# Research Papers — 2025-11 · bundle page 72 of 197 > Full-text markdown of papers #3551–3600 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/72 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-11/page/71.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-11/page/73.md) ### Explainable AI for Diabetic Retinopathy Detection Using Deep Learning with Attention Mechanisms and Fuzzy Logic-Based Interpretability Authors: Abishek Karthik, Pandiyaraju V, Sreya Mynampati Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16294v1 The task of weed detection is an essential element of precision agriculture since accurate species identification allows a farmer to selectively apply herbicides and fits into sustainable agriculture crop management. This paper proposes a hybrid deep learning framework recipe for weed detection that utilizes Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Vision Transformers (ViTs), and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to build robustness to multiple field conditions. A Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based augmentation method was imposed to balance class distributions and better generalize the model. Further, a self-supervised contrastive pre-training method helps to learn more features from limited annotated data. Experimental results yield superior results with 99.33% accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score on multi-benchmark datasets. The proposed model architecture enables local, global, and relational feature representations and offers high interpretability and adaptability. Practically, the framework allows real-time, efficient deployment of edge devices for automated weed detecting, reducing over-reliance on herbicides and providing scalable, sustainable precision-farming options. --- ### Distributed Agent Reasoning Across Independent Systems With Strict Data Locality Authors: Daniel Vaughan, Kateřina Vaughan Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16292v1 This paper presents a proof-of-concept demonstration of agent-to-agent communication across distributed systems, using only natural-language messages and without shared identifiers, structured schemas, or centralised data exchange. The prototype explores how multiple organisations (represented here as a Clinic, Insurer, and Specialist Network) can cooperate securely via pseudonymised case tokens, local data lookups, and controlled operational boundaries. The system uses Orpius as the underlying platform for multi-agent orchestration, tool execution, and privacy-preserving communication. All agents communicate through OperationRelay calls, exchanging concise natural-language summaries. Each agent operates on its own data (such as synthetic clinic records, insurance enrolment tables, and clinical guidance extracts), and none receives or reconstructs patient identity. The Clinic computes an HMAC-based pseudonymous token, the Insurer evaluates coverage rules and consults the Specialist agent, and the Specialist returns an appropriateness recommendation. The goal of this prototype is intentionally limited: to demonstrate feasibility, not to provide a clinically validated, production-ready system. No clinician review was conducted, and no evaluation beyond basic functional runs was performed. The work highlights architectural patterns, privacy considerations, and communication flows that enable distributed reasoning among specialised agents while keeping data local to each organisation. We conclude by outlining opportunities for more rigorous evaluation and future research in decentralised multi-agent systems. --- ### Spectral Identifiability for Interpretable Probe Geometry Authors: William Hao-Cheng Huang Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16288v1 Linear probes are widely used to interpret and evaluate neural representations, yet their reliability remains unclear, as probes may appear accurate in some regimes but collapse unpredictably in others. We uncover a spectral mechanism behind this phenomenon and formalize it as the Spectral Identifiability Principle (SIP), a verifiable Fisher-inspired condition for probe stability. When the eigengap separating task-relevant directions is larger than the Fisher estimation error, the estimated subspace concentrates and accuracy remains consistent, whereas closing this gap induces instability in a phase-transition manner. Our analysis connects eigengap geometry, sample size, and misclassification risk through finite-sample reasoning, providing an interpretable diagnostic rather than a loose generalization bound. Controlled synthetic studies, where Fisher quantities are computed exactly, confirm these predictions and show how spectral inspection can anticipate unreliable probes before they distort downstream evaluation. --- ### Graph Diffusion Counterfactual Explanation Authors: David Bechtoldt, Sidney Bender Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16287v1 Machine learning models that operate on graph-structured data, such as molecular graphs or social