# Research Papers — 2025-11 · bundle page 34 of 197

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### Evaluating the Performance of Deep Learning Models in Whole-body Dynamic 3D Posture Prediction During Load-reaching Activities

Authors: Seyede Niloofar Hosseini, Ali Mojibi, Mahdi Mohseni, Navid Arjmand, Alireza Taheri
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20615v2

This study aimed to explore the application of deep neural networks for whole-body human posture prediction during dynamic load-reaching activities. Two time-series models were trained using bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM) and transformer architectures. The dataset consisted of 3D full-body plug-in gait dynamic coordinates from 20 normal-weight healthy male individuals each performing 204 load-reaching tasks from different load positions while adapting various lifting and handling techniques. The model inputs consisted of the 3D position of the hand-load position, lifting (stoop, full-squat and semi-squat) and handling (one- and two-handed) techniques, body weight and height, and the 3D coordinate data of the body posture from the first 25% of the task duration. These inputs were used by the models to predict body coordinates during the remaining 75% of the task period. Moreover, a novel method was proposed to improve the accuracy of the previous and present posture prediction networks by enforcing constant body segment lengths through the optimization of a new cost function. The results indicated that the new cost function decreased the prediction error of the models by approximately 8% and 21% for the arm and leg models, respectively. We indicated that utilizing the transformer architecture, with a root-mean-square-error of 41.4 mm, exhibited approximately 58% more accurate long-term performance than the BLSTM-based model. This study merits the use of neural networks that capture time series dependencies in 3D motion frames, providing a unique approach for understanding and predict motion dynamics during manual material handling activities.

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### The Consistency Critic: Correcting Inconsistencies in Generated Images via Reference-Guided Attentive Alignment

Authors: Ziheng Ouyang, Yiren Song, Yaoli Liu, Shihao Zhu, Qibin Hou, Ming-Ming Cheng, Mike Zheng Shou
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20614v1

Previous works have explored various customized generation tasks given a reference image, but they still face limitations in generating consistent fine-grained details. In this paper, our aim is to solve the inconsistency problem of generated images by applying a reference-guided post-editing approach and present our ImageCritic. We first construct a dataset of reference-degraded-target triplets obtained via VLM-based selection and explicit degradation, which effectively simulates the common inaccuracies or inconsistencies observed in existing generation models. Furthermore, building on a thorough examination of the model's attention mechanisms and intrinsic representations, we accordingly devise an attention alignment loss and a detail encoder to precisely rectify inconsistencies. ImageCritic can be integrated into an agent framework to automatically detect inconsistencies and correct them with multi-round and local editing in complex scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ImageCritic can effectively resolve detail-related issues in various customized generation scenarios, providing significant improvements over existing methods.

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### Can Vibe Coding Beat Graduate CS Students? An LLM vs. Human Coding Tournament on Market-driven Strategic Planning

Authors: Panayiotis Danassis, Naman Goel
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.MA
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20613v1

The rapid proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized AI-assisted code generation. This rapid development of LLMs has outpaced our ability to properly benchmark them. Prevailing benchmarks emphasize unit-test pass rates and syntactic correctness. Such metrics understate the difficulty of many real-world problems that require planning, optimization, and strategic interaction. We introduce a multi-agent reasoning-driven benchmark based on a real-world logistics optimization problem (Auction, Pickup, and Delivery Problem) that couples competitive auctions with capacity-constrained routing. The benchmark requires building agents that can (i) bid strategically under uncertainty and (ii) optimize planners that deliver tasks while maximizing profit. We evaluate 40 LLM-coded agents (by a wide range of state-of-the-art LLMs under multiple prompting methodologies, including vibe coding) against 17 human-coded agents developed before the advent of LLMs. Our results over 12 double all-play-all tournaments and $\sim 40$k matches demonstrate (i) a clear superiority of human(graduate students)-coded agents: the top 5 spots are consistently won by human-coded agents, (ii) the majority of LLM-coded agents (33 out of 40) are beaten by very simple baselines, and (iii) given the best human solution as an input and prompted to improve upon, the best performing LLM makes the solution significantly worse instead of improving it. Our results highlight a gap in LLMs' ability to produce code that works competitively in the real-world, and motivate new evaluations that emphasize reasoning-driven code synthesis in real-world scenarios.

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### Sparse-to-Field Reconstruction via Stochastic Neural Dynamic Mode Decomposition

Authors: Yujin Kim, Sarah Dean
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.LG, eess.SY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20612v1

Many consequential real-world systems, like wind fields and ocean currents, are dynamic and hard to model. Learning their governing dynamics remains a central challenge in scientific machine learning. Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD) provides a simple, data-driven approximation, but practical use is limited by sparse/noisy observations from continuous fields, reliance on linear approximations, and the lack of principled uncertainty quantification. To address these issues, we introduce Stochastic NODE-DMD, a probabilistic extension of DMD that models continuous-time, nonlinear dynamics while remaining interpretable. Our approach enables continuous spatiotemporal reconstruction at arbitrary coordinates and quantifies predictive uncertainty. Across four benchmarks, a synthetic setting and three physics-based flows, it surpasses a baseline in reconstruction accuracy when trained from only 10% observation density. It further recovers the dynamical structure by aligning learned modes and continuous-time eigenvalues with ground truth. Finally, on datasets with multiple realizations, our method learns a calibrated distribution over latent dynamics that preserves ensemble variability rather than averaging across regimes. Our code is available at: https://github.com/sedan-group/Stochastic-NODE-DMD

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### Building a Foundation Model for Trajectory from Scratch

Authors: Gaspard Merten, Mahmoud Sakr, Gilles Dejaegere
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20610v1

Foundation models are transformative in artificial intelligence, but building them from scratch, especially for mobility trajectories, is not yet clear or documented. This tutorial bridges this gap by demonstrating the steps and code of a minimal implementation of a trajectory-focused foundation model starting from GPT-2. Through a concise, step-by-step, code-driven process, we demonstrate adapting GPT-2 for spatiotemporal data. We then review and compare representative trajectory foundation models, such as TrajFM and TrajGPT, highlighting their architectural innovations and differences. Additionally, we introduce complementary techniques from related domains, like TimesFM's patching approach. Targeted at researchers and practitioners, this tutorial aims to explain the concepts and terminology of foundation models, at the implementation level. We find it timely and indispensable to create this educational material in order to support the SIGSPATIAL community in building and evaluating mobility foundation models, enhancing both research clarity and peer-review effectiveness in mobility AI.

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### Adaptive Hopfield Network: Rethinking Similarities in Associative Memory

Authors: Shurong Wang, Yuqi Pan, Zhuoyang Shen, Meng Zhang, Hongwei Wang, Guoqi Li
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20609v1

Associative memory models are content-addressable memory systems fundamental to biological intelligence and are notable for their high interpretability. However, existing models evaluate the quality of retrieval based on proximity, which cannot guarantee that the retrieved pattern has the strongest association with the query, failing correctness. We reframe this problem by proposing that a query is a generative variant of a stored memory pattern, and define a variant distribution to model this subtle context-dependent generative process. Consequently, correct retrieval should return the memory pattern with the maximum a posteriori probability of being the query's origin. This perspective reveals that an ideal similarity measure should approximate the likelihood of each stored pattern generating the query in accordance with variant distribution, which is impossible for fixed and pre-defined similarities used by existing associative memories. To this end, we develop adaptive similarity, a novel mechanism that learns to approximate this insightful but unknown likelihood from samples drawn from context, aiming for correct retrieval. We theoretically prove that our proposed adaptive similarity achieves optimal correct retrieval under three canonical and widely applicable types of variants: noisy, masked, and biased. We integrate this mechanism into a novel adaptive Hopfield network (A-Hop), and empirical results show that it achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse tasks, including memory retrieval, tabular classification, image classification, and multiple instance learning.

