# Research Papers — 2025-11 · bundle page 43 of 197 > Full-text markdown of papers #2101–2150 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/43 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-11/page/42.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-11/page/44.md) ### Demystifying Diffusion Objectives: Reweighted Losses are Better Variational Bounds Authors: Jiaxin Shi, Michalis K. Titsias Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19664v1 We derive a new theoretical interpretation of the reweighted losses that are widely used for training diffusion models. Our method is based on constructing a cascade of time-dependent variational lower bounds on the data log-likelihood, that provably improves upon the standard evidence lower bound and results in reduced data-model KL-divergences. Combining such bounds gives rise to reweighted objectives that can be applied to any generative diffusion model including both continuous Gaussian diffusion and masked (discrete) diffusion models. Then, we showcase this framework in masked diffusion and report significant improvements over previous training losses in pixel-space image modeling, approaching sample quality comparable to continuous diffusion models. Our results also provide a theoretical justification for the simple weighting scheme widely used in masked image models. --- ### Fara-7B: An Efficient Agentic Model for Computer Use Authors: Ahmed Awadallah, Yash Lara, Raghav Magazine, Hussein Mozannar, Akshay Nambi, Yash Pandya, Aravind Rajeswaran, Corby Rosset, Alexey Taymanov, Vibhav Vineet, Spencer Whitehead, Andrew Zhao Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19663v1 Progress in computer use agents (CUAs) has been constrained by the absence of large and high-quality datasets that capture how humans interact with a computer. While LLMs have thrived on abundant textual data, no comparable corpus exists for CUA trajectories. To address these gaps, we introduce FaraGen, a novel synthetic data generation system for multi-step web tasks. FaraGen can propose diverse tasks from frequently used websites, generate multiple solution attempts, and filter successful trajectories using multiple verifiers. It achieves high throughput, yield, and diversity for multi-step web tasks, producing verified trajectories at approximately $1 each. We use this data to train Fara-7B, a native CUA model that perceives the computer using only screenshots, executes actions via predicted coordinates, and is small enough to run on-device. We find that Fara-7B outperforms other CUA models of comparable size on benchmarks like WebVoyager, Online-Mind2Web, and WebTailBench -- our novel benchmark that better captures under-represented web tasks in pre-existing benchmarks. Furthermore, Fara-7B is competitive with much larger frontier models, illustrating key benefits of scalable data generation systems in advancing small efficient agentic models. We are making Fara-7B open-weight on Microsoft Foundry and HuggingFace, and we are releasing WebTailBench. --- ### CodeV: Code with Images for Faithful Visual Reasoning via Tool-Aware Policy Optimization Authors: Xinhai Hou, Shaoyuan Xu, Manan Biyani, Moyan Li, Jia Liu, Todd C. Hollon, Bryan Wang Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19661v2 Agentic vision-language models are increasingly trained to "think with images" by calling image operations. However, we show that high final-answer accuracy often hides unfaithful visual reasoning: models may invoke tools on irrelevant regions or ignore tool outputs entirely, yet still guess the correct answer. In this work, we first propose a faithfulness evaluation protocol that measures whether intermediate visual tool outputs (e.g., crops) actually contain the queried evidence. This reveals that recent visual agents achieve high final-answer accuracy but exhibit low rates of faithful tool-use on visual search benchmarks. We then introduce CodeV, a code-based visual agent trained with Tool-Aware Policy Optimization (TAPO). TAPO is a process-level RL framework that augments GRPO with dense rewards defined directly on visual tool inputs and outputs, rather than on chain-of-thought tokens, making supervision easier to verify and less susceptible to reward hacking. CodeV represents visual tools as executable Python code, and TAPO assigns step-wise rewards based solely on the question and tool output, encouraging both necessary and evidence-consistent tool use. In a two-stage SFT+RL pipeline, CodeV achieves competitive or superior accuracy while substantially increasing faithful tool-use rates on related visual search benchmarks. Beyond visual search, CodeV attains strong performance on a range of multimodal reasoning and math benchmarks, suggesting that explicitly supervising intermediate tool behavior is crucial for building trustworthy, agentic visual reasoning systems. --- ### Structured Noise Modeling for Enhanced Time-Series Forecasting Authors: Sepideh Koohfar Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19657v1 Time-series forecasting remains difficult in real-world settings because temporal patterns operate at multiple scales, from broad contextual trends to fast, fine-grained fluctuations that drive critical decisions. Existing neural models often struggle to represent these interacting dynamics, leading to unstable predictions and reduced reliability in downstream applications. This work introduces a forecast-blur-denoise framework that improves temporal fidelity through structured noise modeling. The approach incorporates a learnable Gaussian Process module that generates smooth, correlated perturbations, encouraging the forecasting backbone to capture long-range structure while a dedicated refinement model restores high-resolution temporal detail. Training the components jointly enables natural competence division and avoids the artifacts commonly produced by isotropic corruption methods. Experiments across electricity, traffic, and solar datasets show consistent gains in multi-horizon accuracy and stability. The modular design also allows the blur-denoise layer to operate as a lightweight enhancement for pretrained models, supporting efficient adaptation in limited-data scenarios. By strengthening the reliability and interpretability of fine-scale temporal predictions, this framework contributes to more trustworthy AI systems used in forecasting-driven decision support across energy, infrastructure, and other time-critical domains. --- ### Lower Complexity Bounds for Nonconvex-Strongly-Convex Bilevel Optimization with First-Order Oracles Authors: Kaiyi Ji Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.LG, math.OC, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19656v3 Although upper bound guarantees for bilevel optimization have been widely studied, progress on lower bounds has been limited due to the complexity of the bilevel structure. In this work, we focus on the smooth nonconvex-strongly-convex setting and develop new hard instances that yield nontrivial lower bounds under deterministic and stochastic first-order oracle models. In the deterministic case, we prove that any first-order zero-respecting algorithm requires at least $Ω(κ^{3/2}ε^{-2})$ oracle calls to find an $ε$-accurate stationary point, improving the optimal lower bounds known for single-level nonconvex optimization and for nonconvex-strongly-convex min-max problems. In the stochastic case, we show that at least $Ω(κ^{5/2}ε^{-4})$ stochastic oracle calls are necessary, again strengthening the best known bounds in related settings. Our results expose substantial gaps between current upper and lower bounds for bilevel optimization and suggest that even simplified regimes, such as those with quadratic lower-level objectives, warrant further investigation toward understanding the optimal complexity of bilevel optimization under standard first-order oracles. --- ### Accuracy and Efficiency Trade-Offs in LLM-Based Malware Detection and Explanation: A Comparative Study of Parameter Tuning vs. Full Fine-Tuning Authors: Stephen C. Gravereaux, Sheikh Rabiul Islam Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19654v1 This study examines whether Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) can approximate the performance of fully fine-tuned models in generating human-interpretable decisions and explanations for malware classification. Achieving trustworthy malware detection, particularly when LLMs are involved, remains a significant challenge. We developed an evaluation framework using Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU), Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation (ROUGE), and Semantic Similarity Metrics to benchmark explanation quality across five LoRA configurations and a fully fine-tuned baseline. Results indicate that full fine-tuning achieves the highest overall scores, with BLEU and ROUGE improvements of up to 10% over LoRA variants. However, mid-range LoRA models deliver competitive performance exceeding full fine-tuning on two metrics while reducing model size by approximately 81% and training time by over 80% on a LoRA model with 15.5% trainable parameters. These findings demonstrate that LoRA offers a practical balance of interpretability and resource efficiency, enabling deployment in resource-constrained environments without sacrificing explanation quality. By providing feature-driven natural language explanations for malware classifications, this approach enhances transparency, analyst confidence, and operational scalability in malware detection systems. --- ### Navigating Gigapixel Pathology Images with Large Multimodal Models Authors: Thomas A. Buckley, Kian R. Weihrauch, Katherine Latham, Andrew Z. Zhou, Padmini A. Manrai, Arjun K. Manrai Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19652v2 Recent advances in large multimodal models have allowed for the development of interactive chat models that can converse and reason about pathology whole-slide images (WSIs). However, existing slide-level chat systems are often highly specialized, typically compressing WSIs into fixed slide-level embeddings or relying on multi-component pipelines, which can lose multi-scale detail and limit generalizability beyond the target task. We present GIANT (Gigapixel Image Agent for Navigating Tissue), a simple, training-free approach that