networks, often make accurate predictions but offer little insight into why certain predictions are made. Counterfactual explanations address this challenge by seeking the closest alternative scenario where the model's prediction would change. Although counterfactual explanations are extensively studied in tabular data and computer vision, the graph domain remains comparatively underexplored. Constructing graph counterfactuals is intrinsically difficult because graphs are discrete and non-euclidean objects. We introduce Graph Diffusion Counterfactual Explanation, a novel framework for generating counterfactual explanations on graph data, combining discrete diffusion models and classifier-free guidance. We empirically demonstrate that our method reliably generates in-distribution as well as minimally structurally different counterfactuals for both discrete classification targets and continuous properties. --- ### MuISQA: Multi-Intent Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Scientific Question Answering Authors: Zhiyuan Li, Haisheng Yu, Guangchuan Guo, Nan Zhou, Jiajun Zhang Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16283v1 Complex scientific questions often entail multiple intents, such as identifying gene mutations and linking them to related diseases. These tasks require evidence from diverse sources and multi-hop reasoning, while conventional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems are usually single-intent oriented, leading to incomplete evidence coverage. To assess this limitation, we introduce the Multi-Intent Scientific Question Answering (MuISQA) benchmark, which is designed to evaluate RAG systems on heterogeneous evidence coverage across sub-questions. In addition, we propose an intent-aware retrieval framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to hypothesize potential answers, decompose them into intent-specific queries, and retrieve supporting passages for each underlying intent. The retrieved fragments are then aggregated and re-ranked via Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) to balance coverage across diverse intents while reducing redundancy. Experiments on both MuISQA benchmark and other general RAG datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms conventional approaches, particularly in retrieval accuracy and evidence coverage. --- ### Building temporally coherent 3D maps with VGGT for memory-efficient Semantic SLAM Authors: Gergely Dinya, Péter Halász, András Lőrincz, Kristóf Karacs, Anna Gelencsér-Horváth Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16282v2 We present a fast, spatio-temporal scene understanding framework based on Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT). The proposed pipeline is designed to enable efficient, close to real-time performance, supporting applications including assistive navigation. To achieve continuous updates of the 3D scene representation, we process the image flow with a sliding window, aligning submaps, thereby overcoming VGGT's high memory demands. We exploit the VGGT tracking head to aggregate 2D semantic instance masks into 3D objects. To allow for temporal consistency and richer contextual reasoning the system stores timestamps and instance-level identities, thereby enabling the detection of changes in the environment. We evaluate the approach on well-known benchmarks and custom datasets specifically designed for assistive navigation scenarios. The results demonstrate the applicability of the framework to real-world scenarios. --- ### "To Survive, I Must Defect": Jailbreaking LLMs via the Game-Theory Scenarios Authors: Zhen Sun, Zongmin Zhang, Deqi Liang, Han Sun, Yule Liu, Yun Shen, Xiangshan Gao, Yilong Yang, Shuai Liu, Yutao Yue, Xinlei He Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16278v1 As LLMs become more common, non-expert users can pose risks, prompting extensive research into jailbreak attacks. However, most existing black-box jailbreak attacks rely on hand-crafted heuristics or narrow search spaces, which limit scalability. Compared with prior attacks, we propose Game-Theory Attack (GTA), an scalable black-box jailbreak framework. Concretely, we formalize the attacker's interaction against safety-aligned LLMs as a finite-horizon, early-stoppable sequential stochastic game, and reparameterize the LLM's randomized outputs via quantal response. Building on this, we introduce a behavioral conjecture "template-over-safety flip": by reshaping the LLM's effective objective through game-theoretic scenarios, the originally safety preference may become maximizing scenario payoffs within the template, which weakens safety constraints in specific contexts. We validate this mechanism with classical game such as the disclosure variant of the Prisoner's Dilemma, and we further introduce an Attacker Agent that adaptively escalates pressure to increase the ASR. Experiments across multiple protocols and datasets show that GTA achieves over 95% ASR on LLMs such as Deepseek-R1, while maintaining efficiency. Ablations over