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### Optimization of Sums of Bivariate Functions: An Introduction to Relaxation-Based Methods for the Case of Finite Domains

Authors: Nils Müller
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: math.OC, cs.CV, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20607v1

We study the optimization of functions with $n>2$ arguments that have a representation as a sum of several functions that have only $2$ of the $n$ arguments each, termed sums of bivariates, on finite domains. The complexity of optimizing sums of bivariates is shown to be NP-equivalent and it is shown that there exists free lunch in the optimization of sums of bivariates. Based on measure-valued extensions of the objective function, so-called relaxations, $\ell^2$-approximation, and entropy-regularization, we derive several tractable problem formulations solvable with linear programming, coordinate ascent as well as with closed-form solutions. The limits of applying tractable versions of such relaxations to sums of bivariates are investigated using general results for reconstructing measures from their bivariate marginals. Experiments in which the derived algorithms are applied to random functions, vertex coloring, and signal reconstruction problems provide insights into qualitatively different function classes that can be modeled as sums of bivariates.

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### How to Purchase Labels? A Cost-Effective Approach Using Active Learning Markets

Authors: Xiwen Huang, Pierre Pinson
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20605v3

We introduce and analyse active learning markets as a way to purchase labels, in situations where analysts aim to acquire additional data to improve model fitting, or to better train models for predictive analytics applications. This comes in contrast to the many proposals that already exist to purchase features and examples. By originally formalising the market clearing as an optimisation problem, we integrate budget constraints and improvement thresholds into the label acquisition process. We focus on a single-buyer-multiple-seller setup and propose the use of two active learning strategies (variance based and query-by-committee based), paired with distinct pricing mechanisms. They are compared to benchmark baselines including random sampling and a greedy knapsack heuristic. The proposed strategies are validated on real-world datasets from two critical application domains: real estate pricing and energy forecasting. Results demonstrate the robustness of our approach, consistently achieving superior performance with fewer labels acquired compared to conventional methods. Our proposal comprises an easy-to-implement practical solution for optimising data acquisition in resource-constrained environments.

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### On Evaluating LLM Alignment by Evaluating LLMs as Judges

Authors: Yixin Liu, Pengfei Liu, Arman Cohan
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20604v1

Alignment with human preferences is an important evaluation aspect of LLMs, requiring them to be helpful, honest, safe, and to precisely follow human instructions. Evaluating large language models' (LLMs) alignment typically involves directly assessing their open-ended responses, requiring human annotators or strong LLM judges. Conversely, LLMs themselves have also been extensively evaluated as judges for assessing alignment. In this work, we examine the relationship between LLMs' generation and evaluation capabilities in aligning with human preferences. To this end, we first conduct a comprehensive analysis of the generation-evaluation consistency (GE-consistency) among various LLMs, revealing a strong correlation between their generation and evaluation capabilities when evaluated by a strong LLM preference oracle. Utilizing this finding, we propose a benchmarking paradigm that measures LLM alignment with human preferences without directly evaluating their generated outputs, instead assessing LLMs in their role as evaluators. Our evaluation shows that our proposed benchmark, AlignEval, matches or surpasses widely used automatic LLM evaluation benchmarks, such as AlpacaEval and Arena-Hard, in capturing human preferences when ranking LLMs. Our study offers valuable insights into the connection between LLMs' generation and evaluation capabilities, and introduces a benchmark that assesses alignment without directly evaluating model outputs.

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### The Driver-Blindness Phenomenon: Why Deep Sequence Models Default to Autocorrelation in Blood Glucose Forecasting

Authors: Heman Shakeri
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20601v1

Deep sequence models for blood glucose forecasting consistently fail to leverage clinically informative drivers--insulin, meals, and activity--despite well-understood physiological mechanisms. We term this Driver-Blindness and formalize it via $Δ_{\text{drivers}}$, the performance gain of multivariate models over matched univariate baselines. Across the literature, $Δ_{\text{drivers}}$ is typically near zero. We attribute this to three interacting factors: architectural biases favoring autocorrelation (C1), data fidelity gaps that render drivers noisy and confounded (C2), and physiological heterogeneity that undermines population-level models (C3). We synthesize strategies that partially mitigate Driver-Blindness--including physiological feature encoders, causal regularization, and personalization--and recommend that future work routinely report $Δ_{\text{drivers}}$ to prevent driver-blind models from being considered state-of-the-art.

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### BrowseSafe: Understanding and Preventing Prompt Injection Within AI Browser Agents

Authors: Kaiyuan Zhang, Mark Tenenholtz, Kyle Polley, Jerry Ma, Denis Yarats, Ninghui Li
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20597v2

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) agents into web browsers introduces security challenges that go beyond traditional web application threat models. Prior work has identified prompt injection as a new attack vector for web agents, yet the resulting impact within real-world environments remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we examine the landscape of prompt injection attacks and synthesize a benchmark of attacks embedded in realistic HTML payloads. Our benchmark goes beyond prior work by emphasizing injections that can influence real-world actions rather than mere text outputs, and by presenting attack payloads with complexity and distractor frequency similar to what real-world agents encounter. We leverage this benchmark to conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation of existing defenses, assessing their effectiveness across a suite of frontier AI models. We propose a multi-layered defense strategy comprising both architectural and model-based defenses to protect against evolving prompt injection attacks. Our work offers a blueprint for designing practical, secure web agents through a defense-in-depth approach.

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### Variational bagging: a robust approach for Bayesian uncertainty quantification

Authors: Shitao Fan, Ilsang Ohn, David Dunson, Lizhen Lin
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: math.ST, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20594v1

Variational Bayes methods are popular due to their computational efficiency and adaptability to diverse applications. In specifying the variational family, mean-field classes are commonly used, which enables efficient algorithms such as coordinate ascent variational inference (CAVI) but fails to capture parameter dependence and typically underestimates uncertainty. In this work, we introduce a variational bagging approach that integrates a bagging procedure with variational Bayes, resulting in a bagged variational posterior for improved inference. We establish strong theoretical guarantees, including posterior contraction rates for general models and a Bernstein-von Mises (BVM) type theorem that ensures valid uncertainty quantification. Notably, our results show that even when using a mean-field variational family, our approach can recover off-diagonal elements of the limiting covariance structure and provide proper uncertainty quantification. In addition, variational bagging is robust to model misspecification, with covariance structures matching those of the target covariance. We illustrate our variational bagging method in numerical studies through applications to parametric models, finite mixture models, deep neural networks, and variational autoencoders (VAEs).

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### Latent Diffusion Inversion Requires Understanding the Latent Space

Authors: Mingxing Rao, Bowen Qu, Daniel Moyer
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20592v3

The recovery of training data from generative models ("model inversion") has been extensively studied for diffusion models in the data domain as a memorization/overfitting phenomenon. Latent diffusion models (LDMs), which operate on the latent codes from encoder/decoder pairs, have been robust to prior inversion methods. In this work we describe two key findings: (1) the diffusion model exhibits non-uniform memorization across latent codes, tending to overfit samples located in high-distortion regions of the decoder pullback metric; (2) even within a single latent code, memorization contributions are unequal across representation dimensions. Our proposed method to ranks latent dimensions by their contribution to the decoder pullback metric, which in turn identifies dimensions that contribute to memorization. For score-based membership inference, a sub-task of model inversion, we find that removing less-memorizing dimensions improves performance on all tested methods and datasets, with average AUROC gains of 1-4% and substantial increases in TPR@1%FPR (1-32%) across diverse datasets including CIFAR-10, CelebA, ImageNet-1K, Pokemon, MS-COCO, and Flickr. Our results highlight the overlooked influence of the auto-encoder geometry on LDM memorization and provide a new perspective for analyzing privacy risks in diffusion-based generative models.

