for Image Layer Decomposition Authors: Jingxi Chen, Yixiao Zhang, Xiaoye Qian, Zongxia Li, Cornelia Fermuller, Caren Chen, Yiannis Aloimonos Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20996v2 Images can be viewed as layered compositions, foreground objects over background, with potential occlusions. This layered representation enables independent editing of elements, offering greater flexibility for content creation. Despite the progress in large generative models, decomposing a single image into layers remains challenging due to limited methods and data. We observe a strong connection between layer decomposition and in/outpainting tasks, and propose adapting a diffusion-based inpainting model for layer decomposition using lightweight finetuning. To further preserve detail in the latent space, we introduce a novel multi-modal context fusion module with linear attention complexity. Our model is trained purely on a synthetic dataset constructed from open-source assets and achieves superior performance in object removal and occlusion recovery, unlocking new possibilities in downstream editing and creative applications. --- ### GuardTrace-VL: Detecting Unsafe Multimodel Reasoning via Iterative Safety Supervision Authors: Yuxiao Xiang, Junchi Chen, Zhenchao Jin, Changtao Miao, Haojie Yuan, Qi Chu, Tao Gong, Nenghai Yu Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20994v1 Multimodal large reasoning models (MLRMs) are increasingly deployed for vision-language tasks that produce explicit intermediate rationales. However, reasoning traces can contain unsafe content even when the final answer is non-harmful, creating deployment risks. Existing multimodal safety guards primarily evaluate only the input question and the final answer, neglecting the intermediate reasoning process. This oversight allows undetected harm, such as biased inferences or policy-violating use of visual context, to emerge during reasoning. We introduce GuardTrace-VL, a vision-aware safety auditor that monitors the full Question-Thinking-Answer (QTA) pipeline via joint image-text analysis, enabling detection of unsafe content as it emerges in the reasoning stage. To support training and evaluation, we construct the GuardTrace dataset, which is generated through diverse prompting strategies and refined via a MLRM- and human-based voting and verification pipeline. Furthermore, we propose a three-stage progressive training scheme combined with the data refinement process, enabling the model to learn nuanced and context-dependent safety preferences according to different risk levels. On our proposed test set covering both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios, GuardTrace-VL model achieves an F1 score of 93.1% on unsafe reasoning detection tasks, representing a 13.5% improvement in F1 score compared to the previous strongest multimodal safety defense methods. The codes will be made publicly available. --- ### Subgoal Graph-Augmented Planning for LLM-Guided Open-World Reinforcement Learning Authors: Shanwei Fan, Bin Zhang, Zhiwei Xu, Yingxuan Teng, Siqi Dai, Lin Cheng, Guoliang Fan Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20993v2 Large language models (LLMs) offer strong high-level planning capabilities for reinforcement learning (RL) by decomposing tasks into subgoals. However, their practical utility is limited by poor planning-execution alignment, which reflects a critical gap between abstract plans and actionable, environment-compatible behaviors. This misalignment arises from two interrelated limitations: (1) LLMs often produce subgoals that are semantically plausible but infeasible or irrelevant in the target environment due to insufficient grounding in environment-specific knowledge, and (2) single-LLM planning conflates generation with self-verification, resulting in overconfident yet unreliable subgoals that frequently fail during execution. To address these challenges, we propose Subgoal Graph-Augmented Actor-Critic-Refiner (SGA-ACR), a framework that integrates an environment-specific subgoal graph and structured entity knowledge with a multi-LLM planning pipeline that explicitly separates generation, critique, and refinement to produce executable and verifiable subgoals. A subgoal tracker further monitors execution progress, provides auxiliary rewards, and adaptively updates the subgoal graph to maintain alignment between plans and actions. Experimental results on 22 diverse tasks in the open-world game "Crafter" demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. --- ### Dataset Poisoning Attacks on Behavioral Cloning Policies Authors: Akansha Kalra, Soumil Datta, Ethan Gilmore, Duc La, Guanhong Tao, Daniel S. Brown Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CR, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20992v2 Behavior Cloning (BC) is a popular framework for training sequential decision policies from expert demonstrations via supervised learning. As these policies are increasingly being deployed in the real world, their robustness and potential vulnerabilities are an important concern. In this work, we perform the first analysis of the efficacy of clean-label backdoor attacks on BC policies. Our backdoor attacks poison a dataset of demonstrations by injecting a visual trigger to create a spurious correlation that can be exploited at test time. We evaluate how policy vulnerability scales with the fraction of poisoned data, the strength of the trigger, and the trigger type. We also introduce a novel entropy-based test-time trigger attack that substantially degrades policy performance by identifying critical states where test-time triggering of the backdoor is expected to be most effective at degrading performance. We empirically demonstrate that BC policies trained on even minimally poisoned datasets exhibit deceptively high, near-baseline task performance despite being highly vulnerable to backdoor trigger attacks during deployment. Our results underscore the urgent need for more research into the robustness of BC policies, particularly as large-scale datasets are increasingly used to train policies for real-world cyber-physical systems. Videos and code are available at https://sites.google.com/view/dataset-poisoning-in-bc. --- ### Wavefront-Constrained Passive Obscured Object Detection Authors: Zhiwen Zheng, Yiwei Ouyang, Zhao Huang, Tao Zhang, Xiaoshuai Zhang, Huiyu Zhou, Wenwen Tang, Shaowei Jiang, Jin Liu, Xingru Huang Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20991v2 Accurately localizing and segmenting obscured objects from faint light patterns beyond the field of view is highly challenging due to multiple scattering and medium-induced perturbations. Most existing methods, based on real-valued modeling or local convolutional operations, are inadequate for capturing the underlying physics of coherent light propagation. Moreover, under low signal-to-noise conditions, these methods often converge to non-physical solutions, severely compromising the stability and reliability of the observation. To address these challenges, we propose a novel physics-driven Wavefront Propagating Compensation Network (WavePCNet) to simulate wavefront propagation and enhance the perception of obscured objects. This WavePCNet integrates the Tri-Phase Wavefront Complex-Propagation Reprojection (TriWCP) to incorporate complex amplitude transfer operators to precisely constrain coherent propagation behavior, along with a momentum memory mechanism to effectively suppress the accumulation of perturbations. Additionally, a High-frequency Cross-layer Compensation Enhancement is introduced to construct frequency-selective pathways with multi-scale receptive fields and dynamically model structural consistency across layers, further boosting the model's robustness and interpretability under complex environmental conditions. Extensive experiments conducted on four physically collected datasets demonstrate that WavePCNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across both accuracy and robustness. --- ### RefOnce: Distilling References into a Prototype Memory for Referring Camouflaged Object Detection Authors: Yu-Huan Wu, Zi-Xuan Zhu, Yan Wang, Liangli Zhen, Deng-Ping Fan Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20989v1 Referring Camouflaged Object Detection (Ref-COD) segments specified camouflaged objects in a scene by leveraging a small set of referring images. Though effective, current systems adopt a dual-branch design that requires reference images at test time, which limits deployability and adds latency and data-collection burden. We introduce a Ref-COD framework that distills references into a class-prototype memory during training and synthesizes a reference vector at inference via a query-conditioned mixture of prototypes. Concretely, we maintain an EMA-updated prototype per category and predict mixture weights from the query to produce a guidance vector without any test-time references. To bridge the representation gap between reference statistics and camouflaged query features, we propose a bidirectional attention alignment module that adapts both the query features and the class representation. Thus, our approach yields a simple, efficient path to Ref-COD without mandatory references. We evaluate the proposed method on the large-scale R2C7K benchmark. Extensive experiments demonstrate competitive or superior performance of the proposed method compared with recent state-of-the-arts. Code is available at https://github.com/yuhuan-wu/RefOnce. --- ### Even with AI, Bijection Discovery is Still Hard: The Opportunities and Challenges of OpenEvolve for Novel Bijection Construction Authors: Davis Brown, Jesse He, Helen Jenne, Henry Kvinge, Max Vargas Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: math.CO, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20987v1 Evolutionary program synthesis systems such as AlphaEvolve, OpenEvolve, and ShinkaEvolve offer a new approach to