lets general-purpose multimodal models navigate WSIs on their own, iteratively selecting multi-magnification crops and aggregating evidence over time. To evaluate generalizability in WSI question answering and to promote reproducibility, we introduce MultiPathQA, a benchmark suite spanning five clinical challenges and 934 questions over 868 unique WSIs. This includes a new set of 128 pathologist-authored multiple-choice questions designed to mirror real diagnostic search and multi-scale reasoning. Using GPT-5, GIANT outperforms models specialized for pathology question answering, achieving state-of-the-art performance on four out of five benchmarks. --- ### Synthetic Data: AI's New Weapon Against Android Malware Authors: Angelo Gaspar Diniz Nogueira, Kayua Oleques Paim, Hendrio Bragança, Rodrigo Brandão Mansilha, Diego Kreutz Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19649v1 The ever-increasing number of Android devices and the accelerated evolution of malware, reaching over 35 million samples by 2024, highlight the critical importance of effective detection methods. Attackers are now using Artificial Intelligence to create sophisticated malware variations that can easily evade traditional detection techniques. Although machine learning has shown promise in malware classification, its success relies heavily on the availability of up-to-date, high-quality datasets. The scarcity and high cost of obtaining and labeling real malware samples presents significant challenges in developing robust detection models. In this paper, we propose MalSynGen, a Malware Synthetic Data Generation methodology that uses a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) to generate synthetic tabular data. This data preserves the statistical properties of real-world data and improves the performance of Android malware classifiers. We evaluated the effectiveness of this approach using various datasets and metrics that assess the fidelity of the generated data, its utility in classification, and the computational efficiency of the process. Our experiments demonstrate that MalSynGen can generalize across different datasets, providing a viable solution to address the issues of obsolescence and low quality data in malware detection. --- ### Efficient Multi-Hop Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs via LLM Planning and Embedding-Guided Search Authors: Manil Shrestha, Edward Kim Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19648v1 Multi-hop question answering over knowledge graphs remains computationally challenging due to the combinatorial explosion of possible reasoning paths. Recent approaches rely on expensive Large Language Model (LLM) inference for both entity linking and path ranking, limiting their practical deployment. Additionally, LLM-generated answers often lack verifiable grounding in structured knowledge. We present two complementary hybrid algorithms that address both efficiency and verifiability: (1) LLM-Guided Planning that uses a single LLM call to predict relation sequences executed via breadth-first search, achieving near-perfect accuracy (micro-F1 > 0.90) while ensuring all answers are grounded in the knowledge graph, and (2) Embedding-Guided Neural Search that eliminates LLM calls entirely by fusing text and graph embeddings through a lightweight 6.7M-parameter edge scorer, achieving over 100 times speedup with competitive accuracy. Through knowledge distillation, we compress planning capability into a 4B-parameter model that matches large-model performance at zero API cost. Evaluation on MetaQA demonstrates that grounded reasoning consistently outperforms ungrounded generation, with structured planning proving more transferable than direct answer generation. Our results show that verifiable multi-hop reasoning does not require massive models at inference time, but rather the right architectural inductive biases combining symbolic structure with learned representations. --- ### Robot-Powered Data Flywheels: Deploying Robots in the Wild for Continual Data Collection and Foundation Model Adaptation Authors: Jennifer Grannen, Michelle Pan, Kenneth Llontop, Cherie Ho, Mark Zolotas, Jeannette Bohg, Dorsa Sadigh Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19647v1 Foundation models (FM) have unlocked powerful zero-shot capabilities in vision and language, yet their reliance on internet pretraining data leaves them brittle in unstructured, real-world settings. The messy, real-world data encountered during deployment (e.g. occluded or multilingual text) remains massively underrepresented in existing corpora. Robots, as embodied agents, are uniquely positioned to close this gap: they can act in physical environments to collect large-scale, real-world data that enriches FM training with precisely the examples current models lack. We introduce the Robot-Powered Data Flywheel, a framework that transforms robots from FM consumers into data generators. By deploying robots equipped with FMs in the wild, we enable a virtuous cycle: robots perform useful tasks while collecting real-world data that improves both domain-specific adaptation and domain-adjacent generalization. We instantiate this framework with Scanford, a mobile manipulator deployed in the East Asia Library for 2 weeks. Scanford autonomously scans shelves, identifies books using a vision-language model (VLM), and leverages the library catalog to label images without human annotation. This deployment both aids librarians and produces a dataset to finetune the underlying VLM, improving performance on the domain-specific in-the-wild library setting and on domain-adjacent multilingual OCR benchmarks. Using data collected from 2103 shelves, Scanford improves VLM performance on book identification from 32.0% to 71.8% and boosts domain-adjacent multilingual OCR from 24.8% to 46.6% (English) and 30.8% to 38.0% (Chinese), while saving an ~18.7 hrs of human time. These results highlight how robot-powered data flywheels can both reduce human effort in real deployments and unlock new pathways for continually adapting FMs to the messiness of reality. More details are at: https://scanford-robot.github.io --- ### IRSDA: An Agent-Orchestrated Framework for Enterprise Intrusion Response Authors: Damodar Panigrahi, Raj Patel, Shaswata Mitra, Sudip Mittal, Shahram Rahimi Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19644v1 Modern enterprise systems face escalating cyber threats that are increasingly dynamic, distributed, and multi-stage in nature. Traditional intrusion detection and response systems often rely on static rules and manual workflows, which limit their ability to respond with the speed and precision required in high-stakes environments. To address these challenges, we present the Intrusion Response System Digital Assistant (IRSDA), an agent-based framework designed to deliver autonomous and policy-compliant cyber defense. IRSDA combines Self-Adaptive Autonomic Computing Systems (SA-ACS) with the Knowledge guided Monitor, Analyze, Plan, and Execute (MAPE-K) loop to support real-time, partition-aware decision-making across enterprise infrastructure. IRSDA incorporates a knowledge-driven architecture that integrates contextual information with AI-based reasoning to support system-guided intrusion response. The framework leverages retrieval mechanisms and structured representations to inform decision-making while maintaining alignment with operational policies. We assess the system using a representative real-world microservices application, demonstrating its ability to automate containment, enforce compliance, and provide traceable outputs for security analyst interpretation. This work outlines a modular and agent-driven approach to cyber defense that emphasizes explainability, system-state awareness, and operational control in intrusion response. --- ### On the Utility of Foundation Models for Fast MRI: Vision-Language-Guided Image Reconstruction Authors: Ruimin Feng, Xingxin He, Ronald Mercer, Zachary Stewart, Fang Liu Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19641v1 Purpose: To investigate whether a vision-language foundation model can enhance undersampled MRI reconstruction by providing high-level contextual information beyond conventional priors. Methods: We proposed a semantic distribution-guided reconstruction framework that uses a pre-trained vision-language foundation model to encode both the reconstructed image and auxiliary information into high-level semantic features. A contrastive objective aligns the reconstructed representation with the target semantic distribution, ensuring consistency with high-level perceptual cues. The proposed objective works with various deep learning-based reconstruction methods and can flexibly incorporate semantic priors from multimodal sources. To test the effectiveness of these semantic priors, we evaluated reconstruction results guided by priors derived from either image-only or image-language auxiliary information. Results: Experiments on knee and brain datasets demonstrate that semantic priors from images preserve fine anatomical structures and achieve superior perceptual quality, as reflected in lower LPIPS values, higher Tenengrad scores, and improved scores in the reader study, compared with conventional regularization. The image-language information further expands the semantic distribution and enables high-level control over reconstruction attributes. Across all evaluations, the contrastive objective consistently guided the reconstructed features toward the desired semantic distributions while maintaining data fidelity, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed optimization framework. Conclusion: The study highlights that vision-language foundation models can improve undersampled MRI reconstruction through semantic-space optimization. --- ### Parameter-Efficient Construction of the Rashomon Slice for Concept Bottleneck Models Authors: Shihan Feng, Cheng Zhang, Michael Xi, Ethan Hsu, Lesia Semenova, Chudi Zhong Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19636v3 In many machine learning problems, there may exist multiple models that achieve nearly identical predictive performance while relying on fundamentally different internal logic. However, standard training procedures produce a single model, offering no practical way to explore alternatives that