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### Attention Trajectories as a Diagnostic Axis for Deep Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Charlotte Beylier, Hannah Selder, Arthur Fleig, Simon M. Hofmann, Nico Scherf
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20591v3

The emergence and evolution of feature reliance in deep reinforcement learning agents remain poorly understood. Here, we introduce a methodological framework for analyzing the learning process through quantitative analysis of saliency maps. This approach aggregates saliency information at the object and modality level into hierarchical attention profiles, quantifying how agents allocate attention over time, thereby forming attention trajectories throughout training. These profiles are then compared across controlled conditions, connected to behavioral measurements and reproduced with different saliency methods to assess the robustness of the findings. Applied to Atari 2600 benchmarks, custom Pong environments, and biomechanical user simulations in visuomotor tasks, this framework uncovers algorithm-specific attention biases, diagnosed unintended reward-driven strategies, and overfitting to redundant sensory channels. These patterns correspond to measurable behavioral differences, demonstrating empirical links between attention profiles, learning dynamics, and agent behavior. The results establish attention trajectories as a promising diagnostic axis for tracing how feature reliance develops during training and for identifying biases and vulnerabilities invisible to performance metrics alone.

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### EnergyTwin: A Multi-Agent System for Simulating and Coordinating Energy Microgrids

Authors: Jakub Muszyński, Ignacy Walużenicz, Patryk Zan, Zofia Wrona, Maria Ganzha, Marcin Paprzycki, Costin Bădică
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.MA, cs.AI, cs.SE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20590v1

Microgrids are deployed to reduce purchased grid energy, limit exposure to volatile tariffs, and ensure service continuity during disturbances. This requires coordinating heterogeneous distributed energy resources across multiple time scales and under variable conditions. Among existing tools, typically, power-system simulators capture physical behaviour but assume centralized control, while multi-agent frameworks model decentralized decision-making but represent energy with no physical grounding. In this context, the EnergyTwin is introduced, an agent-based microgrid simulation environment that couples physically grounded models with forecast-informed, rolling-horizon planning, and negotiations. Each asset is modeled as an agent, interacting with a central agent that obtains forecasts, formulates predictions, and allocates energy through contract-based interactions. EnergyTwin targets tertiary-layer decision making and is extensible for digital-twin use. Its feasibility was evaluated in a university campus microgrid scenario where multiple planning strategies were compared. Achieved results show that forecast-driven rolling-horizon planning increases local energy self-sufficiency, maintains higher battery reserves, and reduces exposure to low-resilience operating states. They demonstrate also potential of EnergyTwin as platform supporting research on resilient, negotiation-driven microgrids.

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### Anatomica: Localized Control over Geometric and Topological Properties for Anatomical Diffusion Models

Authors: Karim Kadry, Abdallah Abdelwahed, Shoaib Goraya, Ajay Manicka, Naravich Chutisilp, Farhad Nezami, Elazer Edelman
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20587v1

We present Anatomica: an inference-time framework for generating multi-class anatomical voxel maps with localized geo-topological control. During generation, we use cuboidal control domains of varying dimensionality, location, and shape to slice out relevant substructures. These local substructures are used to compute differentiable penalty functions that steer the sample towards target constraints. We control geometric features such as size, shape, and position through voxel-wise moments, while topological features such as connected components, loops, and voids are enforced through persistent homology. Lastly, we implement Anatomica for latent diffusion models, where neural field decoders partially extract substructures, enabling the efficient control of anatomical properties. Anatomica applies flexibly across diverse anatomical systems, composing constraints to control complex structures over arbitrary dimensions and coordinate systems, thereby enabling the rational design of synthetic datasets for virtual trials or machine learning workflows.

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### PaTAS: A Framework for Trust Propagation in Neural Networks Using Subjective Logic

Authors: Koffi Ismael Ouattara, Ioannis Krontiris, Theo Dimitrakos, Dennis Eisermann, Houda Labiod, Frank Kargl
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20586v5

Trustworthiness has become a key requirement for deploying artificial intelligence in safety-critical applications, yet conventional metrics such as accuracy fail to capture uncertainty or the reliability of predictions, particularly under adversarial or degraded conditions. This paper introduces the Parallel Trust Assessment System (PaTAS), a framework for modeling and propagating trust in neural networks using Subjective Logic (SL). PaTAS operates in parallel with standard neural computation through Trust Nodes and Trust Functions that propagate input, parameter, and activation trust across the network, refining parameter trust during training (Parameter Trust Update) and returning a per-inference trust opinion, quantifying belief, disbelief, and uncertainty, on each prediction (Inference-Path Trust Assessment). Experiments on real-world and adversarial datasets show that these estimates are interpretable and stable and complement accuracy: PaTAS flags predictions that remain accurate yet rely on parameters learned from corrupted data, detects adversarially patched inputs without knowledge of the trigger, and audits training-label corruption without any test data. Compared with output-only uncertainty baselines and dedicated input- and feature-space detectors, out-of-distribution and corruption detection is carried by the conformity-derived input opinions PaTAS consumes, within a regime that a per-dataset diagnostic identifies in advance; trust propagation adds model-side signals these detectors lack, and the composed trust degrades gracefully where any single signal fails. The mechanism extends to convolutional networks. PaTAS thereby provides a foundation for transparent, quantifiable trust reasoning across the AI lifecycle.

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### A Tale of Two Geometries: Adaptive Optimizers and Non-Euclidean Descent

Authors: Shuo Xie, Tianhao Wang, Beining Wu, Zhiyuan Li
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20584v1

Adaptive optimizers can reduce to normalized steepest descent (NSD) when only adapting to the current gradient, suggesting a close connection between the two algorithmic families. A key distinction between their analyses, however, lies in the geometries, e.g., smoothness notions, they rely on. In the convex setting, adaptive optimizers are governed by a stronger adaptive smoothness condition, while NSD relies on the standard notion of smoothness. We extend the theory of adaptive smoothness to the nonconvex setting and show that it precisely characterizes the convergence of adaptive optimizers. Moreover, we establish that adaptive smoothness enables acceleration of adaptive optimizers with Nesterov momentum in the convex setting, a guarantee unattainable under standard smoothness for certain non-Euclidean geometry. We further develop an analogous comparison for stochastic optimization by introducing adaptive gradient variance, which parallels adaptive smoothness and leads to dimension-free convergence guarantees that cannot be achieved under standard gradient variance for certain non-Euclidean geometry.

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### MSTN: A Lightweight and Fast Model for General TimeSeries Analysis

Authors: Sumit S Shevtekar, Chandresh K Maurya
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20577v5

Real-world time series often exhibit strong non-stationarity, complex nonlinear dynamics, and behavior expressed across multiple temporal scales, from rapid local fluctuations to slow-evolving long-range trends. However, many contemporary architectures impose rigid, fixed-scale structural priors such as patch-based tokenization, predefined receptive fields, or frozen backbone encoders - which can over-regularize temporal dynamics and limit adaptability to abrupt high-magnitude events. To handle this, we introduce the Multi-scale Temporal Network (MSTN), a hybrid neural architecture grounded in an Early Temporal Aggregation principle. MSTN integrates three complementary components: (i) a multi-scale convolutional encoder that captures fine-grained local structure; (ii) a sequence modeling module that learns long-range dependencies through either recurrent or attention-based mechanisms; and (iii) a self-gated fusion stage incorporating squeeze-excitation and a single dense layer to dynamically reweight and fuse multi-scale representations. ETA ensures downstream modules operate in O(1) time, while the encoder retains O(L^2) (Transformer) or O(L) (BiLSTM). This design enables MSTN to flexibly model temporal patterns spanning milliseconds to extended horizons, while avoiding the computational burden typically associated with long-context models. Across extensive benchmarks covering imputation, long-term forecasting, classification, and cross-dataset generalization, MSTN achieves state-of-the-art performance, establishing new best results on 21 of 27 datasets, while remaining lightweight (~0.40M params for MSTN-BiLSTM and ~1.06M for MSTN-Transformer) and suitable for low-latency inference (<1 sec, often in milliseconds), resource-constrained deployment.