AI-assisted mathematical discovery. These systems utilize teams of large language models (LLMs) to generate candidate solutions to a problem as human readable code. These candidate solutions are then 'evolved' with the goal of improving them beyond what an LLM can produce in a single shot. While existing mathematical applications have mostly focused on problems of establishing bounds (e.g., sphere packing), the program synthesis approach is well suited to any problem where the solution takes the form of an explicit construction. With this in mind, in this paper we explore the use of OpenEvolve for combinatorial bijection discovery. We describe the results of applying OpenEvolve to three bijection construction problems involving Dyck paths, two of which are known and one of which is open. We find that while systems like OpenEvolve show promise as a valuable tool for combinatorialists, the problem of finding novel, research-level bijections remains a challenging task for current frontier systems, reinforcing the need for human mathematicians in the loop. We describe some lessons learned for others in the field interested in exploring the use of these systems. --- ### Inversion-Free Style Transfer with Dual Rectified Flows Authors: Yingying Deng, Xiangyu He, Fan Tang, Weiming Dong, Xucheng Yin Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20986v1 Style transfer, a pivotal task in image processing, synthesizes visually compelling images by seamlessly blending realistic content with artistic styles, enabling applications in photo editing and creative design. While mainstream training-free diffusion-based methods have greatly advanced style transfer in recent years, their reliance on computationally inversion processes compromises efficiency and introduces visual distortions when inversion is inaccurate. To address these limitations, we propose a novel \textit{inversion-free} style transfer framework based on dual rectified flows, which tackles the challenge of finding an unknown stylized distribution from two distinct inputs (content and style images), \textit{only with forward pass}. Our approach predicts content and style trajectories in parallel, then fuses them through a dynamic midpoint interpolation that integrates velocities from both paths while adapting to the evolving stylized image. By jointly modeling the content, style, and stylized distributions, our velocity field design achieves robust fusion and avoids the shortcomings of naive overlays. Attention injection further guides style integration, enhancing visual fidelity, content preservation, and computational efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate generalization across diverse styles and content, providing an effective and efficient pipeline for style transfer. --- ### Privacy-Preserving Federated Vision Transformer Learning Leveraging Lightweight Homomorphic Encryption in Medical AI Authors: Al Amin, Kamrul Hasan, Liang Hong, Sharif Ullah Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20983v1 Collaborative machine learning across healthcare institutions promises improved diagnostic accuracy by leveraging diverse datasets, yet privacy regulations such as HIPAA prohibit direct patient data sharing. While federated learning (FL) enables decentralized training without raw data exchange, recent studies show that model gradients in conventional FL remain vulnerable to reconstruction attacks, potentially exposing sensitive medical information. This paper presents a privacy-preserving federated learning framework combining Vision Transformers (ViT) with homomorphic encryption (HE) for secure multi-institutional histopathology classification. The approach leverages the ViT CLS token as a compact 768-dimensional feature representation for secure aggregation, encrypting these tokens using CKKS homomorphic encryption before transmission to the server. We demonstrate that encrypting CLS tokens achieves a 30-fold communication reduction compared to gradient encryption while maintaining strong privacy guarantees. Through evaluation on a three-client federated setup for lung cancer histopathology classification, we show that gradients are highly susceptible to model inversion attacks (PSNR: 52.26 dB, SSIM: 0.999, NMI: 0.741), enabling near-perfect image reconstruction. In contrast, the proposed CLS-protected HE approach prevents such attacks while enabling encrypted inference directly on ciphertexts, requiring only 326 KB of encrypted data transmission per aggregation round. The framework achieves 96.12 percent global classification accuracy in the unencrypted domain and 90.02 percent in the encrypted domain. --- ### Independent policy gradient-based reinforcement learning for economic and reliable energy management of multi-microgrid systems Authors: Junkai Hu, Li Xia Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: eess.SY, cs.LG, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20977v1 Efficiency and reliability are both crucial for energy management, especially in multi-microgrid systems (MMSs) integrating intermittent and distributed renewable energy sources. This study investigates an economic and reliable energy management problem in MMSs under a distributed scheme, where each microgrid independently updates its energy management policy in a decentralized manner to optimize the long-term system performance collaboratively. We introduce the mean and variance of the exchange power between the MMS and the main grid as indicators for the economic performance and reliability of the system. Accordingly, we formulate the energy management problem as a mean-variance team stochastic game (MV-TSG), where conventional methods based on the maximization of expected cumulative rewards are unsuitable for variance metrics. To solve MV-TSGs, we propose a fully distributed independent policy gradient algorithm, with rigorous convergence analysis, for scenarios with known model parameters. For large-scale scenarios with unknown model parameters, we further develop a deep reinforcement learning algorithm based on independent policy gradients, enabling data-driven policy optimization. Numerical experiments in two scenarios validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Our approaches fully leverage the distributed computational capabilities of MMSs and achieve a well-balanced trade-off between economic performance and operational reliability. --- ### AI4X Roadmap: Artificial Intelligence for the advancement of scientific pursuit and its future directions Authors: Stephen G. Dale, Nikita Kazeev, Alastair J. A. Price, Victor Posligua, Stephan Roche, O. Anatole von Lilienfeld, Konstantin S. Novoselov, Xavier Bresson, Gianmarco Mengaldo, Xudong Chen, Terence J. O'Kane, Emily R. Lines et al. Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: physics.soc-ph, cs.AI, physics.ao-ph, physics.atm-clus, physics.chem-ph, physics.comp-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20976v1 Artificial intelligence and machine learning are reshaping how we approach scientific discovery, not by replacing established methods but by extending what researchers can probe, predict, and design. In this roadmap we provide a forward-looking view of AI-enabled science across biology, chemistry, climate science, mathematics, materials science, physics, self-driving laboratories and unconventional computing. Several shared themes emerge: the need for diverse and trustworthy data, transferable electronic-structure and interatomic models, AI systems integrated into end-to-end scientific workflows that connect simulations to experiments and generative systems grounded in synthesisability rather than purely idealised phases. Across domains, we highlight how large foundation models, active learning and self-driving laboratories can close loops between prediction and validation while maintaining reproducibility and physical interpretability. Taken together, these perspectives outline where AI-enabled science stands today, identify bottlenecks in data, methods and infrastructure, and chart concrete directions for building AI systems that are not only more powerful but also more transparent and capable of accelerating discovery in complex real-world environments. --- ### RosettaSpeech: Zero-Shot Speech-to-Speech Translation without Parallel Speech Authors: Zhisheng Zheng, Xiaohang Sun, Tuan Dinh, Abhishek Yanamandra, Abhinav Jain, Zhu Liu, Sunil Hadap, Vimal Bhat, Manoj Aggarwal, Gerard Medioni, David Harwath Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: eess.AS, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20974v2 End-to-end speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) systems typically struggle with a critical data bottleneck: the scarcity of parallel speech-to-speech corpora. To overcome this, we introduce RosettaSpeech, a novel zero-shot framework trained exclusively on monolingual speech-text data augmented by machine translation supervision. Unlike prior works that rely on complex cascaded pseudo-labeling, our approach strategically utilizes text as a semantic bridge during training to synthesize translation targets, thereby eliminating the need for parallel speech pairs while maintaining a direct, end-to-end inference pipeline. Empirical evaluations on the CVSS-C benchmark demonstrate that RosettaSpeech achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance, surpassing leading baselines by significant margins - achieving ASR-BLEU scores of 25.17 for German-to-English (+27% relative gain) and 29.86 for Spanish-to-English (+14%). Crucially, our model effectively preserves the source speaker's voice without ever seeing paired speech data. We further analyze the impact of data scaling and demonstrate the model's capability in many-to-one translation, offering a scalable solution for extending high-quality S2ST to "text-rich, speech-poor" languages. --- ### Towards Audio Token Compression in Large Audio Language Models Authors: Saurabhchand Bhati, Samuel Thomas, Hilde Kuehne, Rogerio Feris, James Glass Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: eess.AS, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20973v2 Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) deliver strong performance across speech and audio tasks, but their audio encoders generate high-rate token sequences (e.g., 25 tokens/s), making attention computation costly and limiting scalability. In this paper, we explore techniques such as unsupervised segmentation, uniform average pooling, etc., to reduce the number of audio tokens before they are consumed by the LLM decoder. To mitigate potential performance degradation, we employ low-rank adapters during finetuning. We evaluate our proposed models on two tasks, automatic speech recognition and speech-to-speech translation tasks, that are dependent on effectively uncovering the underlying lexical content of the input signal, and study the effect of downsampling on these tasks. Experimental results show that compressed LALMs can achieve performance closer to frame-level LALMs while reducing the input audio token count up to three times before the LLM backbone. --- ### TrafficLens: Multi-Camera Traffic Video Analysis Using LLMs Authors: Md Adnan Arefeen, Biplob Debnath, Srimat Chakradhar Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20965v1 Traffic cameras are essential in urban areas, playing a crucial role in intelligent transportation systems. Multiple cameras at intersections enhance law enforcement capabilities, traffic management, and pedestrian safety. However, efficiently managing and analyzing multi-camera feeds poses challenges due to the vast amount of data. Analyzing such huge video data requires advanced analytical tools. While Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, equipped with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, excel in text-based tasks, integrating them into traffic video analysis demands converting video data into text using a Vision-Language Model (VLM), which is time-consuming and delays the timely utilization of traffic videos for generating insights and investigating incidents. To address these challenges, we propose TrafficLens, a tailored algorithm for multi-camera traffic intersections. TrafficLens employs a sequential approach, utilizing overlapping coverage areas of cameras. It iteratively applies VLMs with varying token limits, using previous outputs as prompts for subsequent cameras, enabling rapid generation of detailed textual descriptions while reducing processing time. Additionally, TrafficLens intelligently bypasses redundant VLM invocations through an object-level similarity detector. Experimental results with real-world datasets demonstrate that TrafficLens reduces video-to-text conversion time by up to $4\times$ while maintaining information accuracy. --- ### Crowdsourcing the Frontier: Advancing Hybrid Physics-ML Climate Simulation via a $50,000 Kaggle Competition Authors: Jerry Lin, Zeyuan Hu, Tom Beucler, Katherine Frields, Hannah Christensen, Walter Hannah, Helge Heuer, Peter Ukkonnen, Laura A. Mansfield, Tian Zheng, Liran Peng, Ritwik Gupta et al. Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: physics.ao-ph, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20963v4 Subgrid machine-learning (ML) parameterizations have the potential to introduce a new generation of climate models that incorporate the effects of higher-resolution physics without incurring the prohibitive computational cost associated with more explicit physics-based simulations. However, important issues, ranging from online instability to inconsistent online performance, have limited their operational use for long-term climate projections. To more rapidly drive progress in solving these issues, domain scientists and machine learning researchers opened up the offline aspect of this problem to the broader machine learning and data science community with the release of ClimSim, a NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks publication, and an associated Kaggle competition. This paper reports on the downstream results of the Kaggle competition by coupling emulators inspired by the winning teams' architectures to an interactive climate model (including full cloud microphysics, a regime historically prone to online instability) and systematically evaluating their online performance. Our results demonstrate that online stability in the low-resolution, real-geography setting is reproducible across multiple diverse architectures, which we consider a key milestone. All tested architectures exhibit strikingly similar offline and online biases, though their responses to architecture-agnostic design choices (e.g., expanding the list of input variables) can differ significantly. Multiple Kaggle-inspired architectures achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on certain metrics such as zonal mean bias patterns and global RMSE, indicating that crowdsourcing the essence of the offline problem is one path to improving online performance in hybrid physics-AI climate simulation. --- ### Geometric Calibration and Neutral Zones for Uncertainty-Aware Multi-Class Classification Authors: Soumojit Das, Nairanjana Dasgupta, Prashanta Dutta Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, math.ST, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20960v2 Modern artificial intelligence systems make critical decisions yet often fail silently when uncertain -- even well-calibrated models provide no mechanism to identify \textit{which specific predictions} are unreliable. We develop a geometric framework addressing both calibration and instance-level uncertainty quantification for neural network probability outputs. Treating probability vectors as points on the $(c-1)$-dimensional probability simplex equipped with the Fisher--Rao metric, we construct: (i) Additive Log-Ratio (ALR) calibration maps that reduce exactly to Platt scaling for binary problems while extending naturally to multi-class settings, and (ii) geometric reliability scores that translate calibrated probabilities into actionable uncertainty measures, enabling principled deferral of ambiguous predictions to human review. Theoretical contributions include: consistency of the calibration estimator at rate $O_p(n^{-1/2})$ via M-estimation theory (Theorem~1), and tight concentration bounds for reliability scores with explicit sub-Gaussian parameters enabling sample size calculations for validation set design (Theorem~2). We conjecture Neyman--Pearson optimality of our neutral zone construction based on connections to Bhattacharyya coefficients. Empirical validation on Adeno-Associated Virus classification demonstrates that the two-stage framework captures 72.5\% of errors while deferring 34.5\% of samples, reducing automated decision error rates from 16.8\% to 6.9\%. Notably, calibration alone yields marginal accuracy gains; the operational benefit arises primarily from the reliability scoring mechanism, which applies to any well-calibrated probability output. This work bridges information geometry and statistical learning, offering formal guarantees for uncertainty-aware classification in applications requiring rigorous validation. --- ### Beyond Realism: Learning the Art of Expressive Composition with StickerNet Authors: Haoming Lu, David Kocharian, Humphrey Shi Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20957v1 As a widely used operation in image editing workflows, image composition has traditionally been studied with a focus on achieving visual realism and semantic plausibility. However, in practical editing scenarios of the modern content creation landscape, many compositions are not intended to preserve realism. Instead, users of online platforms motivated by gaining community recognition often aim to create content that is more artistic, playful, or socially engaging. Taking inspiration from this observation, we define the expressive composition task, a new formulation of image composition that embraces stylistic diversity and looser placement logic, reflecting how users edit images on real-world creative platforms. To address this underexplored problem, we present StickerNet, a two-stage framework that first determines the composition type, then predicts placement parameters such as opacity, mask, location, and scale accordingly. Unlike prior work that constructs datasets by simulating object placements on real images, we directly build our dataset from 1.8 million editing actions collected on an anonymous online visual creation and editing platform, each reflecting user-community validated placement decisions. This grounding in authentic editing behavior ensures strong alignment between task definition and training supervision. User studies and quantitative evaluations show that StickerNet outperforms common baselines and closely matches human placement behavior, demonstrating the effectiveness of learning from real-world editing patterns despite the inherent ambiguity of the task. This work introduces a new direction in visual understanding that emphasizes expressiveness and user intent over realism. --- ### BUSTR: Descriptor-Aware Vision-Language Learning for Breast Ultrasound Report Generation Authors: Rawa Mohammed, Mina Attin, Laxmi Gewali, Bryar Shareef Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20956v2 Breast ultrasound (BUS) reporting relies on clinically meaningful lesion descriptors, including BI-RADS category, lesion shape, margin, echogenicity, posterior features, pathology, and histology. However, many public BUS datasets provide structured annotations and lesion masks without paired radiologist-written reports, limiting the development of vision--language models for BUS report generation. We propose BUSTR, a descriptor-aware vision--language framework that uses structured lesion information to enable report generation under limited report supervision. BUSTR first