may better suit downstream needs. The set of these equally accurate models is known as the Rashomon set. Exploring the Rashomon set is particularly challenging in large and complex hypothesis spaces, such as Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs), which are widely used in computer vision to make predictions through intermediate, human-understandable concepts. In this paper, we provide a method for efficiently exploring the Rashomon set of CBMs. Our framework introduces a specialized parallel parameter-efficient adaptation module, combined with a checkpointing scheme and a concept diversity objective, to generate multiple equally accurate CBMs from a single training process. Empirical results show that our method finds models with better diversity than baselines while using much less memory. We further demonstrate that access to these diverse yet accurate CBMs enables trustworthy model selection, resolution of inter-class confusion, and reliable abstention in decision-making. --- ### Agint: Agentic Graph Compilation for Software Engineering Agents Authors: Abhi Chivukula, Jay Somasundaram, Vijay Somasundaram Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.SE, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19635v1 LLM-based coding agents are increasingly common but still face challenges in context management, latency, reliability, reproducibility, and scalability. We present Agint, an agentic graph compiler, interpreter, and runtime that incrementally and hierarchically converts natural-language instructions into typed, effect-aware code DAGs. Agint introduces explicit type floors (text to data to spec to code) grounded in semantic graph transformations and a hybrid LLM and function-based JIT runtime. This enables dynamic graph refinement, reproducible and optimizable execution, speculative evaluation, and interoperability with existing developer tools. Agint's typed graph bindings improve reliability and allow concurrent composition of concurrent codebases by construction, supporting accelerated development with smaller and faster models, lower latency, efficient context utilization, and higher throughput. Hierarchical compilation allows scalable graph edits, while the graph structure supports reproducibility and efficient parallel generation. Agint provides a composable unix-style toolchain: dagify (DAG compiler), dagent (hybrid JIT runtime), schemagin (schema generator), and datagin (data transformer) for realtime, low-latency code and dataflow creation. Human developers and coding agents refine graphs through the Agint CLI, while non-technical users use Agint Flow GUI for visual editing, conversational refinement, and debugging to promote prototype agentic workflows to production code. This continuous co-creation model allows teams to prototype quickly, refine seamlessly, and deploy reliably, bridging natural language, compiler methods, and developer tooling to enable a new generation of composable, team-centric coding agents at scale. --- ### SkillSight: Efficient First-Person Skill Assessment with Gaze Authors: Chi Hsuan Wu, Kumar Ashutosh, Kristen Grauman Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19629v2 Egocentric perception on smart glasses could transform how we learn new skills in the physical world, but automatic skill assessment remains a fundamental technical challenge. We introduce SkillSight for power-efficient skill assessment from first-person data. Central to our approach is the hypothesis that skill level is evident not only in how a person performs an activity (video), but also in how they direct their attention when doing so (gaze). Our two-stage framework first learns to jointly model gaze and egocentric video when predicting skill level, then distills a gaze-only student model. At inference, the student model requires only gaze input, drastically reducing power consumption by eliminating continuous video processing. Experiments on three datasets spanning cooking, music, and sports establish, for the first time, the valuable role of gaze in skill understanding across diverse real-world settings. Our SkillSight teacher model achieves state-of-the-art performance, while our gaze-only student variant maintains high accuracy using 73x less power than competing methods. These results pave the way for in-the-wild AI-supported skill learning. --- ### Optimization and Regularization Under Arbitrary Objectives Authors: Jared N. Lakhani, Etienne Pienaar Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, stat.CO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19628v2 This study investigates the limitations of applying Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to arbitrary objective functions, focusing on a two-block MCMC framework which alternates between Metropolis-Hastings and Gibbs sampling. While such approaches are often considered advantageous for enabling data-driven regularization, we show that their performance critically depends on the sharpness of the employed likelihood form. By introducing a sharpness parameter and exploring alternative likelihood formulations proportional to the target objective function, we demonstrate how likelihood curvature governs both in-sample performance and the degree of regularization inferred by the training data. Empirical applications are conducted on reinforcement learning tasks: including a navigation problem and the game of tic-tac-toe. The study concludes with a separate analysis examining the implications of extreme likelihood sharpness on arbitrary objective functions stemming from the classic game of blackjack, where the first block of the two-block MCMC framework is replaced with an iterative optimization step. The resulting hybrid approach achieves performance nearly identical to the original MCMC framework, indicating that excessive likelihood sharpness effectively collapses posterior mass onto a single dominant mode. --- ### Learning Massively Multitask World Models for Continuous Control Authors: Nicklas Hansen, Hao Su, Xiaolong Wang Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19584v2 General-purpose control demands agents that act across many tasks and embodiments, yet research on reinforcement learning (RL) for continuous control remains dominated by single-task or offline regimes, reinforcing a view that online RL does not scale. Inspired by the foundation model recipe (large-scale pretraining followed by light RL) we ask whether a single agent can be trained on hundreds of tasks with online interaction. To accelerate research in this direction, we introduce a new benchmark with 200 diverse tasks spanning many domains and embodiments, each with language instructions, demonstrations, and optionally image observations. We then present \emph{Newt}, a language-conditioned multitask world model that is first pretrained on demonstrations to acquire task-aware representations and action priors, and then jointly optimized with online interaction across all tasks. Experiments show that Newt yields better multitask performance and data-efficiency than a set of strong baselines, exhibits strong open-loop control, and enables rapid adaptation to unseen tasks. We release our environments, demonstrations, code for training and evaluation, as well as 200+ checkpoints. --- ### Towards Synergistic Teacher-AI Interactions with Generative Artificial Intelligence Authors: Mutlu Cukurova, Wannapon Suraworachet, Qi Zhou, Sahan Bulathwela Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19580v2 Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly used in education, posing significant challenges for teachers adapting to these changes. GenAI offers unprecedented opportunities for accessibility, scalability and productivity in educational tasks. However, the automation of teaching tasks through GenAI raises concerns about reduced teacher agency, potential cognitive atrophy, and the broader deprofessionalisation of teaching. Drawing findings from prior literature on AI in Education, and refining through a recent systematic literature review, this chapter presents a conceptualisation of five levels of teacher-AI teaming: transactional, situational, operational, praxical and synergistic teaming. The framework aims to capture the nuanced dynamics of teacher-AI interactions, particularly with GenAI, that may lead to the replacement, complementarity, or augmentation of teachers' competences and professional practice. GenAI technological affordances required in supporting teaming, along with empirical studies, are discussed. Drawing on empirical observations, we outline a future vision that moves beyond individual teacher agency toward collaborative decision-making between teachers and AI, in which both agents engage in negotiation, constructive challenge, and co-reasoning that enhance each other's capabilities and enable outcomes neither could realise independently. Further discussion of socio-technical factors beyond teacher-AI teaming is also included to streamline the synergy of teachers and AI in education ethically and practically. --- ### Multiscale Vector-Quantized Variational Autoencoder for Endoscopic Image Synthesis Authors: Dimitrios E. Diamantis, Dimitris K. Iakovidis Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19578v2 Gastrointestinal (GI) imaging via Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) generates a large number of images requiring manual screening. Deep learning-based Clinical Decision Support (CDS) systems can assist screening, yet their performance relies on the existence of large, diverse, training medical datasets. However, the scarcity of such data, due to privacy constraints and annotation costs, hinders CDS development. Generative machine learning offers a viable solution to combat this limitation. While current Synthetic Data Generation (SDG) methods, such as Generative Adversarial Networks and Variational Autoencoders have been explored, they often face challenges with training stability and capturing sufficient visual diversity, especially when synthesizing abnormal findings. This work introduces a novel VAE-based methodology for medical image synthesis and presents its application for the generation of WCE images. The novel contributions of this work include a) multiscale extension of the Vector Quantized VAE model, named as Multiscale Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder (MSVQ-VAE); b) unlike other VAE-based SDG models for WCE image generation, MSVQ-VAE is used to seamlessly introduce abnormalities into normal WCE images; c) it enables conditional generation of synthetic images, enabling the introduction of different types of abnormalities into the normal WCE images; d) it performs experiments with a variety of abnormality types, including polyps, vascular and inflammatory conditions. The utility of the generated images for CDS is assessed via image classification. Comparative experiments demonstrate that training a CDS classifier using the abnormal images generated by the proposed methodology yield comparable results with a classifier trained with only real data. The generality of the proposed methodology promises its applicability to various domains related to medical multimedia. --- ### From Wearables to Warnings: Predicting Pain Spikes in Patients with Opioid Use Disorder Authors: Abhay Goyal, Navin Kumar, Kimberly DiMeola, Rafael Trujillo, Soorya Ram Shimgekar, Christian Poellabauer, Pi Zonooz, Ermonda Gjoni-Markaj, Declan Barry, Lynn Madden Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.AI, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19577v2 Chronic pain (CP) and opioid use disorder (OUD) are common and interrelated chronic medical conditions. Currently, there is a paucity of evidence-based integrated treatments for CP and OUD among individuals receiving medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD). Wearable devices have the potential to monitor complex patient information and inform treatment development for persons with OUD and CP, including pain variability (e.g., exacerbations of pain or pain spikes) and clinical correlates (e.g., perceived stress). However, the application of large language models (LLMs) with wearable data for understanding pain spikes, remains unexplored. Consequently, the aim of this pilot study was to examine the clinical correlates of pain spikes using a range of AI approaches. We found that machine learning models achieved relatively high accuracy (>0.7) in predicting pain spikes, while LLMs were limited in providing insights on pain spikes. Real-time monitoring through wearable devices, combined with advanced AI models, could facilitate early detection of pain spikes and support personalized interventions that may help mitigate the risk of opioid relapse, improve adherence to MOUD, and enhance the integration of CP and OUD care. Given overall limited LLM performance, these findings highlight the need to develop LLMs which can provide actionable insights in the OUD/CP context. --- ### Leveraging Unlabeled Scans for NCCT Image Segmentation in Early Stroke Diagnosis: A Semi-Supervised GAN Approach Authors: Maria Thoma, Michalis A. Savelonas, Dimitris K. Iakovidis Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19576v2 Ischemic stroke is a time-critical medical emergency where rapid diagnosis is essential for improving patient outcomes. Non-contrast computed tomography (NCCT) serves as the frontline imaging tool, yet it often fails to reveal the subtle ischemic changes present in the early, hyperacute phase. This limitation can delay crucial interventions. To address this diagnostic challenge, we introduce a semi-supervised segmentation method using generative adversarial networks (GANs) to accurately delineate early ischemic stroke regions. The proposed method employs an adversarial framework to effectively learn from a limited number of annotated NCCT scans, while simultaneously leveraging a larger pool of unlabeled scans. By employing Dice loss, cross-entropy loss, a feature matching loss and a self-training loss, the model learns to identify and delineate early infarcts, even when they are faint or their size is small. Experiments on the publicly available Acute Ischemic Stroke Dataset (AISD) demonstrate the potential of the proposed method to enhance diagnostic capabilities, reduce the burden of manual annotation, and support more efficient clinical decision-making in stroke care. --- ### HunyuanOCR Technical Report Authors: Hunyuan Vision Team, Pengyuan Lyu, Xingyu Wan, Gengluo Li, Shangpin Peng, Weinong Wang, Liang Wu, Huawen Shen, Yu Zhou, Canhui Tang, Qi Yang, Qiming Peng et al. Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19575v2 This paper presents HunyuanOCR, a commercial-grade, open-source, and lightweight (1B parameters) Vision-Language Model (VLM) dedicated to OCR tasks. The architecture comprises a Native Vision Transformer (ViT) and a lightweight LLM connected via an MLP adapter. HunyuanOCR demonstrates superior performance, outperforming commercial APIs, traditional pipelines, and larger models (e.g., Qwen3-VL-4B). Specifically, it surpasses current public solutions in perception tasks (Text Spotting, Parsing) and excels in semantic tasks (IE, Text Image Translation), securing first place in the ICDAR 2025 DIMT Challenge (Small Model Track). Furthermore, it achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on OCRBench among VLMs with fewer than 3B parameters. HunyuanOCR achieves breakthroughs in three key aspects: 1) Unifying Versatility and Efficiency: We implement comprehensive support for core capabilities including spotting, parsing, IE, VQA, and translation within a lightweight framework. This addresses the limitations of narrow "OCR expert models" and inefficient "General VLMs". 2) Streamlined End-to-End Architecture: Adopting a pure end-to-end paradigm eliminates dependencies on pre-processing modules (e.g., layout analysis). This fundamentally resolves error propagation common in traditional pipelines and simplifies system deployment. 3) Data-Driven and RL Strategies: We confirm the critical role of high-quality data and, for the first time in the industry, demonstrate that Reinforcement Learning (RL) strategies yield significant performance gains in OCR tasks. HunyuanOCR is officially open-sourced on HuggingFace. We also provide a high-performance deployment solution based on vLLM, placing its production efficiency in the top tier. We hope this model will advance frontier research and provide a solid foundation for industrial applications. --- ### Neural Tractability via Structure: Learning-Augmented Algorithms for Graph Combinatorial Optimization Authors: Jialiang Li, Weitong Chen, Mingyu Guo Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19573v2 Neural solvers provide fast solutions to graph combinatorial optimization problems, but training alone does not guarantee solution quality. Exact methods guarantee optimality but can be prohibitively expensive. We propose Neural Fixed-Parameter Tractable (N-FPT), a neural-model-agnostic framework that uses parameterized algorithms to improve neural solutions without retraining and guide learning. It restricts neural advice to a treewidth modulator and completes the bounded-treewidth remainder exactly. It returns and certifies the best achievable solution under any valid advice, improving the neural solution whenever a better compatible completion exists. We prove this guarantee and global optimality under perfect advice. Its incremental-confidence N-FPT (NIC-FPT) and randomized-deferral N-FPT (NRD-FPT) variants consolidate neural advice. Beyond inference, N-FPT feedback becomes available as neural decisions make exact completion tractable. From that state onward, it supplies what final solution rewards lack: the first decision that rules out every optimal completion and alternatives that preserve one. One exact computation supplies reusable guidance for continuations from that state, even when neural samples miss its optimum. Experiments across graph combinatorial optimization problems demonstrate solution-quality gains with different neural models and robustness to graph-size and distribution shifts. The learned completion model reaches optimal completions more often than reinforcement learning (RL) alone, without an exact solver at inference. N-FPT thus uses graph structure to improve neural solutions and guide learning toward optimal completion. --- ### An Invariant Latent Space Perspective on Language Model Inversion Authors: Wentao Ye, Jiaqi Hu, Haobo Wang, Xinpeng Ti, Zhiqing Xiao, Hao Chen, Liyao Li, Lei Feng, Sai Wu, Junbo Zhao Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19569v1 Language model inversion (LMI), i.e., recovering hidden prompts from outputs, emerges as a concrete threat to user privacy and system security. We recast LMI as reusing the LLM's own latent space and propose the Invariant Latent Space Hypothesis (ILSH): (1) diverse outputs from the same source prompt should preserve consistent semantics (source invariance), and (2) input<->output cyclic mappings should be self-consistent within a shared latent space (cyclic invariance). Accordingly, we present Inv^2A, which treats the LLM as an invariant decoder and learns only a lightweight inverse encoder that maps outputs to a denoised pseudo-representation. When multiple outputs are available, they are sparsely concatenated at the representation layer to increase information density. Training proceeds in two stages: contrastive alignment (source invariance) and supervised reinforcement (cyclic invariance). An optional training-free neighborhood search can refine local performance. Across 9 datasets covering user and system prompt scenarios, Inv^2A outperforms baselines by an average of 4.77% BLEU score while reducing dependence on large inverse corpora. Our analysis further shows that prevalent defenses provide limited protection, underscoring the need for stronger strategies. The source code and data involved in this paper can be found in https://github.com/yyy01/Invariant_Attacker. --- ### ModHiFi: Identifying High Fidelity predictive components for Model Modification Authors: Dhruva Kashyap, Chaitanya Murti, Pranav K Nayak, Tanay Narshana, Chiranjib Bhattacharyya Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19566v2 Open weight models, which are ubiquitous, rarely provide access to their training data or loss function. This makes modifying such models for tasks such as pruning or unlearning, which are constrained by this unavailability, an active area of research. Existing techniques typically require gradients or ground-truth labels, rendering them infeasible in settings with limited computational resources. In