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### VQ-VA World: Towards High-Quality Visual Question-Visual Answering

Authors: Chenhui Gou, Zilong Chen, Zeyu Wang, Feng Li, Deyao Zhu, Zicheng Duan, Kunchang Li, Chaorui Deng, Hongyi Yuan, Haoqi Fan, Cihang Xie, Jianfei Cai et al.
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20573v1

This paper studies Visual Question-Visual Answering (VQ-VA): generating an image, rather than text, in response to a visual question -- an ability that has recently emerged in proprietary systems such as NanoBanana and GPT-Image. To also bring this capability to open-source models, we introduce VQ-VA World, a data-centric framework built around an agentic pipeline for large-scale, targeted data construction. Leveraging web-scale deployment, this pipeline crawls a massive amount of ~1.8M high-quality, interleaved image-text samples for model training. For evaluation, we further release IntelligentBench, a human-curated benchmark that systematically assesses VQ-VA along the aspects of world knowledge, design knowledge, and reasoning. Training with VQ-VA World data yields strong empirical gains: it helps LightFusion attain 53.06 on IntelligentBench, substantially surpassing the best prior open-source baselines (i.e., 7.78 from vanilla LightFusion; 1.94 from UniWorld-V1), and significantly narrowing the gap toward leading proprietary systems (e.g., 81.67 from NanoBanana; 82.64 from GPT-Image). By releasing the full suite of model weights, datasets, and pipelines, we hope to stimulate future research on VQ-VA.

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### Gated Uncertainty-Aware Runtime Dual Invariants for Neural Signal-Controlled Robotics

Authors: Tasha Kim, Oiwi Parker Jones
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.HC, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20570v1

Safety-critical assistive systems that directly decode user intent from neural signals require rigorous guarantees of reliability and trust. We present GUARDIAN (Gated Uncertainty-Aware Runtime Dual Invariants), a framework for real-time neuro-symbolic verification for neural signal-controlled robotics. GUARDIAN enforces both logical safety and physiological trust by coupling confidence-calibrated brain signal decoding with symbolic goal grounding and dual-layer runtime monitoring. On the BNCI2014 motor imagery electroencephalogram (EEG) dataset with 9 subjects and 5,184 trials, the system performs at a high safety rate of 94-97% even with lightweight decoder architectures with low test accuracies (27-46%) and high ECE confidence miscalibration (0.22-0.41). We demonstrate 1.7x correct interventions in simulated noise testing versus at baseline. The monitor operates at 100Hz and sub-millisecond decision latency, making it practically viable for closed-loop neural signal-based systems. Across 21 ablation results, GUARDIAN exhibits a graduated response to signal degradation, and produces auditable traces from intent, plan to action, helping to link neural evidence to verifiable robot action.

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### DINO-Tok: Adapting DINO for Visual Tokenizers

Authors: Mingkai Jia, Mingxiao Li, Zhijian Shu, Anlin Zheng, Liaoyuan Fan, Jiaxin Guo, Tianxing Shi, Dongyue Lu, Zeming Li, Xiaoyang Guo, Xiaojuan Qi, Xiao-Xiao Long et al.
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20565v2

Recent advances in visual generation have emphasized the importance of Latent Generative Models (LGMs), which critically depend on effective visual tokenizers to bridge pixels and semantic representations. However, tokenizers constructed on pre-trained vision foundation models (VFMs) often struggle to balance semantic richness and reconstruction fidelity in high-dimensional latent spaces. In this paper, we introduce DINO-Tok, a visual tokenizer built upon a frozen DINO encoder that supports both continuous autoencoding (DINO-Tok-AE) and discrete vector-quantization (DINO-Tok-VQ). By unifying hierarchical representations from both shallow fine-grained features and deep global semantics into an information-complete latent space, DINO-Tok preserves texture details while maintaining \textit{semantic consistency} for generation. We further investigate VQ in frozen semantic feature spaces of high dimensionality, where information dilution and codebook collapse frequently arise. To address this issue, we propose Dominant-Subspace Quantization (DSQ), which leverages a global PCA analysis to select principal components while suppressing noisy dimensions, thereby stabilizing codebook optimization and improving reconstruction and generation quality. On ImageNet 256x256, DINO-Tok achieves strong reconstruction performance, achieving 0.28 rFID for continuous autoencoding and 1.10 rFID for discrete VQ, as well as strong few-step generation performance 1.82 gFID for diffusion and 2.44 gFID for autoregressive generation. These results demonstrate that pre-trained VFMs such as DINO can be directly adapted into high-fidelity, semantically aligned visual tokenizers for next-generation latent generative models. Code will be publicly available at https://github.com/MKJia/DINO-Tok.

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### E2E-GRec: An End-to-End Joint Training Framework for Graph Neural Networks and Recommender Systems

Authors: Rui Xue, Shichao Zhu, Liang Qin, Tianfu Wu
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20564v2

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as powerful tools for modeling graph-structured data and have been widely used in recommender systems, such as for capturing complex user-item and item-item relations. However, most industrial deployments adopt a two-stage pipeline: GNNs are first pre-trained offline to generate node embeddings, which are then used as static features for downstream recommender systems. This decoupled paradigm leads to two key limitations: (1) high computational overhead, since large-scale GNN inference must be repeatedly executed to refresh embeddings; and (2) lack of joint optimization, as the gradient from the recommender system cannot directly influence the GNN learning process, causing the GNN to be suboptimally informative for the recommendation task. In this paper, we propose E2E-GRec, a novel end-to-end training framework that unifies GNN training with the recommender system. Our framework is characterized by three key components: (i) efficient subgraph sampling from a large-scale cross-domain heterogeneous graph to ensure training scalability and efficiency; (ii) a Graph Feature Auto-Encoder (GFAE) serving as an auxiliary self-supervised task to guide the GNN to learn structurally meaningful embeddings; and (iii) a two-level feature fusion mechanism combined with Gradnorm-based dynamic loss balancing, which stabilizes graph-aware multi-task end-to-end training. Extensive offline evaluations, online A/B tests (e.g., a +0.133% relative improvement in stay duration, a 0.3171% reduction in the average number of videos a user skips) on large-scale production data, together with theoretical analysis, demonstrate that E2E-GRec consistently surpasses traditional approaches, yielding significant gains across multiple recommendation metrics.

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### A Reason-then-Describe Instruction Interpreter for Controllable Video Generation

Authors: Shengqiong Wu, Weicai Ye, Yuanxing Zhang, Jiahao Wang, Quande Liu, Xintao Wang, Pengfei Wan, Kun Gai, Hao Fei, Tat-Seng Chua
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20563v1

Diffusion Transformers have significantly improved video fidelity and temporal coherence, however, practical controllability remains limited. Concise, ambiguous, and compositionally complex user inputs contrast with the detailed prompts used in training, yielding an intent-output mismatch. We propose ReaDe, a universal, model-agnostic interpreter that converts raw instructions into precise, actionable specifications for downstream video generators. ReaDe follows a reason-then-describe paradigm: it first analyzes the user request to identify core requirements and resolve ambiguities, then produces detailed guidance that enables faithful, controllable generation. We train ReaDe via a two-stage optimization: (i) reasoning-augmented supervision imparts analytic parsing with stepwise traces and dense captions, and (ii) a multi-dimensional reward assigner enables stable, feedback-driven refinement for natural-style captions. Experiments across single- and multi-condition scenarios show consistent gains in instruction fidelity, caption accuracy, and downstream video quality, with strong generalization to reasoning-intensive and unseen inputs. ReaDe offers a practical route to aligning controllable video generation with accurately interpreted user intent. Project Page: https://sqwu.top/ReaDe/.