constructs descriptor-derived reports from available annotations and radiomics features extracted from lesion masks. It then trains a multi-head Swin Transformer encoder with multitask supervision to learn descriptor-aware visual representations across datasets with partially overlapping annotation sets. The projected visual tokens condition a frozen LLaMA-based language model, and training is guided by a dual-level objective combining token-level cross-entropy with representation-level cosine alignment. At inference, BUSTR generates reports from BUS images without access to structured descriptors, lesion masks, or radiomics features. We evaluate BUSTR on the public BrEaST and BUS-BRA datasets using natural language generation and clinical efficacy metrics. BUSTR improves report similarity and descriptor recovery compared with representative report-generation baselines, with notable gains for lesion shape, margin, posterior features, and pathology, as well as improved BI-RADS sensitivity and F1-score on BrEaST. These results suggest that structured BUS descriptors, lesion masks, and radiomics features can provide useful supervision for descriptor-aware BUS report generation when paired radiologist-written reports are unavailable. --- ### SpaceX: Exploring metrics with the SPACE model for developer productivity Authors: Sanchit Kaul, Kevin Nhu, Jason Eissayou, Ivan Eser, Victor Borup Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20955v1 This empirical investigation elucidates the limitations of deterministic, unidimensional productivity heuristics by operationalizing the SPACE framework through extensive repository mining. Utilizing a dataset derived from open-source repositories, the study employs rigorous statistical methodologies including Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMM) and RoBERTa-based sentiment classification to synthesize a holistic, multi-faceted productivity metric. Analytical results reveal a statistically significant positive correlation between negative affective states and commit frequency, implying a cycle of iterative remediation driven by frustration. Furthermore, the investigation has demonstrated that analyzing the topology of contributor interactions yields superior fidelity in mapping collaborative dynamics compared to traditional volume-based metrics. Ultimately, this research posits a Composite Productivity Score (CPS) to address the heterogeneity of developer efficacy. --- ### Semantic Superiority vs. Forensic Efficiency: A Comparative Analysis of Deep Learning and Psycholinguistics for Business Email Compromise Detection Authors: Yaw Osei Adjei, Frederick Ayivor Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20944v4 Business Email Compromise (BEC) is a high-impact social engineering threat with extreme operational asymmetry: false negatives can trigger large financial losses, while false positives primarily incur investigation and delay costs. This paper compares two BEC detection paradigms under a cost-sensitive decision framework: (i) a semantic transformer approach (DistilBERT) for contextual language understanding, and (ii) a forensic psycholinguistic approach (CatBoost) using engineered linguistic and structural cues. We evaluate both on a hybrid dataset (N = 7,990) combining legitimate corporate email and AI-synthesised adversarial fraud generated across 30 BEC taxonomies, including character-level Unicode obfuscations. We add classical baselines (TF-IDF+LogReg and character n-gram+Linear SVM), an ablation study for the Smiling Assassin Score, and a homoglyph-map sensitivity analysis. DistilBERT achieves AUC = 1.0000 and F1 = 0.9981 at 7.403 ms per email on GPU; CatBoost achieves AUC = 0.9860 and F1 = 0.9382 at 0.855 ms on CPU. A three-way cost-sensitive decision policy (auto-allow, auto-block, manual review) optimises expected financial loss under a 1:5,167 false-negative-to-false-positive cost ratio. --- ### Resilient Charging Infrastructure via Decentralized Coordination of Electric Vehicles at Scale Authors: Chuhao Qin, Alexandru Sorici, Andrei Olaru, Evangelos Pournaras, Adina Magda Florea Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: cs.MA, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20943v1 The rapid adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) introduces major challenges for decentralized charging control. Existing decentralized approaches efficiently coordinate a large number of EVs to select charging stations while reducing energy costs, preventing power peak and preserving driver privacy. However, they often struggle under severe contingencies, such as station outages or unexpected surges in charging requests. These situations create competition for limited charging slots, resulting in long queues and reduced driver comfort. To address these limitations, we propose a novel collective learning-based coordination framework that allows EVs to balance individual comfort on their selections against system-wide efficiency, i.e., the overall queues across all stations. In the framework, EVs are recommended for adaptive charging behaviors that shift priority between comfort and efficiency, achieving Pareto-optimal trade-offs under varying station capacities and dynamic spatio-temporal EV distribution. Experiments using real-world data from EVs and charging stations show that the proposed approach outperforms baseline methods, significantly reducing travel and queuing time. The results reveal that, under uncertain charging conditions, EV drivers that behave selfishly or altruistically at the right moments achieve shorter waiting time than those maintaining moderate behavior throughout. Our findings under high fractions of station outages and adversarial EVs further demonstrate improved resilience and trustworthiness of decentralized EV charging infrastructure. --- ### Improving Procedural Skill Explanations via Constrained Generation: A Symbolic-LLM Hybrid Architecture Authors: Rahul Dass, Thomas Bowlin, Zebing Li, Xiao Jin, Ashok Goel Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20942v1 In procedural skill learning, instructional explanations must convey not just steps, but the causal, goal-directed, and compositional logic behind them. Large language models (LLMs) often produce fluent yet shallow responses that miss this structure. We present Ivy, an AI coaching system that delivers structured, multi-step explanations by combining symbolic Task-Method-Knowledge (TMK) models with a generative interpretation layer-an LLM that constructs explanations while being constrained by TMK structure. TMK encodes causal transitions, goal hierarchies, and problem decompositions, and guides the LLM within explicit structural bounds. We evaluate Ivy against responses against GPT and retrieval-augmented GPT baselines using expert and independent annotations across three inferential dimensions. Results show that symbolic constraints consistently improve the structural quality of explanations for "how" and "why" questions. This study demonstrates a scalable AI for education approach that strengthens the pedagogical value of AI-generated explanations in intelligent coaching systems. --- ### Classical and quantum kernel fusion for two-sample testing Authors: Yu Terada, Yugo Ogio, Ken Arai, Hiroyuki Tezuka, Yu Tanaka Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: quant-ph, cs.LG, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20941v2 Two-sample tests have been extensively employed in various scientific fields and machine learning to discriminate whether two sets of samples come from the same distribution or not. Kernel-based procedures for hypothetical testing have been proposed to efficiently disentangle high-dimensional complex structures in data to obtain accurate results in a model-free way by embedding the data into the reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). While the choice of kernels plays a crucial role for their performance, little is understood about how to choose kernel especially for small datasets. Here we construct a hypothetical test which can be effective even for small datasets, based on the theoretical foundation of kernel-based tests using maximum mean discrepancy, which is called MMD-FUSE. We enhance the MMD-FUSE framework by incorporating quantum kernels and propose a novel hybrid testing strategy that fuses classical and quantum kernels. This approach creates a powerful and adaptive test by combining the domain-specific inductive biases of classical kernels with the unique expressive power of quantum kernels. We evaluate our method on various synthetic and real-world clinical datasets, and our experiments reveal two key findings: 1) With appropriate hyperparameter tuning, MMD-FUSE with quantum kernels consistently improves test power over classical counterparts, especially for small and high-dimensional data. 2) The proposed hybrid framework demonstrates remarkable robustness, adapting to different data characteristics and achieving high test power across diverse scenarios. These results highlight the potential of quantum-inspired and hybrid kernel strategies to build more effective statistical tests, offering versatile tools for data analysis where sample sizes are limited. --- ### Chatty-KG: A Multi-Agent AI System for On-Demand Conversational Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs Authors: Reham Omar, Abdelghny Orogat, Ibrahim Abdelaziz, Omij Mangukiya, Panos Kalnis, Essam Mansour Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20940v1 Conversational Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs (KGs) combines the factual grounding of KG-based QA with the interactive nature of dialogue systems. KGs are widely used in enterprise and domain applications to provide structured, evolving, and reliable knowledge. Large language models (LLMs) enable natural and context-aware conversations, but lack direct access to private and dynamic KGs. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems can retrieve graph content but often serialize structure, struggle with multi-turn context, and require heavy indexing. Traditional KGQA systems preserve structure but typically support only single-turn QA, incur high latency, and struggle with coreference and context tracking. To address these limitations, we propose Chatty-KG, a modular multi-agent system for conversational QA over KGs. Chatty-KG combines RAG-style retrieval with structured execution by generating SPARQL queries through task-specialized LLM agents. These agents collaborate for contextual interpretation, dialogue tracking, entity and relation linking, and efficient query planning, enabling accurate and low-latency translation of natural questions into executable queries. Experiments on large and diverse KGs show that Chatty-KG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both single-turn and multi-turn settings, achieving higher F1 and P@1 scores. Its modular design preserves dialogue coherence and supports evolving KGs without fine-tuning or pre-processing. Evaluations with commercial (e.g., GPT-4o, Gemini-2.0) and open-weight (e.g., Phi-4, Gemma 3) LLMs confirm broad compatibility and stable performance. Overall, Chatty-KG unifies conversational flexibility with structured KG grounding, offering a scalable and extensible approach for reliable multi-turn KGQA. --- ### ENACT: Evaluating Embodied Cognition with World Modeling of Egocentric Interaction Authors: Qineng Wang, Wenlong Huang, Yu Zhou, Hang Yin, Tianwei Bao, Jianwen Lyu, Weiyu Liu, Ruohan Zhang, Jiajun Wu, Li Fei-Fei, Manling Li Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20937v1 Embodied cognition argues that intelligence arises from sensorimotor interaction rather than passive observation. It raises an intriguing question: do modern vision-language models (VLMs), trained largely in a disembodied manner, exhibit signs of embodied cognition? We introduce ENACT, a benchmark that casts evaluation of embodied cognition as world modeling from egocentric interaction in a visual question answering (VQA) format. Framed as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) whose actions are scene graph changes, ENACT comprises two complementary sequence reordering tasks: forward world modeling (reorder shuffled observations given actions) and inverse world modeling (reorder shuffled actions given observations). While conceptually simple, solving these tasks implicitly demands capabilities central to embodied cognition-affordance recognition, action-effect reasoning, embodied awareness, and interactive, long-horizon memory from partially observable egocentric input, while avoiding low-level image synthesis that could confound the evaluation. We provide a scalable pipeline that synthesizes QA pairs from robotics simulation (BEHAVIOR) and evaluates models on 8,972 QA pairs spanning long-horizon home-scale activities. Experiments reveal a performance gap between frontier VLMs and humans that widens with interaction horizon. Models consistently perform better on the inverse task than the forward one and exhibit anthropocentric biases, including a preference for right-handed actions and degradation when camera intrinsics or viewpoints deviate from human vision. Website at https://enact-embodied-cognition.github.io/. --- ### Wavelet-Guided Water-Level Estimation for ISAC Authors: Ayoob Salari, Kai Wu, Khawaja Fahad Masood, Y. Jay Guo, J. Andrew Zhang Published: 2025-11-26 Categories: eess.SP, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20936v1 Real-time water-level monitoring across many locations is vital for flood response, infrastructure management, and environmental forecasting. Yet many sensing methods rely on fixed instruments - acoustic, radar, camera, or pressure probes - that are costly to install and maintain and are vulnerable during extreme events. We propose a passive, low-cost water-level tracking scheme that uses only LTE downlink power metrics reported by commodity receivers. The method extracts per-antenna RSRP, RSSI, and RSRQ, applies a continuous wavelet transform (CWT) to the RSRP to isolate the semidiurnal tide component, and forms a summed-coefficient signature that simultaneously marks high/low tide (tide-turn times) and tracks the tide-rate (flow speed) over time. These wavelet features guide a lightweight neural network that learns water-level changes over time from a short training segment. Beyond a single serving base station, we also show a multi-base-station cooperative mode: independent CWTs are computed per carrier and fused by a robust median to produce one tide-band feature that improves stability and resilience to local disturbances. Experiments over a 420 m river path under line-of-sight conditions achieve root-mean-square and mean-absolute errors of 0.8 cm and 0.5 cm, respectively. Under a non-line-of-sight setting with vegetation and vessel traffic, the same model transfers successfully after brief fine-tuning, reaching 1.7 cm RMSE and 0.8 cm MAE. Unlike CSI-based methods, the approach needs no array calibration and runs on standard hardware, making wide deployment practical. When signals from multiple base stations are available, fusion further improves robustness. --- ### The Metaphysics We Train: A Heideggerian Reading of Machine Learning Authors: Heman Shakeri Published: 2025-11-25 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.19028v2 This paper offers a phenomenological reading of contemporary machine learning through Heideggerian concepts, aimed at enriching practitioners' reflexive understanding of their own practice. We argue that this philosophical lens reveals three insights invisible to purely technical analysis. First, the algorithmic Entwurf (projection) is distinctive in being automated, opaque, and emergent--a metaphysics that operates without explicit articulation or debate, crystallizing implicitly through gradient descent rather than theoretical argument. Second, even sophisticated technical advances remain within the regime of Gestell (Enframing), improving calculation without questioning the primacy of calculation itself. Third, AI's lack of existential structure, specifically the absence of Care (Sorge), is genuinely explanatory: it illuminates why AI systems have no internal resources for questioning their own optimization imperatives, and why they optimize without the anxiety (Angst) that signals, in human agents, the friction between calculative absorption and authentic existence. We conclude by exploring the pedagogical value of this perspective, arguing that data science education should cultivate not only technical competence but ontological literacy--the capacity to recognize what worldviews our tools enact and when calculation itself may be the wrong mode of engagement. --- ### TextBridgeGNN: Pre-training Graph Neural Network for Cross-Domain Recommendation via Text-Guided Transfer Authors: Yiwen Chen, Yiqing Wu, Huishi Luo, Fuzhen Zhuang, Deqing Wang, Zhao Zhang Published: 2025-11-25 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02366v3 Graph-based recommendation has achieved great success in recent years. The classical graph recommendation model utilizes ID embedding to store essential collaborative information. However, this ID-based paradigm faces challenges in transferring to a new domain. This phenomenon primarily stems from two inherent challenges: (1) the non-transferability of ID embeddings due to isolated domain-specific ID spaces, and (2) structural incompatibility between heterogeneous interaction graphs across domains. To address these issues, we propose TextBridgeGNN, a pre-training and fine-tuning framework that can effectively transfer knowledge from a pre-trained GNN to downstream tasks. Specifically, TextBridgeGNN uses text as a semantic bridge to connect domains through multi-level graph propagation. During the pre-training stage, hierarchical GNNs are designed to learn both domain-specific and domain-global knowledge with text features, ensuring the retention of collaborative signals and the enhancement of semantics. During the fine-tuning stage, a similarity transfer mechanism initializes ID embeddings in the target domain by transferring from semantically related nodes, successfully transferring the ID embeddings and graph pattern. Experiments demonstrate that TextBridgeGNN consistently achieves strong overall performance across cross-domain, multi-domain, and training-free scenarios, without costly language model fine-tuning or real-time inference overhead. --- ### The Qualitative Laboratory: Theory Prototyping and Hypothesis Generation with Large Language Models Authors: Hugues Draelants Published: 2025-11-25 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00797v1 A central challenge in social science is to generate rich qualitative hypotheses about how diverse social groups might interpret new information. This article introduces and illustrates a novel methodological approach for this purpose: sociological persona simulation using Large Language Models (LLMs), which we frame as a "qualitative laboratory". We argue that for this specific task, persona simulation offers a distinct advantage over established methods. By generating naturalistic discourse, it overcomes the lack of discursive depth common in vignette surveys, and by operationalizing complex worldviews through natural language, it bypasses the formalization bottleneck of rule-based agent-based models (ABMs). To demonstrate this potential, we present a protocol where personas derived from a sociological theory of climate reception react to policy messages. The simulation produced nuanced and counter-intuitive hypotheses - such as a conservative persona's rejection of a national security frame - that challenge theoretical assumptions. We conclude that this method, used as part of a "simulation then validation" workflow, represents a superior tool for generating deeply textured hypotheses