this work, we investigate the fundamental question of identifying components that are critical to the model's predictive performance, without access to either gradients or the loss function, and with only distributional access such as synthetic data. We theoretically demonstrate that the global error is linearly bounded by local reconstruction errors for Lipschitz-continuous networks such as CNNs and well-trained Transformers (which, contrary to existing literature, we find exhibit Lipschitz continuity). This motivates using the locally reconstructive behavior of component subsets to quantify their global importance, via a metric that we term Subset Fidelity. In the uncorrelated features setting, selecting individual components based on their Subset Fidelity scores is optimal, which we utilize to propose ModHiFi, an algorithm for model modification that requires neither training data nor access to a loss function. ModHiFi-P, for structured pruning, achieves an 11\% speedup over the current state of the art on ImageNet models and competitive performance on language models. ModHiFi-U, for classwise unlearning, achieves complete unlearning on CIFAR-10 without fine-tuning and demonstrates competitive performance on Swin Transformers. --- ### Deductive Systems for Logic Programs with Counting Authors: Jorge Fandinno, Vladimir Lifschitz Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.LO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19565v1 In answer set programming, two groups of rules are considered strongly equivalent if they have the same meaning in any context. Strong equivalence of two programs can be sometimes established by deriving rules of each program from rules of the other in an appropriate deductive system. This paper shows how to extend this method of proving strong equivalence to programs containing the counting aggregate. --- ### Trust-Based Social Learning for Communication (TSLEC) Protocol Evolution in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Authors: Abraham Itzhak Weinberg Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.MA, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19562v1 Emergent communication in multi-agent systems typically occurs through independent learning, resulting in slow convergence and potentially suboptimal protocols. We introduce TSLEC (Trust-Based Social Learning with Emergent Communication), a framework where agents explicitly teach successful strategies to peers, with knowledge transfer modulated by learned trust relationships. Through experiments with 100 episodes across 30 random seeds, we demonstrate that trust-based social learning reduces episodes-to-convergence by 23.9% (p < 0.001, Cohen's d = 1.98) compared to independent emergence, while producing compositional protocols (C = 0.38) that remain robust under dynamic objectives (Phi > 0.867 decoding accuracy). Trust scores strongly correlate with teaching quality (r = 0.743, p < 0.001), enabling effective knowledge filtering. Our results establish that explicit social learning fundamentally accelerates emergent communication in multi-agent coordination. --- ### Merging without Forgetting: Continual Fusion of Task-Specific Models via Optimal Transport Authors: Zecheng Pan, Zhikang Chen, Ding Li, Min Zhang, Sen Cui, Hongshuo Jin, Luqi Tao, Yi Yang, Deheng Ye, Yu Zhang, Tingting Zhu, Tianling Ren Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19561v1 Merging models fine-tuned for different tasks into a single unified model has become an increasingly important direction for building versatile, efficient multi-task systems. Existing approaches predominantly rely on parameter interpolation in weight space, which we show introduces significant distribution shift in the feature space and undermines task-specific knowledge. In this paper, we propose OTMF (Optimal Transport-based Masked Fusion), a novel model merging framework rooted in optimal transport theory to address the distribution shift that arises from naive parameter interpolation. Instead of directly aggregating features or weights, OTMF aligns the semantic geometry of task-specific models by discovering common masks applied to task vectors through optimal transport plans. These masks selectively extract transferable and task-agnostic components while preserving the unique structural identities of each task. To ensure scalability in real-world settings, OTMF further supports a continual fusion paradigm that incrementally integrates each new task vector without revisiting previous ones, maintaining a bounded memory footprint and enabling efficient fusion across a growing number of tasks. We conduct comprehensive experiments on multiple vision and language benchmarks, and results show that OTMF achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. These findings highlight the practical and theoretical value of our approach to model merging. --- ### SPQR: A Multi-Dimensional Benchmark for Safety Alignment under Benign Model Adaptation Authors: Mohammed Talha Alam, Nada Saadi, Fahad Shamshad, Nils Lukas, Karthik Nandakumar, Fahkri Karray, Samuele Poppi Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19558v2 Text-to-image diffusion models can emit copyrighted, unsafe, or private content. Safety alignment aims to suppress specific concepts, yet evaluations seldom test whether safety persists under benign downstream fine-tuning routinely applied after deployment (e.g., LoRA personalization, style/domain adapters). We study the stability of current safety methods under benign fine-tuning and observe frequent breakdowns. As true safety alignment must withstand even benign post-deployment adaptations, we introduce the SPQR benchmark (Safety, Prompt adherence, Quality, and Robustness). SPQR is a single-scored metric that provides a unified, reproducible framework to evaluate how well safety-aligned diffusion models preserve safety, utility, and robustness under benign fine-tuning, by reporting a single leaderboard score to facilitate comparisons. We conduct multilingual, domain-specific, and out-of-distribution analyses, along with category-wise breakdowns, to identify when safety alignment fails after benign fine-tuning, ultimately showcasing SPQR as a concise yet comprehensive benchmark for T2I safety alignment techniques for T2I models. --- ### Think First, Assign Next (ThiFAN-VQA): A Two-stage Chain-of-Thought Framework for Post-Disaster Damage Assessment Authors: Ehsan Karimi, Nhut Le, Maryam Rahnemoonfar Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19557v1 Timely and accurate assessment of damages following natural disasters is essential for effective emergency response and recovery. Recent AI-based frameworks have been developed to analyze large volumes of aerial imagery collected by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, providing actionable insights rapidly. However, creating and annotating data for training these models is costly and time-consuming, resulting in datasets that are limited in size and diversity. Furthermore, most existing approaches rely on traditional classification-based frameworks with fixed answer spaces, restricting their ability to provide new information without additional data collection or model retraining. Using pre-trained generative models built on in-context learning (ICL) allows for flexible and open-ended answer spaces. However, these models often generate hallucinated outputs or produce generic responses that lack domain-specific relevance. To address these limitations, we propose ThiFAN-VQA, a two-stage reasoning-based framework for visual question answering (VQA) in disaster scenarios. ThiFAN-VQA first generates structured reasoning traces using chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting and ICL to enable interpretable reasoning under limited supervision. A subsequent answer selection module evaluates the generated responses and assigns the most coherent and contextually accurate answer, effectively improve the model performance. By integrating a custom information retrieval system, domain-specific prompting, and reasoning-guided answer selection, ThiFAN-VQA bridges the gap between zero-shot and supervised methods, combining flexibility with consistency. Experiments on FloodNet and RescueNet-VQA, UAV-based datasets from flood- and hurricane-affected regions, demonstrate that ThiFAN-VQA achieves superior accuracy, interpretability, and adaptability for real-world post-disaster damage assessment tasks. --- ### Online Sparse Feature Selection in Data Streams via Differential Evolution Authors: Ruiyang Xu Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19555v1 The processing of high-dimensional streaming data commonly utilizes online streaming feature selection (OSFS) techniques. However, practical implementations often face challenges with data incompleteness due to equipment failures and technical constraints. Online Sparse Streaming Feature Selection (OS2FS) tackles this issue through latent factor analysis-based missing data imputation. Despite this advancement, existing OS2FS approaches exhibit substantial limitations in feature evaluation, resulting in performance deterioration. To address these shortcomings, this paper introduces a novel Online Differential Evolution for Sparse Feature Selection (ODESFS) in data streams, incorporating two key innovations: (1) missing value imputation using a latent factor analysis model, and (2) feature importance evaluation through differential evolution. Comprehensive experiments conducted on six real-world datasets demonstrate that ODESFS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art OSFS and OS2FS methods by selecting optimal feature subsets and achieving superior accuracy. --- ### The Semiotic Channel Principle: Measuring the Capacity for Meaning in LLM Communication Authors: Davide Picca Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.IT, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19550v1 This paper proposes a novel semiotic framework for analyzing Large Language Models (LLMs), conceptualizing them as stochastic semiotic engines whose outputs demand active, asymmetric human interpretation. We formalize the trade-off between expressive richness (semiotic breadth) and interpretive stability (decipherability) using information-theoretic tools. Breadth is quantified as source entropy, and