components, decoding, multilingual settings, and the Agent's core model confirm effectiveness and generalization. Moreover, scenario scaling studies further establish scalability. GTA also attains high ASR on other game-theoretic scenarios, and one-shot LLM-generated variants that keep the model mechanism fixed while varying background achieve comparable ASR. Paired with a Harmful-Words Detection Agent that performs word-level insertions, GTA maintains high ASR while lowering detection under prompt-guard models. Beyond benchmarks, GTA jailbreaks real-world LLM applications and reports a longitudinal safety monitoring of popular HuggingFace LLMs. --- ### SeSE: Black-Box Uncertainty Quantification for Large Language Models Based on Structural Information Theory Authors: Xingtao Zhao, Hao Peng, Dingli Su, Xianghua Zeng, Chunyang Liu, Jinzhi Liao, Philip S. Yu Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16275v4 Reliable uncertainty quantification (UQ) is essential for deploying large language models (LLMs) in safety-critical scenarios, as it enables them to abstain from responding when uncertain, thereby avoiding hallucinations, i.e., plausible yet factually incorrect responses. However, while semantic UQ methods have achieved advanced performance, they overlook latent semantic structural information that could enable more precise uncertainty estimates. In this paper, we propose \underline{Se}mantic \underline{S}tructural \underline{E}ntropy ({SeSE}), a principled black-box UQ framework applicable to both open- and closed-source LLMs. To reveal the intrinsic structure of the semantic space, SeSE constructs its optimal hierarchical abstraction through an encoding tree with minimal structural entropy. The structural entropy of this encoding tree thus quantifies the inherent uncertainty within LLM semantic space after optimal compression. Additionally, unlike existing methods that primarily focus on simple short-form generation, we extent SeSE to provide interpretable, granular uncertainty estimation for long-form outputs. We theoretically prove that SeSE generalizes semantic entropy, the gold standard for UQ in LLMs, and empirically demonstrate its superior performance over strong baselines across 24 model-dataset combinations. --- ### TetraSDF: Analytic Isosurface Extraction with Multi-resolution Tetrahedral Grid Authors: Seonghun Oh, Youngjung Uh, Jin-Hwa Kim Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16273v4 Extracting an explicit surface that exactly matches the zero-level set of a neural signed distance function (SDF) remains challenging. Sampling-based isosurfacing methods such as Marching Cubes introduce discretization error. In contrast, continuous piecewise affine (CPWA) analytic approaches typically require plain ReLU MLPs, which limits the ability to learn high-frequency SDFs in practice. We present TetraSDF, an analytic isosurface extraction framework for SDFs that retains the expressiveness of grid-based encoders while enabling exact zero-level set extraction, by representing the SDF with a ReLU MLP composed with a multi-resolution tetrahedral positional encoder. Our positional encoder's barycentric interpolation preserves a global CPWA structure, allowing us to track ReLU linear regions within an encoder-induced polyhedral complex. We further introduce a fixed analytic input preconditioner derived from the encoder's metric to reduce directional bias, thereby stabilizing training. Across multiple benchmarks, TetraSDF matches or surpasses existing grid-based encoders in SDF reconstruction accuracy, while faithfully recovering the network's zero-level set as a triangle mesh. --- ### Weakly Supervised Segmentation and Classification of Alpha-Synuclein Aggregates in Brightfield Midbrain Images Authors: Erwan Dereure, Robin Louiset, Laura Parkkinen, David A Menassa, David Holcman Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV, q-bio.QM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16268v2 Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder associated with the accumulation of misfolded alpha-synuclein aggregates, forming Lewy bodies and neuritic shape used for pathology diagnostics. Automatic analysis of immunohistochemistry histopathological images with Deep Learning provides a promising tool for better understanding the spatial organization of these aggregates. In this study, we develop an automated image processing pipeline to segment and classify these aggregates in whole-slide images (WSIs) of midbrain tissue from PD and incidental Lewy Body Disease (iLBD) cases based on weakly supervised segmentation, robust to immunohistochemical labelling variability, with a ResNet50 classifier. Our approach allows to differentiate between major aggregate morphologies, including Lewy bodies and neurites with a balanced accuracy of $80\%$. This framework paves the way for large-scale characterization of the spatial distribution and heterogeneity of alpha-synuclein aggregates in brightfield immunohistochemical tissue, and for investigating their poorly understood relationships with surrounding cells such as microglia and astrocytes. --- ### Mem-MLP: Real-Time 3D Human Motion Generation from Sparse Inputs Authors: Sinan Mutlu, Georgios F. Angelis, Savas Ozkan, Paul Wisbey, Anastasios Drosou, Mete Ozay Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16264v1 Realistic and smooth full-body tracking is crucial for immersive AR/VR applications. Existing systems primarily track head and hands via Head Mounted Devices (HMDs) and controllers, making the 3D full-body reconstruction in-complete. One potential approach is to generate the full-body motions from sparse inputs collected from limited sensors using a Neural Network (NN) model. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) backbone that is enhanced with residual connections and a novel NN-component called Memory-Block. In particular, Memory-Block represents missing sensor data with trainable code-vectors, which are combined with the sparse signals from previous time instances to improve the temporal consistency. Furthermore, we formulate our solution as a multi-task learning problem, allowing our MLP-backbone to learn robust representations that boost accuracy. Our experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by substantially reducing prediction errors. Moreover, it achieves 72 FPS on mobile HMDs that ultimately improves the accuracy-running time tradeoff. --- ### How Robot Dogs See the Unseeable: Improving Visual Interpretability via Peering for Exploratory Robots Authors: Oliver Bimber, Karl Dietrich von Ellenrieder, Michael Haller, Rakesh John Amala Arokia Nathan, Gianni Lunardi, Mohamed Youssef, Marco Camurri, Santos Miguel Orozco Soto, Jeremy E. Niven Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16262v4 In vegetated environments, such as forests, exploratory robots play a vital role in navigating complex, cluttered environments where human access is limited and traditional equipment struggles. Visual occlusion from obstacles, such as foliage, can severely obstruct a robot's sensors, impairing scene understanding. We show that "peering", a characteristic side-to-side movement used by insects to overcome their visual limitations, can also allow robots to markedly improve visual reasoning under partial occlusion. This is accomplished by applying core signal processing principles, specifically optical synthetic aperture sensing, together with the vision reasoning capabilities of modern large multimodal models. Peering enables real-time, high-resolution, and wavelength-independent perception, which is crucial for vision-based scene understanding across a wide range of applications. The approach is low-cost and immediately deployable on any camera-equipped robot. We investigated different peering motions and occlusion masking strategies, demonstrating that, unlike peering, state-of-the-art multi-view 3D vision techniques fail in these conditions due to their high susceptibility to occlusion. Our experiments were carried out on an industrial-grade quadrupedal robot. However, the ability to peer is not limited to such platforms, but potentially also applicable to bipedal, hexapod, wheeled, or crawling platforms. Robots that can effectively see through partial occlusion will gain superior perception abilities - including enhanced scene understanding, situational awareness, camouflage breaking, and advanced navigation in complex environments. --- ### GeoPTH: A Lightweight Approach to Category-Based Trajectory Retrieval via Geometric Prototype Trajectory Hashing Authors: Yang Xu, Zuliang Yang, Kai Ming Ting Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16258v2 Trajectory similarity retrieval is an important part of spatiotemporal data mining, however, existing methods have the following limitations: traditional metrics are computationally expensive, while learning-based methods suffer from substantial training costs and potential instability. This paper addresses these problems by proposing Geometric Prototype Trajectory Hashing (GeoPTH), a novel, lightweight, and non-learning framework for efficient category-based trajectory retrieval. GeoPTH constructs data-dependent hash functions by using representative trajectory prototypes, i.e., small point sets preserving geometric characteristics, as anchors. The hashing process is efficient, which involves mapping a new trajectory to its closest prototype via a robust, Hausdorff metric. Extensive experiments show that GeoPTH's retrieval accuracy is highly competitive with both traditional metrics and state-of-the-art learning methods, and it significantly outperforms binary codes generated through simple binarization of the learned embeddings. Critically, GeoPTH consistently outperforms all competitors in terms of efficiency. Our work demonstrates that a lightweight, prototype-centric approach offers a practical and powerful alternative, achieving an exceptional retrieval performance and computational efficiency. --- ### Revisiting Fairness-aware Interactive Recommendation: Item Lifecycle as a Control Knob Authors: Yun Lu, Xiaoyu