for subsequent empirical testing. --- ### Parameter-Efficient Neural CDEs via Implicit Function Jacobians Authors: Ilya Kuleshov, Alexey Zaytsev Published: 2025-11-25 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20625v1 Neural Controlled Differential Equations (Neural CDEs, NCDEs) are a unique branch of methods, specifically tailored for analysing temporal sequences. However, they come with drawbacks, the main one being the number of parameters, required for the method's operation. In this paper, we propose an alternative, parameter-efficient look at Neural CDEs. It requires much fewer parameters, while also presenting a very logical analogy as the "Continuous RNN", which the Neural CDEs aspire to. --- ### Quantum-Inspired Multi Agent Reinforcement Learning for Exploration Exploitation Optimization in UAV-Assisted 6G Network Deployment Authors: Mazyar Taghavi, Javad Vahidi Published: 2025-11-25 Categories: cs.AI, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20624v1 This study introduces a quantum inspired framework for optimizing the exploration exploitation tradeoff in multiagent reinforcement learning, applied to UAVassisted 6G network deployment. We consider a cooperative scenario where ten intelligent UAVs autonomously coordinate to maximize signal coverage and support efficient network expansion under partial observability and dynamic conditions. The proposed approach integrates classical MARL algorithms with quantum-inspired optimization techniques, leveraging variational quantum circuits VQCs as the core structure and employing the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm QAOA as a representative VQC based method for combinatorial optimization. Complementary probabilistic modeling is incorporated through Bayesian inference, Gaussian processes, and variational inference to capture latent environmental dynamics. A centralized training with decentralized execution CTDE paradigm is adopted, where shared memory and local view grids enhance local observability among agents. Comprehensive experiments including scalability tests, sensitivity analysis, and comparisons with PPO and DDPG baselines demonstrate that the proposed framework improves sample efficiency, accelerates convergence, and enhances coverage performance while maintaining robustness. Radar chart and convergence analyses further show that QI MARL achieves a superior balance between exploration and exploitation compared to classical methods. All implementation code and supplementary materials are publicly available on GitHub to ensure reproducibility. --- ### Enhancing Geo-localization for Crowdsourced Flood Imagery via LLM-Guided Attention Authors: Fengyi Xu, Jun Ma, Waishan Qiu, Cui Guo, Jack C. P. Cheng Published: 2025-11-25 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.11811v3 Crowdsourced social media imagery provides real-time visual evidence of urban flooding but often lacks reliable geographic metadata for emergency response. Existing Visual Place Recognition (VPR) models struggle to geo-localize these images due to cross-source domain shifts and visual distortions. We present VPR-AttLLM, a model-agnostic framework integrating the semantic reasoning and geospatial knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs) into VPR pipelines via attention-guided descriptor enhancement. VPR-AttLLM uses LLMs to isolate location-informative regions and suppress transient noise, improving retrieval without model retraining or new data. We evaluate this framework across San Francisco and Hong Kong using established queries, synthetic flooding scenarios, and real social media flood images. Integrating VPR-AttLLM with state-of-the-art models (CosPlace, EigenPlaces, SALAD) consistently improves recall, yielding 1-3% relative gains and up to 8% on challenging real flood imagery. By embedding urban perception principles into attention mechanisms, VPR-AttLLM bridges human-like spatial reasoning with modern VPR architectures. Its plug-and-play design and cross-source robustness offer a scalable solution for rapid geo-localization of crowdsourced crisis imagery, advancing cognitive urban resilience. --- ### Emotion-Driven Personalized Recommendation for AI-Generated Content Using Multi-Modal Sentiment and Intent Analysis Authors: Zheqi Hu, Xuanjing Chen, Jinlin Hu Published: 2025-11-25 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.HC, cs.LG, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.10963v1 With the rapid growth of AI-generated content (AIGC) across domains such as music, video, and literature, the demand for emotionally aware recommendation systems has become increasingly important. Traditional recommender systems primarily rely on user behavioral data such as clicks, views, or ratings, while neglecting users' real-time emotional and intentional states during content interaction. To address this limitation, this study proposes a Multi-Modal Emotion and Intent Recognition Model (MMEI) based on a BERT-based Cross-Modal Transformer with Attention-Based Fusion, integrated into a cloud-native personalized AIGC recommendation framework. The proposed system jointly processes visual (facial expression), auditory (speech tone), and textual (comments or utterances) modalities through pretrained encoders ViT, Wav2Vec2, and BERT, followed by an attention-based fusion module to learn emotion-intent representations. These embeddings are then used to drive personalized content recommendations through a contextual matching layer. Experiments conducted on benchmark emotion datasets (AIGC-INT, MELD, and CMU-MOSEI) and an AIGC interaction dataset demonstrate that the proposed MMEI model achieves a 4.3% improvement in F1-score and a 12.3% reduction in cross-entropy loss compared to the best fusion-based transformer baseline. Furthermore, user-level online evaluations reveal that emotion-driven recommendations increase engagement time by 15.2% and enhance satisfaction scores by 11.8%, confirming the model's effectiveness in aligning AI-generated content with users' affective and intentional states. This work highlights the potential of cross-modal emotional intelligence for next-generation AIGC ecosystems, enabling adaptive, empathetic, and context-aware recommendation experiences. --- ### CarBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Neural Surrogates on High-Fidelity 3D Car Aerodynamics Authors: Mohamed Elrefaie, Dule Shu, Matt Klenk, Faez Ahmed Published: 2025-11-25 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07847v3 Benchmarking has been the cornerstone of progress in computer vision, natural language processing, and the broader deep learning domain, driving algorithmic innovation through standardized datasets and reproducible evaluation protocols. The growing availability of large-scale Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) datasets has opened new opportunities for applying machine learning to aerodynamic and engineering design. Yet, despite this progress, there exists no standardized benchmark for large-scale numerical simulations in engineering design. In this work, we introduce CarBench, the first comprehensive benchmark dedicated to large-scale 3D car aerodynamics, performing a large-scale evaluation of state-of-the-art models on DrivAerNet++, the largest public dataset for automotive aerodynamics, containing over 8,000 high-fidelity car simulations. We assess eleven architectures spanning neural operator methods (e.g., Fourier Neural Operator), geometric deep learning (PointNet, RegDGCNN, PointMAE, PointTransformer), transformer-based neural solvers (Transolver, Transolver++, AB-UPT), and implicit field networks (TripNet). Beyond standard interpolation tasks, we perform cross-category experiments in which transformer-based solvers trained on a single car archetype are evaluated on unseen categories. Our analysis covers predictive accuracy, physical consistency, computational efficiency, and statistical uncertainty. To accelerate progress in data-driven engineering, we open-source the benchmark framework, including training pipelines, uncertainty estimation routines based on bootstrap resampling, and pretrained model weights, establishing the first reproducible foundation for large-scale learning from high-fidelity CFD simulations, available at https://github.com/Mohamedelrefaie/CarBench. --- ### MixLM: High-Throughput and Effective LLM Ranking via Text-Embedding Mix-Interaction Authors: Guoyao Li, Ran He, Shusen Jing, Kayhan Behdin, Yubo Wang, Sundara Raman Ramachandran, Chanh Nguyen, Jian Sheng, Xiaojing Ma, Chuanrui Zhu, Sriram Vasudevan, Muchen Wu et al. Published: 2025-11-25 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07846v2 Large language models (LLMs) excel at capturing semantic nuances and therefore show impressive relevance ranking performance in modern recommendation and search systems. However, they suffer from high computational overhead under industrial latency and throughput requirements. In particular, cross-encoder ranking systems often create long context prefill-heavy workloads, as the model has to be presented with the user, query and item information. To this end, we propose MixLM, a novel LLM-based ranking framework, which significantly improves the system throughput via reducing the input context length, while preserving the semantic strength of cross-encoder rankers. In contrast to a standard ranking system where the context is presented to the model as pure text, we propose to use mix-interaction, a mixture of text and embedding tokens to represent the input. Specifically, MixLM encodes all items in the catalog into a few embedding tokens and stores in a nearline cache. The encoded item descriptions are used during online inference, effectively reducing the item length from a few thousand text tokens to a few embedding tokens. We share insights from deploying our MixLM framework to a real-world search application at LinkedIn, including a detailed