decipherability as the mutual information between messages and human interpretations. We introduce a generative complexity parameter (lambda) that governs this trade-off, as both breadth and decipherability are functions of lambda. The core trade-off is modeled as an emergent property of their distinct responses to $λ$. We define a semiotic channel, parameterized by audience and context, and posit a capacity constraint on meaning transmission, operationally defined as the maximum decipherability by optimizing lambda. This reframing shifts analysis from opaque model internals to observable textual artifacts, enabling empirical measurement of breadth and decipherability. We demonstrate the framework's utility across four key applications: (i) model profiling; (ii) optimizing prompt/context design; (iii) risk analysis based on ambiguity; and (iv) adaptive semiotic systems. We conclude that this capacity-based semiotic approach offers a rigorous, actionable toolkit for understanding, evaluating, and designing LLM-mediated communication. --- ### Neural Evidence and Behavioural Welfare Economics: When Can Neuroeconomics Inform Policy? Authors: Louis Yiven Zhu Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CY, econ.GN, q-bio.NC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19548v2 Neuroeconomics appears to offer welfare economics an evidential supplement, since neural data may help distinguish choices that express genuine preferences from choices distorted by addiction, framing or self-control failure. This paper asks when such evidence can legitimately inform welfare judgements for policy. It develops a conceptual framework linking three levels of analysis, namely neural signals, computational decision models and normative welfare criteria. The central argument is that neural data can constrain welfare analysis only under four conditions, covering the validity of the neural measure, the identifiability of the decision model, the explicit statement of the welfare criterion, and the institutional context of any policy use. Applying this framework to addiction, neuromarketing and environmental policy, and working through the United Kingdom's Tobacco and Vapes Act 2026, a major intervention justified without any neural measurement, the paper develops a Neuroeconomic Welfare Inference Checklist for neural evidence. Neural data can improve behavioural welfare economics by clarifying the mechanisms behind choice, and they cannot replace normative argument about what counts as welfare. The same reasoning applies to artificial agents trained on human feedback, whose internal reward signals are computational quantities and not welfare measures. --- ### Learning to Solve Weighted Maximum Satisfiability with a Co-Training Architecture Authors: Kaidi Wan, Minghao Liu, Yong Lai Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19544v1 Wepropose SplitGNN, a graph neural network (GNN)-based approach that learns to solve weighted maximum satisfiabil ity (MaxSAT) problem. SplitGNN incorporates a co-training architecture consisting of supervised message passing mech anism and unsupervised solution boosting layer. A new graph representation called edge-splitting factor graph is proposed to provide more structural information for learning, which is based on spanning tree generation and edge classification. To improve the solutions on challenging and weighted instances, we implement a GPU-accelerated layer applying efficient score calculation and relaxation-based optimization. Exper iments show that SplitGNN achieves 3* faster convergence and better predictions compared with other GNN-based ar chitectures. More notably, SplitGNN successfully finds solu tions that outperform modern heuristic MaxSAT solvers on much larger and harder weighted MaxSAT benchmarks, and demonstrates exceptional generalization abilities on diverse structural instances. --- ### Proxy-Free Gaussian Splats Deformation with Splat-Based Surface Estimation Authors: Jaeyeong Kim, Seungwoo Yoo, Minhyuk Sung Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19542v1 We introduce SpLap, a proxy-free deformation method for Gaussian splats (GS) based on a Laplacian operator computed from our novel surface-aware splat graph. Existing approaches to GS deformation typically rely on deformation proxies such as cages or meshes, but they suffer from dependency on proxy quality and additional computational overhead. An alternative is to directly apply Laplacian-based deformation techniques by treating splats as point clouds. However, this often fail to properly capture surface information due to lack of explicit structure. To address this, we propose a novel method that constructs a surface-aware splat graph, enabling the Laplacian operator derived from it to support more plausible deformations that preserve details and topology. Our key idea is to leverage the spatial arrangement encoded in splats, defining neighboring splats not merely by the distance between their centers, but by their intersections. Furthermore, we introduce a Gaussian kernel adaptation technique that preserves surface structure under deformation, thereby improving rendering quality after deformation. In our experiments, we demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to both proxy-based and proxy-free baselines, evaluated on 50 challenging objects from the ShapeNet, Objaverse, and Sketchfab datasets, as well as the NeRF-Synthetic dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/kjae0/SpLap. --- ### PhysDNet: Physics-Guided Decomposition Network of Side-Scan Sonar Imagery Authors: Can Lei, Hayat Rajani, Nuno Gracias, Rafael Garcia, Huigang Wang Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: physics.ao-ph, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19539v1 Side-scan sonar (SSS) imagery is widely used for seafloor mapping and underwater remote sensing, yet the measured intensity is strongly influenced by seabed reflectivity, terrain elevation, and acoustic path loss. This entanglement makes the imagery highly view-dependent and reduces the robustness of downstream analysis. In this letter, we present PhysDNet, a physics-guided multi-branch network that decouples SSS images into three interpretable fields: seabed reflectivity, terrain elevation, and propagation loss. By embedding the Lambertian reflection model, PhysDNet reconstructs sonar intensity from these components, enabling self-supervised training without ground-truth annotations. Experiments show that the decomposed representations preserve stable geological structures, capture physically consistent illumination and attenuation, and produce reliable shadow maps. These findings demonstrate that physics-guided decomposition provides a stable and interpretable domain for SSS analysis, improving both physical consistency and downstream tasks such as registration and shadow interpretation. --- ### Studying Maps at Scale: A Digital Investigation of Cartography and the Evolution of Figuration Authors: Remi Petitpierre Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL, cs.DL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19538v1 This thesis presents methods and datasets to investigate cartographic heritage on a large scale and from a cultural perspective. Heritage institutions worldwide have digitized more than one million maps, and automated techniques now enable large-scale recognition and extraction of map content. Yet these methods have engaged little with the history of cartography, or the view that maps are semantic-symbolic systems, and cultural objects reflecting political and epistemic expectations. This work leverages a diverse corpus of 771,561 map records and 99,715 digitized images aggregated from 38 digital catalogs. After normalization, the dataset includes 236,925 contributors and spans six centuries, from 1492 to 1948. These data make it possible to chart geographic structures and the global chronology of map publication. The spatial focus of cartography is analyzed in relation to political dynamics, evidencing links between Atlantic maritime charting, the triangular trade, and colonial expansion. Further results document the progression of national, domestic focus and the impact of military conflicts on publication volumes. The research introduces semantic segmentation techniques and object detection models for the generic recognition of land classes and cartographic signs, trained on annotated data and synthetic images. The analysis of land classes shows that maps are designed images whose framing and composition emphasize features through centering and semantic symmetries. The study of cartographic figuration encodes 63 M signs and 25 M fragments into a latent visual space, revealing figurative shifts such as the replacement of relief hachures by terrain contours and showing that signs tend to form locally consistent systems. Analyses of collaboration and diffusion highlight the role of legitimacy, larger actors, and major cities in the spread of figurative norms and semiotic cultures. --- ### Cross-Domain Generalization of Multimodal LLMs for Global Photovoltaic Assessment Authors: Muhao Guo, Yang Weng Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG, eess.IV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19537v1 The rapid expansion of distributed photovoltaic (PV) systems poses challenges for power grid management, as many installations remain undocumented. While satellite imagery provides global coverage, traditional computer vision (CV) models such as CNNs and U-Nets require extensive labeled data and fail to generalize across regions. This study investigates the cross-domain generalization of a multimodal large language model (LLM) for global PV assessment. By leveraging structured prompts and fine-tuning, the model integrates detection, localization, and quantification within a unified schema. Cross-regional evaluation using the $Δ$F1 metric demonstrates that the proposed model achieves the smallest performance degradation across unseen regions, outperforming conventional CV and transformer baselines. These results highlight the robustness of multimodal LLMs under domain shift and their potential for scalable, transferable, and interpretable global PV mapping. --- ### AttackPilot: Autonomous Inference Attacks Against ML Services With LLM-Based Agents Authors: Yixin Wu, Rui