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### PhysChoreo: Physics-Controllable Video Generation with Part-Aware Semantic Grounding

Authors: Haoze Zhang, Tianyu Huang, Zichen Wan, Xiaowei Jin, Hongzhi Zhang, Hui Li, Wangmeng Zuo
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20562v2

While recent video generation models have achieved significant visual fidelity, they often suffer from the lack of explicit physical controllability and plausibility. To address this, some recent studies attempted to guide the video generation with physics-based rendering. However, these methods face inherent challenges in accurately modeling complex physical properties and effectively control ling the resulting physical behavior over extended temporal sequences. In this work, we introduce PhysChoreo, a novel framework that can generate videos with diverse controllability and physical realism from a single image. Our method consists of two stages: first, it estimates the static initial physical properties of all objects in the image through part-aware physical property reconstruction. Then, through temporally instructed and physically editable simulation, it synthesizes high-quality videos with rich dynamic behaviors and physical realism. Experimental results show that PhysChoreo can generate videos with rich behaviors and physical realism, outperforming state-of-the-art methods on multiple evaluation metrics.

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### Does Understanding Inform Generation in Unified Multimodal Models? From Analysis to Path Forward

Authors: Yuwei Niu, Weiyang Jin, Jiaqi Liao, Chaoran Feng, Peng Jin, Bin Lin, Zongjian Li, Bin Zhu, Weihao Yu, Li Yuan
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20561v3

Recent years have witnessed significant progress in Unified Multimodal Models, yet a fundamental question remains: Does understanding truly inform generation in Unified Multimodal Models? To investigate this, we introduce UniSandbox, a decoupled evaluation framework paired with controlled, synthetic datasets to avoid data leakage and enable detailed analysis. Our findings reveal a significant understanding-generation gap, which is mainly reflected in two key dimensions: reasoning generation and knowledge transfer. Specifically, for reasoning generation tasks, we observe that explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) in the understanding module effectively bridges the gap, and further demonstrate that a self-training approach can successfully internalize this ability, enabling implicit reasoning during generation. Additionally, for knowledge transfer tasks, we find that CoT assists the generative process by helping retrieve newly learned knowledge, and also discover that query-based architectures inherently exhibit latent CoT-like properties that affect this transfer. UniSandbox provides preliminary insights for designing future unified architectures and training strategies that truly bridge the understanding-generation gap.

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### Spatio-Temporal Hierarchical Causal Models

Authors: Xintong Li, Haoran Zhang, Xiao Zhou
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20558v2

The abundance of fine-grained spatio-temporal data, such as traffic sensor networks, offers vast opportunities for scientific discovery. However, inferring causal relationships from such observational data remains challenging, particularly due to unobserved confounders that are specific to units (e.g., geographical locations) yet influence outcomes over time. Most existing methods for spatio-temporal causal inference assume that all confounders are observed, an assumption that is often violated in practice. In this paper, we introduce Spatio-Temporal Hierarchical Causal Models (ST-HCMs), a novel graphical framework that extends hierarchical causal modeling to the spatio-temporal domain. At the core of our approach is the Spatio-Temporal Collapse Theorem, which shows that a complex ST-HCM converges to a simpler flat causal model as the amount of subunit data increases. This theoretical result enables a general procedure for causal identification, allowing ST-HCMs to recover causal effects even in the presence of unobserved, time-invariant unit-level confounders, a scenario where standard non-hierarchical models fail. We validate the effectiveness of our framework on both synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating its potential for robust causal inference in complex dynamic systems.

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### Time-Domain Linear Model-based Framework for Passive Acoustic Mapping of Cavitation Activity

Authors: Tatiana Gelvez-Barrera, Barbara Nicolas, Denis Kouamé, Bruno Gilles, Adrian Basarab
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: eess.SP, cs.AI, eess.IV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20551v1

Passive acoustic mapping enables the spatial mapping and temporal monitoring of cavitation activity, playing a crucial role in therapeutic ultrasound applications. Most conventional beamforming methods, whether implemented in the time or frequency domains, suffer from limited axial resolution due to the absence of a reference emission onset time. While frequency-domain methods, the most efficient of which are based on the cross-spectral matrix, require long signals for accurate estimation, time-domain methods typically achieve lower spatial resolution. To address these limitations, we propose a linear model-based beamforming framework fully formulated in the time domain. The linear forward model relates a discretized spatiotemporal distribution of cavitation activity to the temporal signals recorded by a probe, explicitly accounting for time-of-flight delays dictated by the acquisition geometry. This model is then inverted using regularization techniques that exploit prior knowledge of cavitation activity in both spatial and temporal domains. Experimental results show that the proposed framework achieves enhanced or competitive cavitation map quality while using only 20\% of the data typically required by frequency-domain methods. This highlights the substantial gain in data efficiency and the flexibility of our spatiotemporal regularization to adapt to diverse passive cavitation scenarios, outperforming state-of-the-art techniques.

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### Flash-DMD: Towards High-Fidelity Few-Step Image Generation with Efficient Distillation and Joint Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Guanjie Chen, Shirui Huang, Kai Liu, Jianchen Zhu, Xiaoye Qu, Peng Chen, Yu Cheng, Yifu Sun
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20549v1

Diffusion Models have emerged as a leading class of generative models, yet their iterative sampling process remains computationally expensive. Timestep distillation is a promising technique to accelerate generation, but it often requires extensive training and leads to image quality degradation. Furthermore, fine-tuning these distilled models for specific objectives, such as aesthetic appeal or user preference, using Reinforcement Learning (RL) is notoriously unstable and easily falls into reward hacking. In this work, we introduce Flash-DMD, a novel framework that enables fast convergence with distillation and joint RL-based refinement. Specifically, we first propose an efficient timestep-aware distillation strategy that significantly reduces training cost with enhanced realism, outperforming DMD2 with only $2.1\%$ its training cost. Second, we introduce a joint training scheme where the model is fine-tuned with an RL objective while the timestep distillation training continues simultaneously. We demonstrate that the stable, well-defined loss from the ongoing distillation acts as a powerful regularizer, effectively stabilizing the RL training process and preventing policy collapse. Extensive experiments on score-based and flow matching models show that our proposed Flash-DMD not only converges significantly faster but also achieves state-of-the-art generation quality in the few-step sampling regime, outperforming existing methods in visual quality, human preference, and text-image alignment metrics. Our work presents an effective paradigm for training efficient, high-fidelity, and stable generative models. Codes are coming soon.

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### From Words to Wisdom: Discourse Annotation and Baseline Models for Student Dialogue Understanding

Authors: Farjana Sultana Mim, Shuchin Aeron, Eric Miller, Kristen Wendell
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20547v1

Identifying discourse features in student conversations is quite important for educational researchers to recognize the curricular and pedagogical variables that cause students to engage in constructing knowledge rather than merely completing tasks. The manual analysis of student conversations to identify these discourse features is time-consuming and labor-intensive, which limits the scale and scope of studies. Leveraging natural language processing (NLP) techniques can facilitate the automatic detection of these discourse features, offering educational researchers scalable and data-driven insights. However, existing studies in NLP that focus on discourse in dialogue rarely address educational data. In this work, we address this gap by introducing an annotated educational dialogue dataset of student conversations featuring knowledge construction and task production discourse. We also establish baseline models for automatically predicting these discourse properties for each turn of talk within conversations, using pre-trained large language models GPT-3.5 and Llama-3.1. Experimental results indicate that these state-of-the-art models perform suboptimally on this task, indicating the potential for future research.