discussion of our training pipelines, as well as a thorough analysis of our online serving infrastructure optimization. With the same latency budget and on-par relevance metrics, MixLM increased throughput by 10.0x comparing with strong baselines, 75.9x over full-text LLM rerankers. The efficiency gains delivered by MixLM enabled full-traffic deployment of LLM-powered search, which resulted in a significant 0.47\% increase in Daily Active Users (DAU) in online A/B tests. --- ### AudioScene: Integrating Object-Event Audio into 3D Scenes Authors: Shuaihang Yuan, Congcong Wen, Muhammad Shafique, Anthony Tzes, Yi Fang Published: 2025-11-25 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI, eess.AS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07845v1 The rapid advances in audio analysis underscore its vast potential for humancomputer interaction, environmental monitoring, and public safety; yet, existing audioonly datasets often lack spatial context. To address this gap, we present two novel audiospatial scene datasets, AudioScanNet and AudioRoboTHOR, designed to explore audioconditioned tasks within 3D environments. By integrating audio clips with spatially aligned 3D scenes, our datasets enable research on how audio signals interact with spatial context. To associate audio events with corresponding spatial information, we leverage the common sense reasoning ability of large language models and supplement them with rigorous human verification, This approach offers greater scalability compared to purely manual annotation while maintaining high standards of accuracy, completeness, and diversity, quantified through inter annotator agreement and performance on two benchmark tasks audio based 3D visual grounding and audio based robotic zeroshot navigation. The results highlight the limitations of current audiocentric methods and underscore the practical challenges and significance of our datasets in advancing audio guided spatial learning. --- ### Space Alignment Matters: The Missing Piece for Inducing Neural Collapse in Long-Tailed Learning Authors: Jinping Wang, Zhiqiang Gao, Zhiwu Xie Published: 2025-11-25 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07844v1 Recent studies on Neural Collapse (NC) reveal that, under class-balanced conditions, the class feature means and classifier weights spontaneously align into a simplex equiangular tight frame (ETF). In long-tailed regimes, however, severe sample imbalance tends to prevent the emergence of the NC phenomenon, resulting in poor generalization performance. Current efforts predominantly seek to recover the ETF geometry by imposing constraints on features or classifier weights, yet overlook a critical problem: There is a pronounced misalignment between the feature and the classifier weight spaces. In this paper, we theoretically quantify the harm of such misalignment through an optimal error exponent analysis. Built on this insight, we propose three explicit alignment strategies that plug-and-play into existing long-tail methods without architectural change. Extensive experiments on the CIFAR-10-LT, CIFAR-100-LT, and ImageNet-LT datasets consistently boost examined baselines and achieve the state-of-the-art performances. --- ### Physics Enhanced Deep Surrogates for the Phonon Boltzmann Transport Equation Authors: Antonio Varagnolo, Giuseppe Romano, Raphaël Pestourie Published: 2025-11-25 Categories: physics.comp-ph, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05976v3 Designing materials with controlled heat flow at the nano-scale is central to advances in microelectronics, thermoelectrics, and energy-conversion technologies. At these scales, phonon transport follows the Boltzmann Transport Equation (BTE), which captures non-diffusive (ballistic) effects but is too costly to solve repeatedly in inverse-design loops. Existing surrogate approaches trade speed for accuracy: fast macroscopic solvers can overestimate conductivities by hundreds of percent, while recent data-driven operator learners often require thousands of high-fidelity simulations. This creates a need for a fast, data-efficient surrogate that remains reliable across ballistic and diffusive regimes. We introduce a Physics-Enhanced Deep Surrogate (PEDS) that combines a differentiable Fourier solver with a neural generator and couples it with uncertainty-driven active learning. The Fourier solver acts as a physical inductive bias, while the network learns geometry-dependent corrections and a mixing coefficient that interpolates between macroscopic and nano-scale behavior. PEDS reduces training-data requirements by up to 70% compared with purely data-driven baselines, achieves roughly 5% fractional error with only 300 high-fidelity BTE simulations, and enables efficient design of porous geometries spanning 12-85 W m$^{-1}$ K$^{-1}$ with average design errors of 4%. The learned mixing parameter recovers the ballistic-diffusive transition and improves out of distribution robustness. These results show that embedding simple, differentiable low-fidelity physics can dramatically increase surrogate data-efficiency and interpretability, making repeated PDE-constrained optimization practical for nano-scale thermal-materials design. --- ### A Large Scale Heterogeneous Treatment Effect Estimation Framework and Its Applications of Users' Journey at Snap Authors: Jing Pan, Li Shi, Paul Lo Published: 2025-11-25 Categories: cs.LG, stat.AP, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03060v1 Heterogeneous Treatment Effect (HTE) and Conditional Average Treatment Effect (CATE) models relax the assumption that treatment effects are the same for every user. We present a large scale industrial framework for estimating HTE using experimental data from hundreds of millions of Snapchat users. By combining results across many experiments, the framework uncovers latent user characteristics that were previously unmeasurable and produces stable treatment effect estimates at scale. We describe the core components that enabled this system, including experiment selection, base learner design, and incremental training. We also highlight two applications: user influenceability to ads and user sensitivity to ads. An online A/B test using influenceability scores for targeting showed an improvement on key business metrics that is more than six times larger than what is typically considered significant. --- ### Safe and Sustainable Electric Bus Charging Scheduling with Constrained Hierarchical DRL Authors: Jiaju Qi, Lei Lei, Thorsteinn Jonsson, Dusit Niyato Published: 2025-11-25 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03059v1 The integration of Electric Buses (EBs) with renewable energy sources such as photovoltaic (PV) panels is a promising approach to promote sustainable and low-carbon public transportation. However, optimizing EB charging schedules to minimize operational costs while ensuring safe operation without battery depletion remains challenging - especially under real-world conditions, where uncertainties in PV generation, dynamic electricity prices, variable travel times, and limited charging infrastructure must be accounted for. In this paper, we propose a safe Hierarchical Deep Reinforcement Learning (HDRL) framework for solving the EB Charging Scheduling Problem (EBCSP) under multi-source uncertainties. We formulate the problem as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) with options to enable temporally abstract decision-making. We develop a novel HDRL algorithm, namely Double Actor-Critic Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization Lagrangian (DAC-MAPPO-Lagrangian), which integrates Lagrangian relaxation into the Double Actor-Critic (DAC) framework. At the high level, we adopt a centralized PPO-Lagrangian algorithm to learn safe charger allocation policies. At the low level, we incorporate MAPPO-Lagrangian to learn decentralized charging power decisions under the Centralized Training and Decentralized Execution (CTDE) paradigm. Extensive experiments with real-world data demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms existing baselines in both cost minimization and safety compliance, while maintaining fast convergence speed. --- ### Dynamical Properties of Tokens in Self-Attention and Effects of Positional Encoding Authors: Duy-Tung Pham, An The Nguyen, Viet-Hoang Tran, Nhan-Phu Chung, Xin T. Tong, Tan M. Nguyen, Thieu N. Vo Published: 2025-11-25 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03058v1 This paper investigates the dynamical properties of tokens in pre-trained Transformer models and explores their application to improving Transformers. To this end, we analyze the dynamical system governing the continuous-time limit of the pre-trained model and characterize the asymptotic behavior of its solutions. Specifically, we characterize when tokens move closer to or farther from one another over time, depending on the model parameters. We provide sufficient conditions, based on these parameters, to identify scenarios where tokens either converge to zero or diverge to infinity. Unlike prior works, our conditions are broader in scope and more applicable to real-world models. Furthermore, we investigate how different forms of positional encoding -- specifically absolute and rotary -- affect these dynamical regimes. Empirical evidence reveals that the convergence scenario adversely impacts model performance. Motivated by these insights, we propose simple refinements to Transformer architectures that mitigate convergence behavior in models with absolute or rotary positional encoding. These findings support theoretical foundations and design principles for improving Transformer models. --- ### A note on conditional PAC-efficient reasoning in large language model routing Authors: Hao Zeng, Bingyi Jing Published: 2025-11-25 Categories: stat.ML, cs.AI, cs.LG, math.ST arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03057v2 We study distribution-free