Shi, Hong Xie, Chongjun Xia, Zhenhui Gong, Mingsheng Shang Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16248v1 This paper revisits fairness-aware interactive recommendation (e.g., TikTok, KuaiShou) by introducing a novel control knob, i.e., the lifecycle of items. We make threefold contributions. First, we conduct a comprehensive empirical analysis and uncover that item lifecycles in short-video platforms follow a compressed three-phase pattern, i.e., rapid growth, transient stability, and sharp decay, which significantly deviates from the classical four-stage model (introduction, growth, maturity, decline). Second, we introduce LHRL, a lifecycle-aware hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that dynamically harmonizes fairness and accuracy by leveraging phase-specific exposure dynamics. LHRL consists of two key components: (1) PhaseFormer, a lightweight encoder combining STL decomposition and attention mechanisms for robust phase detection; (2) a two-level HRL agent, where the high-level policy imposes phase-aware fairness constraints, and the low-level policy optimizes immediate user engagement. This decoupled optimization allows for effective reconciliation between long-term equity and short-term utility. Third, experiments on multiple real-world interactive recommendation datasets demonstrate that LHRL significantly improves both fairness and user engagement. Furthermore, the integration of lifecycle-aware rewards into existing RL-based models consistently yields performance gains, highlighting the generalizability and practical value of our approach. --- ### Pass@k Metric for RLVR: A Diagnostic Tool of Exploration, But Not an Objective Authors: Yang Yu Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16231v1 The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform complex, multi-step reasoning is a central focus of modern AI research. To evaluate and enhance this capability, the pass@k metric, which measures the probability of obtaining at least one correct solution in k independent samples, has received significant attention. Its intuitive appeal has led to its adoption not only as an evaluation standard but also as a direct optimization objective in reinforcement learning. In this paper, we analyze the pass@k objective, derive its gradient, and demonstrate that it is fundamentally a per-example positive reweighting of the simpler pass@1 objective. Our analysis reveals that the pass@k objective provides a vanishing learning signal in regimes where exploration is most critical. We further analyze the dynamics of "exploration collapse", showing that as the policy concentrates probability mass, the gap between pass@k and pass@1 diminishes. We conclude that while pass@k is a useful diagnostic tool, it may be an unsuitable direct objective for optimization. Instead, mechanisms explicitly encouraging efficient exploration could offer a more effective path forward for reinforcement learning in reasoning tasks. --- ### Q-MLLM: Vector Quantization for Robust Multimodal Large Language Model Security Authors: Wei Zhao, Zhe Li, Yige Li, Jun Sun Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16229v1 Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in cross-modal understanding, but remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks through visual inputs despite robust textual safety mechanisms. These vulnerabilities arise from two core weaknesses: the continuous nature of visual representations, which allows for gradient-based attacks, and the inadequate transfer of text-based safety mechanisms to visual content. We introduce Q-MLLM, a novel architecture that integrates two-level vector quantization to create a discrete bottleneck against adversarial attacks while preserving multimodal reasoning capabilities. By discretizing visual representations at both pixel-patch and semantic levels, Q-MLLM blocks attack pathways and bridges the cross-modal safety alignment gap. Our two-stage training methodology ensures robust learning while maintaining model utility. Experiments demonstrate that Q-MLLM achieves significantly better defense success rate against both jailbreak attacks and toxic image attacks than existing approaches. Notably, Q-MLLM achieves perfect defense success rate (100\%) against jailbreak attacks except in one arguable case, while maintaining competitive performance on multiple utility benchmarks with minimal inference overhead. This work establishes vector quantization as an effective defense mechanism for secure multimodal AI systems without requiring expensive safety-specific fine-tuning or detection overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/Amadeuszhao/QMLLM. --- ### SwiTrack: Tri-State Switch for Cross-Modal Object Tracking Authors: Boyue Xu, Ruichao Hou, Tongwei Ren, Dongming Zhou, Gangshan Wu, Jinde Cao Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16227v1 Cross-modal object tracking (CMOT) is an emerging task that maintains target consistency while the video stream switches between different modalities, with