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### New York Smells: A Large Multimodal Dataset for Olfaction

Authors: Ege Ozguroglu, Junbang Liang, Ruoshi Liu, Mia Chiquier, Michael DeTienne, Wesley Wei Qian, Alexandra Horowitz, Andrew Owens, Carl Vondrick
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20544v2

While olfaction is central to how animals perceive the world, this rich chemical sensory modality remains largely inaccessible to machines. One key bottleneck is the lack of diverse, multimodal olfactory training data collected in natural settings. We present New York Smells, a large dataset of paired image and olfactory signals captured ``in the wild.'' Our dataset contains 7,000 smell-image pairs from 3,500 distinct objects across indoor and outdoor environments, with approximately 70$\times$ more objects than existing olfactory datasets. Our benchmark has three tasks: cross-modal smell-to-image retrieval, recognizing scenes, objects, and materials from smell alone, and fine-grained discrimination between grass species. Through experiments on our dataset, we find that visual data enables cross-modal olfactory representation learning, and that our learned olfactory representations outperform widely-used hand-crafted features.

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### Feature-Modulated UFNO for Improved Prediction of Multiphase Flow in Porous Media

Authors: Alhasan Abdellatif, Hannah P. Menke, Florian Doster, Kamaljit Singh, Ahmed H. Elsheikh
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20543v2

The UNet-enhanced Fourier Neural Operator (UFNO) extends the Fourier Neural Operator (FNO) by incorporating a parallel UNet pathway, enabling the retention of both high- and low-frequency components. While UFNO improves predictive accuracy over FNO, it inefficiently treats scalar inputs (e.g., temperature, injection rate) as spatially distributed fields by duplicating their values across the domain. This forces the model to process redundant constant signals within the frequency domain. Additionally, its standard loss function does not account for spatial variations in error sensitivity, limiting performance in regions of high physical importance. We introduce UFNO-FiLM, an enhanced architecture that incorporates two key innovations. First, we decouple scalar inputs from spatial features using a Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) layer, allowing the model to modulate spatial feature maps without introducing constant signals into the Fourier transform. Second, we employ a spatially weighted loss function that prioritizes learning in critical regions. Our experiments on subsurface multiphase flow demonstrate a 21\% reduction in gas saturation Mean Absolute Error (MAE) compared to UFNO, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach in improving predictive accuracy.

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### Automated Monitoring of Cultural Heritage Artifacts Using Semantic Segmentation

Authors: Andrea Ranieri, Giorgio Palmieri, Silvia Biasotti
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20541v1

This paper addresses the critical need for automated crack detection in the preservation of cultural heritage through semantic segmentation. We present a comparative study of U-Net architectures, using various convolutional neural network (CNN) encoders, for pixel-level crack identification on statues and monuments. A comparative quantitative evaluation is performed on the test set of the OmniCrack30k dataset (1) using popular segmentation metrics including Mean Intersection over Union (mIoU), Dice coefficient, and Jaccard index. This is complemented by an out-of-distribution qualitative evaluation on an unlabeled test set of real-world cracked statues and monuments. Our findings provide valuable insights into the capabilities of different CNN- based encoders for fine-grained crack segmentation. We show that the models exhibit promising generalization capabilities to unseen cultural heritage contexts, despite never having been explicitly trained on images of statues or monuments.

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### Proceedings Twentieth Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge

Authors: Adam Bjorndahl
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.LO, cs.AI, cs.GT, cs.MA
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20540v1

The TARK conference (Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge) is a conference that aims to bring together researchers from a wide variety of fields, including computer science, artificial intelligence, game theory, decision theory, philosophy, logic, linguistics, and cognitive science. Its goal is to further our understanding of interdisciplinary issues involving reasoning about rationality and knowledge. Previous conferences have been held biennially around the world since 1986, on the initiative of Joe Halpern (Cornell University). Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, semantic models for knowledge, belief, uncertainty, awareness, bounded rationality, common sense epistemic reasoning, epistemic logic, epistemic game theory, knowledge and action, applications of reasoning about knowledge and other mental states, belief revision, computational social choice, algorithmic game theory, and foundations of multi-agent systems. Information about TARK is available at http://www.tark.org/. These proceedings contain the papers that have been accepted for presentation at the Twentieth Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (TARK 2025), held July 14--16, 2025, at Heinrich-Heine-Universität, Düsseldorf, Germany. The conference website can be found at https://ccc.cs.uni-duesseldorf.de/tark-2025/.

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### Bridging the Language Gap: Synthetic Voice Diversity via Latent Mixup for Equitable Speech Recognition

Authors: Wesley Bian, Xiaofeng Lin, Guang Cheng
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20534v1

Modern machine learning models for audio tasks often exhibit superior performance on English and other well-resourced languages, primarily due to the abundance of available training data. This disparity leads to an unfair performance gap for low-resource languages, where data collection is both challenging and costly. In this work, we introduce a novel data augmentation technique for speech corpora designed to mitigate this gap. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method significantly improves the performance of automatic speech recognition systems on low-resource languages. Furthermore, we show that our approach outperforms existing augmentation strategies, offering a practical solution for enhancing speech technology in underrepresented linguistic communities.

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### MIMIC-MJX: Neuromechanical Emulation of Animal Behavior

Authors: Charles Y. Zhang, Yuanjia Yang, Aidan Sirbu, Elliott T. T. Abe, Emil Wärnberg, Eric J. Leonardis, Diego E. Aldarondo, Adam Lee, Aaditya Prasad, Jason Foat, Kaiwen Bian, Joshua Park et al.
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: q-bio.NC, cs.AI, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20532v3

The primary output of the nervous system is movement and behavior. While recent advances have democratized pose tracking during complex behavior, kinematic trajectories alone provide only indirect access to the underlying control processes. Here we present MIMIC-MJX, a framework for learning biomechanically grounded neural control policies from kinematics. MIMIC-MJX provides a platform for modeling the generative process of motor control by training neural controllers that learn to actuate biomechanical animal models in physics simulation to reproduce real kinematic trajectories. We demonstrate that our implementation is accurate, fast, and generalizable to diverse animal body models, and that it can be trained with modest amounts of motion data. MIMIC-MJX can be used to model motor control policies and simulate behavioral experiments, illustrating its potential as an integrative modeling framework for neuroscience.

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### Beyond Generation: Multi-Hop Reasoning for Factual Accuracy in Vision-Language Models

Authors: Shamima Hossain
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20531v1

Visual Language Models (VLMs) are powerful generative tools but often produce factually inaccurate outputs due to a lack of robust reasoning capabilities. While extensive research has been conducted on integrating external knowledge for reasoning in large language models (LLMs), such efforts remain underexplored in VLMs, where the challenge is compounded by the need to bridge multiple modalities seamlessly. This work introduces a framework for knowledge-guided reasoning in VLMs, leveraging structured knowledge graphs for multi-hop verification using image-captioning task to illustrate our framework. Our approach enables systematic reasoning across multiple steps, including visual entity recognition, knowledge graph traversal, and fact-based caption refinement. We evaluate the framework using hierarchical, triple-based and bullet-point based knowledge representations, analyzing their effectiveness in factual accuracy and logical inference. Empirical results show that our approach improves factual accuracy by approximately 31% on preliminary experiments on a curated dataset of mixtures from Google Landmarks v2, Conceptual captions and Coco captions revealing key insights into reasoning patterns and failure modes. This work demonstrates the potential of integrating external knowledge for advancing reasoning in VLMs, paving the way for more reliable and knowledgable multimodal systems.