risk control for model routing, motivated by large language model reasoning. We formalize pointwise conditional efficiency under a probably approximately correct guarantee and show that it forces a nearly impossible router: at almost every input where the fast model exceeds the target loss, the algorithm must route to the expert with probability at least one minus the prescribed error level. We therefore introduce a restricted conditional formulation based on a prespecified family of conditioning sets, together with an explicit router. The proposed router achieves finite-sample conditional validity and, under separation and margin conditions, near-oracle expert usage. The main insight is that the level of conditioning determines whether distribution-free reliability can coexist with computational savings: pointwise control is too strong, whereas structured setwise control remains feasible. --- ### Delta Sampling: Data-Free Knowledge Transfer Across Diffusion Models Authors: Zhidong Gao, Zimeng Pan, Yuhang Yao, Chenyue Xie, Wei Wei Published: 2025-11-25 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03056v1 Diffusion models like Stable Diffusion (SD) drive a vibrant open-source ecosystem including fully fine-tuned checkpoints and parameter-efficient adapters such as LoRA, LyCORIS, and ControlNet. However, these adaptation components are tightly coupled to a specific base model, making them difficult to reuse when the base model is upgraded (e.g., from SD 1.x to 2.x) due to substantial changes in model parameters and architecture. In this work, we propose Delta Sampling (DS), a novel method that enables knowledge transfer across base models with different architectures, without requiring access to the original training data. DS operates entirely at inference time by leveraging the delta: the difference in model predictions before and after the adaptation of a base model. This delta is then used to guide the denoising process of a new base model. We evaluate DS across various SD versions, demonstrating that DS achieves consistent improvements in creating desired effects (e.g., visual styles, semantic concepts, and structures) under different sampling strategies. These results highlight DS as an effective, plug-and-play mechanism for knowledge transfer in diffusion-based image synthesis. Code:~ https://github.com/Zhidong-Gao/DeltaSampling --- ### Physics-informed self-supervised learning for predictive modeling of coronary artery digital twins Authors: Xiaowu Sun, Thabo Mahendiran, Ortal Senouf, Denise Auberson, Bernard De Bruyne, Stephane Fournier, Olivier Muller, Pascal Frossard, Emmanuel Abbe, Dorina Thanou Published: 2025-11-25 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03055v1 Cardiovascular disease is the leading global cause of mortality, with coronary artery disease (CAD) as its most prevalent form, necessitating early risk prediction. While 3D coronary artery digital twins reconstructed from imaging offer detailed anatomy for personalized assessment, their analysis relies on computationally intensive computational fluid dynamics (CFD), limiting scalability. Data-driven approaches are hindered by scarce labeled data and lack of physiological priors. To address this, we present PINS-CAD, a physics-informed self-supervised learning framework. It pre-trains graph neural networks on 200,000 synthetic coronary digital twins to predict pressure and flow, guided by 1D Navier-Stokes equations and pressure-drop laws, eliminating the need for CFD or labeled data. When fine-tuned on clinical data from 635 patients in the multicenter FAME2 study, PINS-CAD predicts future cardiovascular events with an AUC of 0.73, outperforming clinical risk scores and data-driven baselines. This demonstrates that physics-informed pretraining boosts sample efficiency and yields physiologically meaningful representations. Furthermore, PINS-CAD generates spatially resolved pressure and fractional flow reserve curves, providing interpretable biomarkers. By embedding physical priors into geometric deep learning, PINS-CAD transforms routine angiography into a simulation-free, physiology-aware framework for scalable, preventive cardiology. --- ### Energy-Efficient Federated Learning via Adaptive Encoder Freezing for MRI-to-CT Conversion: A Green AI-Guided Research Authors: Ciro Benito Raggio, Lucia Migliorelli, Nils Skupien, Mathias Krohmer Zabaleta, Oliver Blanck, Francesco Cicone, Giuseppe Lucio Cascini, Paolo Zaffino, Maria Francesca Spadea Published: 2025-11-25 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.DC, physics.med-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03054v3 Federated Learning (FL) holds the potential to advance equality in health by enabling diverse institutions to collaboratively train deep learning (DL) models, even with limited data. However, the significant resource requirements of FL often exclude centres with limited computational infrastructure, further widening existing healthcare disparities. To address this issue, we propose a Green AI-oriented adaptive layer-freezing strategy designed to reduce energy consumption and computational load while maintaining model performance. We tested our approach using different federated architectures for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)-to-Computed Tomography (CT) conversion. The proposed adaptive strategy optimises the federated training by selectively freezing the encoder weights based on the monitored relative difference of the encoder weights from round to round. A patience-based mechanism ensures that freezing only occurs when updates remain consistently minimal. The energy consumption and CO2eq emissions of the federation were tracked using the CodeCarbon library. Compared to equivalent non-frozen counterparts, our approach reduced training time, total energy consumption and CO2eq emissions by up to 23%. At the same time, the MRI-to-CT conversion performance was maintained, with only small variations in the Mean Absolute Error (MAE). Notably, for three out of the five evaluated architectures, no statistically significant differences were observed, while two architectures exhibited statistically significant improvements. Our work aligns with a research paradigm that promotes DL-based frameworks meeting clinical requirements while ensuring climatic, social, and economic sustainability. It lays the groundwork for novel FL evaluation frameworks, advancing privacy, equity and, more broadly, justice in AI-driven healthcare. --- ### Mitigating hallucinations and omissions in LLMs for invertible problems: An application to hardware logic design automation Authors: Andrew S. Cassidy, Guillaume Garreau, Jay Sivagnaname, Mike Grassi, Bernard Brezzo, John V. Arthur, Dharmendra S. Modha Published: 2025-11-25 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.AR, cs.PL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03053v2 We show for invertible problems that transform data from a source domain (for example, Logic Condition Tables (LCTs)) to a destination domain (for example, Hardware Description Language (HDL) code), an approach of using Large Language Models (LLMs) as a lossless encoder from source to destination followed by as a lossless decoder back to the source, comparable to lossless compression in information theory, can mitigate most of the LLM drawbacks of hallucinations and omissions. Specifically, using LCTs as inputs, we generate the full HDL for a two-dimensional network-on-chip router (13 units, 1500-2000 lines of code) using seven different LLMs, reconstruct the LCTs from the auto-generated HDL, and compare the original and reconstructed LCTs. This approach yields significant productivity improvements, not only confirming correctly generated LLM logic and detecting incorrectly generated LLM logic but also assisting developers in finding design specification errors. --- ### Mirror, Mirror on the Wall -- Which is the Best Model of Them All? Authors: Dina Sayed, Heiko Schuldt Published: 2025-11-25 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.02043v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) have become one of the most transformative tools across many applications, as they have significantly boosted productivity and achieved impressive results in various domains such as finance, healthcare, education, telecommunications, and law, among others. Typically, state-of-the-art (SOTA) foundation models are developed by large corporations based on large data collections and substantial computational and financial resources required to pretrain such models from scratch. These foundation models then serve as the basis for further development and domain adaptation for specific use cases or tasks. However, given the dynamic and fast-paced nature of launching new foundation models, the process of selecting the most suitable model for a particular use case, application, or domain becomes increasingly complex. We argue that there are two main dimensions that need to be taken into consideration when selecting a model for further training: a qualitative dimension (which model is best suited for a task based on information, for instance, taken from model cards) and a quantitative dimension (which is the best performing model). The quantitative performance of models is assessed through leaderboards, which rank models based on standardized benchmarks and provide a consistent framework for comparing different LLMs. In this work, we address the analysis of the quantitative dimension by exploring the current leaderboards and benchmarks. To illustrate this analysis, we focus on the medical domain as a case study, demonstrating the evolution, current landscape, and practical significance of this quantitative evaluation dimension. Finally, we propose a Model Selection Methodology (MSM), a systematic approach designed to guide the navigation, prioritization, and selection of the model that best aligns with a given use case. ---