only one modality available in each frame, mostly focusing on RGB-Near Infrared (RGB-NIR) tracking. Existing methods typically connect parallel RGB and NIR branches to a shared backbone, which limits the comprehensive extraction of distinctive modality-specific features and fails to address the issue of object drift, especially in the presence of unreliable inputs. In this paper, we propose SwiTrack, a novel state-switching framework that redefines CMOT through the deployment of three specialized streams. Specifically, RGB frames are processed by the visual encoder, while NIR frames undergo refinement via a NIR gated adapter coupled with the visual encoder to progressively calibrate shared latent space features, thereby yielding more robust cross-modal representations. For invalid modalities, a consistency trajectory prediction module leverages spatio-temporal cues to estimate target movement, ensuring robust tracking and mitigating drift. Additionally, we incorporate dynamic template reconstruction to iteratively update template features and employ a similarity alignment loss to reinforce feature consistency. Experimental results on the latest benchmarks demonstrate that our tracker achieves state-of-the-art performance, boosting precision rate and success rate gains by 7.2\% and 4.3\%, respectively, while maintaining real-time tracking at 65 frames per second. Code and models are available at https://github.com/xuboyue1999/SwiTrack.git. --- ### Deep SOR Minimax Q-learning for Two-player Zero-sum Game Authors: Saksham Gautam, Lakshmi Mandal, Shalabh Bhatnagar Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16226v1 In this work, we consider the problem of a two-player zero-sum game. In the literature, the successive over-relaxation Q-learning algorithm has been developed and implemented, and it is seen to result in a lower contraction factor for the associated Q-Bellman operator resulting in a faster value iteration-based procedure. However, this has been presented only for the tabular case and not for the setting with function approximation that typically caters to real-world high-dimensional state-action spaces. Furthermore, such settings in the case of two-player zero-sum games have not been considered. We thus propose a deep successive over-relaxation minimax Q-learning algorithm that incorporates deep neural networks as function approximators and is suitable for high-dimensional spaces. We prove the finite-time convergence of the proposed algorithm. Through numerical experiments, we show the effectiveness of the proposed method over the existing Q-learning algorithm. Our ablation studies demonstrate the effect of different values of the crucial successive over-relaxation parameter. --- ### Real-Time Inference for Distributed Multimodal Systems under Communication Delay Uncertainty Authors: Victor Croisfelt, João Henrique Inacio de Souza, Shashi Raj Pandey, Beatriz Soret, Petar Popovski Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16225v1 Connected cyber-physical systems perform inference based on real-time inputs from multiple data streams. Uncertain communication delays across data streams challenge the temporal flow of the inference process. State-of-the-art (SotA) non-blocking inference methods rely on a reference-modality paradigm, requiring one modality input to be fully received before processing, while depending on costly offline profiling. We propose a novel, neuro-inspired non-blocking inference paradigm that primarily employs adaptive temporal windows of integration (TWIs) to dynamically adjust to stochastic delay patterns across heterogeneous streams while relaxing the reference-modality requirement. Our communication-delay-aware framework achieves robust real-time inference with finer-grained control over the accuracy-latency tradeoff. Experiments on the audio-visual event localization (AVEL) task demonstrate superior adaptability to network dynamics compared to SotA approaches. --- ### Can MLLMs Read the Room? A Multimodal Benchmark for Assessing Deception in Multi-Party Social Interactions Authors: Caixin Kang, Yifei Huang, Liangyang Ouyang, Mingfang Zhang, Ruicong Liu, Yoichi Sato Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16221v2 Despite their advanced reasoning capabilities, state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) still lack a core component of human intelligence: the ability to "read the room" and assess deception in complex social interactions. To rigorously evaluate this limitation, we introduce Multimodal Interactive Deception Assessment (MIDA), a new task and multimodal dataset comprising synchronized video and text with verifiable ground-truth labels for every statement. We benchmark 12 state-of-the-art open- and closed-source MLLMs and identify a substantial performance gap: even powerful models such as GPT-4o struggle to reliably distinguish truthful statements from deceptive ones. Our analysis shows that current models have difficulty grounding language in multimodal social cues and modeling what others