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### Assessing LLMs' Performance: Insights from the Chinese Pharmacist Exam

Authors: Xinran Wang, Boran Zhu, Shujuan Zhou, Ziwen Long, Dehua Zhou, Shu Zhang
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20526v1

Background: As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into digital health education and assessment workflows, their capabilities in supporting high-stakes, domain-specific certification tasks remain underexplored.In China, the national pharmacist licensure exam serves as a standardized benchmark for evaluating pharmacists' clinical and theoretical competencies. Objective: This study aimed to compare the performance of two LLMs: ChatGPT-4o and DeepSeek-R1 on real questions from the Chinese Pharmacist Licensing Examination (2017-2021), and to discuss the implications of these performance differences for AI-enabled formative evaluation. Methods: A total of 2,306 multiple-choice (text-only) questions were compiled from official exams, training materials, and public databases. Questions containing tables or images were excluded. Each item was input in its original Chinese format, and model responses were evaluated for exact accuracy. Pearson's Chi-squared test was used to compare overall performance, and Fisher's exact test was applied to year-wise multiple-choice accuracy. Results: DeepSeek-R1 outperformed ChatGPT-4o with a significantly higher overall accuracy (90.0% vs. 76.1%, p < 0.001). Unit-level analyses revealed consistent advantages for DeepSeek-R1, particularly in foundational and clinical synthesis modules. While year-by-year multiple-choice performance also favored DeepSeek-R1, this performance gap did not reach statistical significance in any specific unit-year (all p > 0.05). Conclusion: DeepSeek-R1 demonstrated robust alignment with the structural and semantic demands of the pharmacist licensure exam. These findings suggest that domain-specific models warrant further investigation for this context, while also reinforcing the necessity of human oversight in legally and ethically sensitive contexts.

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### Mistake Attribution: Fine-Grained Mistake Understanding in Egocentric Videos

Authors: Yayuan Li, Aadit Jain, Filippos Bellos, Jason J. Corso
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20525v2

We introduce Mistake Attribution (MATT), a new task for fine-grained understanding of human mistakes in egocentric videos. While prior work detects whether a mistake occurs, MATT attributes the mistake to what part of the instruction is violated (semantic role), when in the video the deviation becomes irreversible (the Point-of-No-Return, PNR), and where the mistake appears in the PNR frame. We develop MisEngine, a data engine that automatically constructs mistake samples from existing datasets with attribution-rich annotations. Applied to large egocentric corpora, MisEngine yields EPIC-KITCHENS-M and Ego4D-M -- two datasets up to two orders of magnitude larger than prior mistake datasets. We then present MisFormer, a unified attention-based model for mistake attribution across semantic, temporal, and spatial dimensions, trained with MisEngine supervision. A human study demonstrates the ecological validity of our MisEngine-constructed mistake samples, confirming that EPIC-KITCHENS-M and Ego4D-M can serve as reliable benchmarks for mistake understanding. Experiments on both our datasets and prior benchmarks show that MisFormer, as a single unified model, outperforms task-specific SOTA methods by at least 6.66%, 21.81%, 18.7%, and 3.00% in video-language understanding, temporal localization, hand-object interaction, and mistake detection, respectively. Project page: https://yayuanli.github.io/MATT/

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### HBridge: H-Shape Bridging of Heterogeneous Experts for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation

Authors: Xiang Wang, Zhifei Zhang, He Zhang, Zhe Lin, Yuqian Zhou, Qing Liu, Shiwei Zhang, Yijun Li, Shaoteng Liu, Haitian Zheng, Jason Kuen, Yuehuan Wang et al.
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20520v1

Recent unified models integrate understanding experts (e.g., LLMs) with generative experts (e.g., diffusion models), achieving strong multimodal performance. However, recent advanced methods such as BAGEL and LMFusion follow the Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) paradigm, adopting a symmetric design that mirrors one expert to another for convenient initialization and fusion, which remains suboptimal due to inherent modality discrepancies. In this work, we propose HBridge, an asymmetric H-shaped architecture that enables heterogeneous experts to optimally leverage pretrained priors from their respective modality domains. Unlike prior dense fusion strategies that straightforwardly connect all layers between experts via shared attention, HBridge selectively bridges intermediate layers, reducing over 40% attention sharing, which improves efficiency and enhances generation quality. Shallow and deep layers, which capture modality-specific representations, are decoupled, while mid-layer bridging promotes semantic alignment. To further strengthen cross-modal coherence, we introduce semantic reconstruction tokens that explicitly guide the generative expert to reconstruct visual semantic tokens of the target image. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and superior performance of HBridge, establishing a new paradigm for unified multimodal generation.

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### Adam Simplified: Bias Correction Debunked

Authors: Sam Laing, Antonio Orvieto
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20516v2

The Adam optimizer is a cornerstone of modern deep learning, yet the empirical necessity of each of its individual components is often taken for granted. This paper presents a focused investigation into the role of bias-correction, a feature whose contribution remains poorly understood. Through a series of systematic ablations on vision and language modelling tasks, we demonstrate that the conventional wisdom surrounding bias correction is misleading. In particular, we demonstrate that in the optimal hyper-parameter configuration, the inclusion of bias correction leads to no improvement in final test performance. Moreover, unless appropriate learning rate scheduling is implemented, the inclusion of bias correction can sometimes be detrimental to performance. We further reinterpret bias correction as a form of implicit learning rate scheduling whose behaviour is strongly dependent on the choice of smoothing hyper-parameters $β_1, β_2 \in (0,1)$. Our findings challenge the universal inclusion of this component.

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### HalDec-Bench: Benchmarking Hallucination Detector in Image Captioning

Authors: Kuniaki Saito, Risa Shinoda, Shohei Tanaka, Tosho Hirasawa, Fumio Okura, Yoshitaka Ushiku
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20515v4

Hallucination detection in captions (HalDec) assesses a vision-language model's ability to correctly align image content with text by identifying errors in captions that misrepresent the image. Beyond evaluation, effective hallucination detection is also essential for curating high-quality image-caption pairs used to train VLMs. However, the generalizability of VLMs as hallucination detectors across different captioning models and hallucination types remains unclear due to the lack of a comprehensive benchmark. In this work, we introduce HalDec-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate hallucination detectors in a principled and interpretable manner. HalDec-Bench contains captions generated by diverse VLMs together with human annotations indicating the presence of hallucinations, detailed hallucination-type categories, and segment-level labels. The benchmark provides tasks with a wide range of difficulty levels and reveals performance differences across models that are not visible in existing multimodal reasoning or alignment benchmarks. Our analysis further uncovers two key findings. First, detectors tend to recognize sentences appearing at the beginning of a response as correct, regardless of their actual correctness. Second, our experiments suggest that dataset noise can be substantially reduced by using strong VLMs as filters while employing recent VLMs as caption generators. Our project page is available at https://dahlian00.github.io/HalDec-Bench-Page/.

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### DesignPref: Capturing Personal Preferences in Visual Design Generation

Authors: Yi-Hao Peng, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Jason Wu
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.HC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20513v1

Generative models, such as large language models and text-to-image diffusion models, are increasingly used to create visual designs like user interfaces (UIs) and presentation slides. Finetuning and benchmarking these generative models have often relied on datasets of human-annotated design preferences. Yet, due to the subjective and highly personalized nature of visual design, preference varies widely among individuals. In this paper, we study this problem by introducing DesignPref, a dataset of 12k pairwise comparisons of UI design generation annotated by 20 professional designers with multi-level preference ratings. We found that among trained designers, substantial levels of disagreement exist (Krippendorff's alpha = 0.25 for binary preferences). Natural language rationales provided by these designers indicate that disagreements stem from differing perceptions of various design aspect importance and individual preferences. With DesignPref, we demonstrate that traditional majority-voting methods for training aggregated judge models often do not accurately reflect individual preferences. To address this challenge, we investigate multiple personalization strategies, particularly fine-tuning or incorporating designer-specific annotations into RAG pipelines. Our results show that personalized models consistently outperform aggregated baseline models in predicting individual designers' preferences, even when using 20 times fewer examples. Our work provides the first dataset to study personalized visual design evaluation and support future research into modeling individual design taste.