Wen, Chi Cui, Michael Backes, Yang Zhang Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19536v1 Inference attacks have been widely studied and offer a systematic risk assessment of ML services; however, their implementation and the attack parameters for optimal estimation are challenging for non-experts. The emergence of advanced large language models presents a promising yet largely unexplored opportunity to develop autonomous agents as inference attack experts, helping address this challenge. In this paper, we propose AttackPilot, an autonomous agent capable of independently conducting inference attacks without human intervention. We evaluate it on 20 target services. The evaluation shows that our agent, using GPT-4o, achieves a 100.0% task completion rate and near-expert attack performance, with an average token cost of only $0.627 per run. The agent can also be powered by many other representative LLMs and can adaptively optimize its strategy under service constraints. We further perform trace analysis, demonstrating that design choices, such as a multi-agent framework and task-specific action spaces, effectively mitigate errors such as bad plans, inability to follow instructions, task context loss, and hallucinations. We anticipate that such agents could empower non-expert ML service providers, auditors, or regulators to systematically assess the risks of ML services without requiring deep domain expertise. --- ### Masked Autoencoder Joint Learning for Robust Spitzoid Tumor Classification Authors: Ilán Carretero, Roshni Mahtani, Silvia Perez-Deben, José Francisco González-Muñoz, Carlos Monteagudo, Valery Naranjo, Rocío del Amor Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: q-bio.QM, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19535v1 Accurate diagnosis of spitzoid tumors (ST) is critical to ensure a favorable prognosis and to avoid both under- and over-treatment. Epigenetic data, particularly DNA methylation, provide a valuable source of information for this task. However, prior studies assume complete data, an unrealistic setting as methylation profiles frequently contain missing entries due to limited coverage and experimental artifacts. Our work challenges these favorable scenarios and introduces ReMAC, an extension of ReMasker designed to tackle classification tasks on high-dimensional data under complete and incomplete regimes. Evaluation on real clinical data demonstrates that ReMAC achieves strong and robust performance compared to competing classification methods in the stratification of ST. Code is available: https://github.com/roshni-mahtani/ReMAC. --- ### Vidi2.5: Large Multimodal Models for Video Understanding and Creation Authors: Vidi Team, Chia-Wen Kuo, Chuang Huang, Dawei Du, Fan Chen, Fanding Lei, Feng Gao, Guang Chen, Haoji Zhang, Haojun Zhao, Jin Liu, Jingjing Zhuge et al. Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19529v2 Video has emerged as the primary medium for communication and creativity on the Internet, driving strong demand for scalable, high-quality video production. Vidi models continue to evolve toward next-generation video creation and have achieved state-of-the-art performance in multimodal temporal retrieval (TR). In its second release, Vidi2 advances video understanding with fine-grained spatio-temporal grounding (STG) and extends its capability to video question answering (Video QA), enabling comprehensive multimodal reasoning. Given a text query, Vidi2 can identify not only the corresponding timestamps but also the bounding boxes of target objects within the output time ranges. To enable comprehensive evaluation of STG, we introduce a new benchmark, VUE-STG, which offers critical improvements over existing STG datasets. In addition, we upgrade the previous VUE-TR benchmark to VUE-TR-V2, achieving a more balanced duration and query distribution. Remarkably, the Vidi2 model substantially outperforms leading proprietary systems, such as Gemini 3 Pro Preview and GPT-5, on both VUE-TR-V2 and VUE-STG, while achieving competitive results with popular open-source models with similar scale on video QA benchmarks. The latest Vidi2.5 offers significantly stronger STG capability and slightly better TR and Video QA performance over Vidi2. This update also introduces a Vidi2.5-Think model to handle plot understanding with complex plot reasoning. To comprehensively evaluate the performance of plot understanding, we propose VUE-PLOT benchmark with two tracks, Character and Reasoning. Notably, Vidi2.5-Think outperforms Gemini 3 Pro Preview on fine-grained character understanding with comparable performance on complex plot reasoning. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of Vidi2.5 on a challenging real-world application, video editing planning. --- ### Discover, Learn, and Reinforce: Scaling Vision-Language-Action Pretraining with Diverse RL-Generated Trajectories Authors: Rushuai Yang, Zhiyuan Feng, Tianxiang Zhang, Kaixin Wang, Chuheng Zhang, Li Zhao, Xiu Su, Yi Chen, Jiang Bian Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19528v1 Scaling vision-language-action (VLA) model pre-training requires large volumes of diverse, high-quality manipulation trajectories. Most current data is obtained via human teleoperation, which is expensive and difficult to scale. Reinforcement learning (RL) methods learn useful skills through autonomous exploration, making them a viable approach for generating data. However, standard RL training collapses to a narrow execution pattern, limiting its utility for large-scale pre-training. We propose Discover, Lea rn and Reinforce (DLR), an information-theoretic pattern discovery framework that generates multiple distinct, high-success behavioral patterns for VLA pretraining. Empirically, DLR generates a markedly more diverse trajectory corpus on LIBERO. Specifically, it learns multiple distinct, high-success strategies for the same task where standard RL discovers only one, and hence it covers substantially broader regions of the state-action space. When adapted to unseen downstream task suites, VLA models pretrained on our diverse RL data surpass counterparts trained on equal-sized standard RL datasets. Moreover, DLR exhibits positive data-scaling behavior that single-pattern RL lacks. These results position multi-pattern RL as a practical, scalable data engine for embodied foundation models. --- ### MapRF: Weakly Supervised Online HD Map Construction via NeRF-Guided Self-Training Authors: Hongyu Lyu, Thomas Monninger, Julie Stephany Berrio Perez, Mao Shan, Zhenxing Ming, Stewart Worrall Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19527v2 Autonomous driving systems benefit from high-definition (HD) maps that provide critical information about road infrastructure. The online construction of HD maps offers a scalable approach to generate local maps from on-board sensors. However, existing methods typically rely on costly 3D map annotations for training, which limits their generalization and scalability across diverse driving environments. In this work, we propose MapRF, a weakly supervised framework that learns to construct 3D maps using only 2D image labels. To generate high-quality pseudo labels, we introduce a novel Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) module conditioned on map predictions, which reconstructs view-consistent 3D geometry and semantics. These pseudo labels are then iteratively used to refine the map network in a self-training manner, enabling progressive improvement without additional supervision. Furthermore, to mitigate error accumulation during self-training, we propose a Map-to-Ray Matching strategy that aligns map predictions with camera rays derived from 2D labels. Extensive experiments on the Argoverse 2 and nuScenes datasets demonstrate that MapRF achieves performance comparable to fully supervised methods, attaining around 75% of the baseline while surpassing several approaches using only 2D labels. This highlights the potential of MapRF to enable scalable and cost-effective online HD map construction for autonomous driving. --- ### Perceptual Taxonomy: Evaluating and Guiding Hierarchical Scene Reasoning in Vision-Language Models Authors: Jonathan Lee, Xingrui Wang, Jiawei Peng, Luoxin Ye, Zehan Zheng, Tiezheng Zhang, Tao Wang, Wufei Ma, Siyi Chen, Yu-Cheng Chou, Prakhar Kaushik, Alan Yuille Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19526v1 We propose Perceptual Taxonomy, a structured process of scene understanding that first recognizes objects and their spatial configurations, then infers task-relevant properties such as material, affordance, function, and physical attributes to support goal-directed reasoning. While this form of reasoning is fundamental to human cognition, current vision-language benchmarks lack comprehensive evaluation of this ability and instead focus on surface-level recognition or image-text alignment. To address this gap, we introduce Perceptual Taxonomy, a benchmark for physically grounded visual reasoning. We annotate 3173 objects with four property families covering 84 fine-grained attributes. Using these annotations, we construct a multiple-choice question benchmark with 5802 images across both synthetic and real domains. The benchmark contains 28033 template-based questions spanning four types (object description, spatial reasoning, property matching, and taxonomy reasoning), along with 50 expert-crafted questions designed to evaluate models across the full spectrum of perceptual taxonomy reasoning. Experimental results show that leading vision-language models perform well on recognition tasks but degrade by 10 to 20 percent on property-driven questions, especially those requiring multi-step reasoning over structured attributes. These findings highlight a persistent gap in structured visual understanding and the limitations of current models that rely heavily on pattern matching. We also show that providing in-context reasoning examples from simulated scenes improves performance on real-world and expert-curated questions, demonstrating the effectiveness of perceptual-taxonomy-guided prompting. --- ### Shortcut Invariance: Targeted Jacobian Regularization in Disentangled Latent Space Authors: Shivam Pal, Sakshi Varshney, Piyush Rai Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19525v2 Deep neural networks are prone to learning shortcuts, spurious correlations present in the training data that undermine out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. Most prior work mitigates shortcut learning through input-space reweighting, either relying on explicit shortcut labels or inferring shortcut structure from heuristics such as per-sample loss. Moreover, these approaches typically assume the presence of some shortcut-conflicting examples in the training set, an assumption that is often violated in practice, particularly in medical imaging where data is aggregated across institutions with different acquisition protocols. We propose a latent-space method that views shortcut learning as over-reliance on shortcut-aligned axes. In a disentangled latent space, we identify candidate shortcut-aligned axes via their strong correlation with labels and reduce classifier reliance on them by injecting targeted anisotropic noise during training. Unlike prior latent-space based approaches that remove, project out, or adversarially suppress shortcut features, our method preserves the full representation and instead impose functional invariance by regularizing the classifier's sensitivity along those axes. We show that injecting anisotropic noise induces targeted Jacobian and curvature regularization, effectively flattening the decision boundary along shortcut axes while leaving core feature dimensions largely unaffected. Our method achieves state-of-the-art OOD performance across standard shortcut-learning benchmarks without requiring shortcut labels or shortcut-conflicting samples. --- ### VideoChat-M1: Collaborative Policy Planning for Video Understanding via Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Authors: Boyu Chen, Zikang Wang, Zhengrong Yue, Kainan Yan, Chenyun Yu, Yi Huang, Zijun Liu, Yafei Wen, Xiaoxin Chen, Yang Liu, Peng Li, Yali Wang Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.CV, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19524v2 By leveraging tool-augmented Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), multi-agent frameworks are driving progress in video understanding. However, most of them adopt static and non-learnable tool invocation mechanisms, which limit the discovery of diverse clues essential for robust perception and reasoning regarding temporally or spatially complex videos. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Multi-agent system for video understanding, namely VideoChat-M1. Instead of using a single or fixed policy, VideoChat-M1 adopts a distinct Collaborative Policy Planning (CPP) paradigm with multiple policy agents, which comprises three key processes. (1) Policy Generation: Each agent generates its unique tool invocation policy tailored to the user's query; (2) Policy Execution: Each agent sequentially invokes relevant tools to execute its policy and explore the video content; (3) Policy Communication: During the intermediate stages of policy execution, agents interact with one another to update their respective policies. Through this collaborative framework, all agents work in tandem, dynamically refining their preferred policies based on contextual insights from peers to effectively respond to the user's query. Moreover, we equip our CPP paradigm with a concise Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) method. Consequently, the team of policy agents can be jointly optimized to enhance VideoChat-M1's performance, guided by both the final answer reward and intermediate collaborative process feedback. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VideoChat-M1 achieves SOTA performance across eight benchmarks spanning four tasks. Notably, on LongVideoBench, our method outperforms the SOTA model Gemini 2.5 pro by 3.6% and GPT-4o by 15.6%. --- ### Modeling Bioelectric State Transitions in Glial Cells: An ASAL-Inspired Computational Approach to Glioblastoma Initiation Authors: Wiktoria Agata Pawlak Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: physics.bio-ph, cs.NE, q-bio.NC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19520v1 Understanding how glioblastoma (GBM) emerges from initially healthy glial tissue requires models that integrate bioelectrical, metabolic, and multicellular dynamics. This work introduces an ASAL-inspired agent-based framework that simulates bioelectric state transitions in glial cells as a function of mitochondrial efficiency (Meff), ion-channel conductances, gap-junction coupling, and ROS dynamics. Using a 64x64 multicellular grid over 60,000 simulation steps, we show that reducing Meff below a critical threshold (~0.6) drives sustained depolarization, ATP collapse, and elevated ROS, reproducing key electrophysiological signatures associated with GBM. We further apply evolutionary optimization (genetic algorithms and MAP-Elites) to explore resilience, parameter sensitivity, and the emergence of tumor-like attractors. Early evolutionary runs converge toward depolarized, ROS-dominated regimes characterized by weakened electrical coupling and altered ionic transport. These results highlight mitochondrial dysfunction and disrupted bioelectric signaling as sufficient drivers of malignant-like transitions and provide a computational basis for probing the bioelectrical origins of oncogenesis. --- ### Blinking Beyond EAR: A Stable Eyelid Angle Metric for Driver Drowsiness Detection and Data Augmentation Authors: Mathis Wolter, Julie Stephany Berrio Perez, Mao Shan Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG, eess.IV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19519v1 Detecting driver drowsiness reliably is crucial for enhancing road safety and supporting advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). We introduce the Eyelid Angle (ELA), a novel, reproducible metric of eye openness derived from 3D facial landmarks. Unlike conventional binary eye state estimators or 2D measures, such as the Eye Aspect Ratio (EAR), the ELA provides a stable geometric description of eyelid motion that is robust to variations in camera angle. Using the ELA, we design a blink detection framework that extracts temporal characteristics, including the closing, closed, and reopening durations, which are shown to correlate with drowsiness levels. To address the scarcity and risk of collecting natural drowsiness data, we further leverage ELA signals to animate rigged avatars in Blender 3D, enabling the creation of realistic synthetic datasets with controllable noise, camera viewpoints, and blink dynamics. Experimental results in public driver monitoring datasets demonstrate that the ELA offers lower variance under viewpoint changes compared to EAR and achieves accurate blink detection. At the same time, synthetic augmentation expands the diversity of training data for drowsiness recognition. Our findings highlight the ELA as both a reliable biometric measure and a powerful tool for generating scalable datasets in driver state monitoring. --- ### Towards Efficient VLMs: Information-Theoretic Driven Compression via Adaptive Structural Pruning Authors: Zhaoqi Xu, Yingying Zhang, Jian Li, Jianwei Guo, Qiannan Zhu, Hua Huang Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.IT, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19518v1 Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have shown remarkable performance across multimodal tasks, yet their ever-growing scale poses severe challenges for deployment and efficiency. Existing compression methods often rely on heuristic importance metrics or empirical pruning rules, lacking theoretical guarantees about information preservation. In this work, we propose InfoPrune, an information-theoretic framework for adaptive structural compression of VLMs. Grounded in the Information Bottleneck principle, we formulate pruning as a trade-off between retaining task-relevant semantics and discarding redundant dependencies. To quantify the contribution of each attention head, we introduce an entropy-based effective rank (eRank) and employ the Kolmogorov--Smirnov (KS) distance to measure the divergence between original and compressed structures. This yields a unified criterion that jointly considers structural sparsity and informational efficiency. Building on this foundation, we further design two complementary schemes: (1) a training-based head pruning guided by the proposed information loss objective, and (2) a training-free FFN compression via adaptive low-rank approximation. Extensive experiments on VQAv2, TextVQA, and GQA demonstrate that InfoPrune achieves up to 3.2x FLOP reduction and 1.8x acceleration with negligible performance degradation, establishing a theoretically grounded and practically effective step toward efficient multimodal large models. --- ### Automating Deception: Scalable Multi-Turn LLM Jailbreaks Authors: Adarsh Kumarappan, Ananya Mujoo Published: 2025-11-24 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19517v3 Multi-turn conversational attacks, which leverage psychological principles like Foot-in-the-Door (FITD), where a small initial request paves the way for a more significant one, to bypass safety alignments, pose a persistent threat to Large Language Models (LLMs). Progress in defending against these attacks is hindered by a reliance on manual, hard-to-scale dataset creation. This paper introduces a novel, automated pipeline for generating large-scale, psychologically-grounded multi-turn jailbreak datasets. We systematically operationalize FITD techniques into reproducible templates, creating a benchmark of 1,500 scenarios across illegal activities and offensive content. We evaluate seven models from three major LLM families under both multi-turn (with history) and single-turn (without history) conditions. Our results reveal stark differences in contextual robustness: models in the GPT family demonstrate a significant vulnerability to conversational history, with Attack Success Rates (ASR) increasing by as much as 32 percentage points. In contrast, Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash exhibits exceptional resilience, proving nearly immune to these attacks, while Anthropic's Claude 3 Haiku shows strong but imperfect resistance. These findings highlight a critical divergence in how current safety architectures handle conversational context and underscore the need for defenses that can resist narrative-based manipulation. ---