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### FRAGMENTA: Efficient End-to-end Fragmentation-based Generative Model with Agentic Tuning for Drug Lead Optimization in Small Data Regime

Authors: Yuto Suzuki, Paul Awolade, Daniel V. LaBarbera, Farnoush Banaei-Kashani
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20510v3

Molecule generation from extremely limited training data is a key challenge in drug discovery. Existing fragment-based methods are more suitable than atom-based approaches in this regime, but typically optimize fragment selection separately from downstream generation. Expert feedback is also especially valuable with limited data, yet translating such feedback into model objectives usually requires AI engineering expertise. We introduce FRAGMENTA, an end-to-end framework for small-data drug lead optimization with two components: (1) LVSEF, a fragment-based generator that jointly optimizes fragmentation and generation through a tabular reward-update mechanism, and (2) an agentic system that converts conversational expert feedback into updated generative objectives. Across three small-data datasets (11--104 molecules), LVSEF outperforms state-of-the-art methods in the smallest-data settings, matches them at larger scales, and trains ${\sim}16\times$ faster. On three public protein targets, iterative closed-loop optimization improves final-round discovery yield by up to ${\sim}16%$ over one-shot LVSEF-only on kinase, with gains depending on how well feedback matches target chemistry. In a real-world cancer drug-discovery deployment, Human-Agent FRAGMENTA identified nearly twice as many molecules with favorable docking scores ($< -6$) as baseline methods.

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### DP-MicroAdam: Private and Frugal Algorithm for Training and Fine-tuning

Authors: Mihaela Hudişteanu, Nikita P. Kalinin, Edwige Cyffers
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20509v2

Adaptive optimizers are the de facto standard in non-private training as they often enable faster convergence and improved performance. In contrast, differentially private (DP) training is still predominantly performed with DP-SGD, typically requiring extensive compute and hyperparameter tuning. We propose DP-MicroAdam, a memory-efficient and sparsity-aware adaptive DP optimizer. We prove that DP-MicroAdam converges in stochastic non-convex optimization at the optimal $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$ rate, up to privacy-dependent constants. Empirically, DP-MicroAdam outperforms existing adaptive DP optimizers and achieves competitive or superior accuracy compared to DP-SGD across a range of benchmarks, including CIFAR-10, large-scale ImageNet training, and private fine-tuning of pretrained transformers. These results demonstrate that adaptive optimization can improve both performance and stability under differential privacy.

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### The Text Aphasia Battery (TAB): A Clinically-Grounded Benchmark for Aphasia-Like Deficits in Language Models

Authors: Nathan Roll, Jill Kries, Flora Jin, Catherine Wang, Ann Marie Finley, Meghan Sumner, Cory Shain, Laura Gwilliams
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20507v1

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a candidate "model organism" for human language, offering an unprecedented opportunity to study the computational basis of linguistic disorders like aphasia. However, traditional clinical assessments are ill-suited for LLMs, as they presuppose human-like pragmatic pressures and probe cognitive processes not inherent to artificial architectures. We introduce the Text Aphasia Battery (TAB), a text-only benchmark adapted from the Quick Aphasia Battery (QAB) to assess aphasic-like deficits in LLMs. The TAB comprises four subtests: Connected Text, Word Comprehension, Sentence Comprehension, and Repetition. This paper details the TAB's design, subtests, and scoring criteria. To facilitate large-scale use, we validate an automated evaluation protocol using Gemini 2.5 Flash, which achieves reliability comparable to expert human raters (prevalence-weighted Cohen's kappa = 0.255 for model--consensus agreement vs. 0.286 for human--human agreement). We release TAB as a clinically-grounded, scalable framework for analyzing language deficits in artificial systems.

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### Manifold Percolation: from generative model to Reinforce learning

Authors: Rui Tong
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20503v2

Generative modeling is typically framed as learning mapping rules, but from an observer's perspective without access to these rules, the task becomes disentangling the geometric support from the probability distribution. We propose that continuum percolation is uniquely suited to this support analysis, as the sampling process effectively projects high-dimensional density estimation onto a geometric counting problem on the support. In this work, we establish a rigorous correspondence between the topological phase transitions of random geometric graphs and the underlying data manifold in high-dimensional space. By analyzing the relationship between our proposed Percolation Shift metric and FID, we show that this metric captures structural pathologies, such as implicit mode collapse, where standard statistical metrics fail. Finally, we translate this topological phenomenon into a differentiable loss function that guides training. Experimental results confirm that this approach not only prevents manifold shrinkage but also fosters a form of synergistic improvement, where topological stability becomes a prerequisite for sustained high fidelity in both static generation and sequential decision making.

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### A Physics-Informed Loss Function for Boundary-Consistent and Robust Artery Segmentation in DSA Sequences

Authors: Muhammad Irfan, Nasir Rahim, Khalid Mahmood Malik
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20501v1

Accurate extraction and segmentation of the cerebral arteries from digital subtraction angiography (DSA) sequences is essential for developing reliable clinical management models of complex cerebrovascular diseases. Conventional loss functions often rely solely on pixel-wise overlap, overlooking the geometric and physical consistency of vascular boundaries, which can lead to fragmented or unstable vessel predictions. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel \textit{Physics-Informed Loss} (PIL) that models the interaction between the predicted and ground-truth boundaries as an elastic process inspired by dislocation theory in materials physics. This formulation introduces a physics-based regularization term that enforces smooth contour evolution and structural consistency, allowing the network to better capture fine vascular geometry. The proposed loss is integrated into several segmentation architectures, including U-Net, U-Net++, SegFormer, and MedFormer, and evaluated on two public benchmarks: DIAS and DSCA. Experimental results demonstrate that PIL consistently outperforms conventional loss functions such as Cross-Entropy, Dice, Active Contour, and Surface losses, achieving superior sensitivity, F1 score, and boundary coherence. These findings confirm that the incorporation of physics-based boundary interactions into deep neural networks improves both the precision and robustness of vascular segmentation in dynamic angiographic imaging. The implementation of the proposed method is publicly available at https://github.com/irfantahir301/Physicsis_loss.

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### From One Attack Domain to Another: Contrastive Transfer Learning with Siamese Networks for APT Detection

Authors: Sidahmed Benabderrahmane, Talal Rahwan
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CR, cs.NE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20500v1

Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) pose a major cybersecurity challenge due to their stealth, persistence, and adaptability. Traditional machine learning detectors struggle with class imbalance, high dimensional features, and scarce real world traces. They often lack transferability-performing well in the training domain but degrading in novel attack scenarios. We propose a hybrid transfer framework that integrates Transfer Learning, Explainable AI (XAI), contrastive learning, and Siamese networks to improve cross-domain generalization. An attention-based autoencoder supports knowledge transfer across domains, while Shapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) select stable, informative features to reduce dimensionality and computational cost. A Siamese encoder trained with a contrastive objective aligns source and target representations, increasing anomaly separability and mitigating feature drift. We evaluate on real-world traces from the DARPA Transparent Computing (TC) program and augment with synthetic attack scenarios to test robustness. Across source to target transfers, the approach delivers improved detection scores with classical and deep baselines, demonstrating a scalable, explainable, and transferable solution for APT detection.

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### Quantifying the Privacy Implications of High-Fidelity Synthetic Network Traffic

Authors: Van Tran, Shinan Liu, Tian Li, Nick Feamster
Published: 2025-11-25
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20497v1

To address the scarcity and privacy concerns of network traffic data, various generative models have been developed to produce synthetic traffic. However, synthetic traffic is not inherently privacy-preserving, and the extent to which it leaks sensitive information, and how to measure such leakage, remain largely unexplored. This challenge is further compounded by the diversity of model architectures, which shape how traffic is represented and synthesized. We introduce a comprehensive set of privacy metrics for synthetic network traffic, combining standard approaches like membership inference attacks (MIA) and data extraction attacks with network-specific identifiers and attributes. Using these metrics, we systematically evaluate the vulnerability of different representative generative models and examine the factors that influence attack success. Our results reveal substantial variability in privacy risks across models and datasets. MIA success ranges from 0% to 88%, and up to 100% of network identifiers can be recovered from generated traffic, highlighting serious privacy vulnerabilities. We further identify key factors that significantly affect attack outcomes, including training data diversity and how well the generative model fits the training data. These findings provide actionable guidance for designing and deploying generative models that minimize privacy leakage, establishing a foundation for safer synthetic network traffic generation.

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