know, believe, or intend. To address these limitations, we propose a Social Chain-of-Thought (SoCoT) reasoning pipeline and a Dynamic Social Epistemic Memory (DSEM) module. Experimental results show that structured epistemic memory consistently improves deception assessment, while multimodal social-cue reasoning remains a challenging and important direction for future research. --- ### Mind the Gap: Bridging Prior Shift in Realistic Few-Shot Crop-Type Classification Authors: Joana Reuss, Ekaterina Gikalo, Marco Körner Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16218v1 Real-world agricultural distributions often suffer from severe class imbalance, typically following a long-tailed distribution. Labeled datasets for crop-type classification are inherently scarce and remain costly to obtain. When working with such limited data, training sets are frequently constructed to be artificially balanced -- in particular in the case of few-shot learning -- failing to reflect real-world conditions. This mismatch induces a shift between training and test label distributions, degrading real-world generalization. To address this, we propose Dirichlet Prior Augmentation (DirPA), a novel method that simulates an unknown label distribution skew of the target domain proactively during model training. Specifically, we model the real-world distribution as Dirichlet-distributed random variables, effectively performing a prior augmentation during few-shot learning. Our experiments show that DirPA successfully shifts the decision boundary and stabilizes the training process by acting as a dynamic feature regularizer. --- ### FlipVQA: Scaling Multi-modal Instruction Tuning via Textbook-to-Knowledge Synthesis Authors: Zhen Hao Wong, Jingwen Deng, Yuzhao Wang, Wenkai Yu, Jihao Huang, Runming He, Chengyu Shen, Hao Liang, Wentao Zhang Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16216v2 Textbooks are among the richest repositories of human-verified reasoning knowledge, yet their complex layouts contain multi-column typesetting, cross-page question answer separation, and interleaved figures, make automated extraction of structured QA and VQA pairs extremely challenging. Existing alternatives either synthesize data from scratch, which lacks authentic problem contexts, or rely on costly expert annotation that cannot scale. We propose $\textbf{FlipVQA-Miner}$, an automated pipeline that resolves long-range logical dependencies and cross-page discontinuities in OCR-parsed documents, recovering coherent question--answer--figure associations even when answers reside in separate companion volumes. A subsequent multi-stage curation pipeline transforms these raw extractions into AI-ready supervision signals. Using FlipVQA-Miner, we construct $\textbf{FlipVQA-83K}$, comprising 83K QA and VQA pairs spanning 11 academic disciplines, at a $\textbf{50$\times$}$ cost saving compared to manual annotation while maintaining high structural fidelity ($F_1 > 0.96$). Models fine-tuned on FlipVQA-83K demonstrate significantly improved reasoning ability and cross-domain generalization, establishing a scalable paradigm for human-knowledge-grounded data curation. Our dataset and the complete data generating and curating methods can be found in https://github.com/OpenDCAI/DataFlow-VQA . --- ### Unsupervised Image Classification with Adaptive Nearest Neighbor Selection and Cluster Ensembles Authors: Melih Baydar, Emre Akbas Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16213v1 Unsupervised image classification, or image clustering, aims to group unlabeled images into semantically meaningful categories. Early methods integrated representation learning and clustering within an iterative framework. However, the rise of foundational models have recently shifted focus solely to clustering, bypassing the representation learning step. In this work, we build upon a recent multi-head clustering approach by introducing adaptive nearest neighbor selection and cluster ensembling strategies to improve clustering performance. Our method, "Image Clustering through Cluster Ensembles" (ICCE), begins with a clustering stage, where we train multiple clustering heads on a frozen backbone, producing diverse image clusterings. We then employ a cluster ensembling technique to consolidate these potentially conflicting results into a unified consensus clustering. Finally, we train an image classifier using the consensus clustering result as pseudo-labels. ICCE achieves state-of-the-art performance on ten image classification benchmarks, achieving 99.3% accuracy on CIFAR10, 89% on CIFAR100, and 70.4% on ImageNet datasets, narrowing the performance gap with supervised methods. To the best of our knowledge, ICCE is the first fully unsupervised image classification method to exceed 70% accuracy on ImageNet. --- ### PSM: Prompt Sensitivity Minimization via LLM-Guided Black-Box Optimization Authors: Huseein Jawad, Nicolas Brunel Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CR, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16209v2 System prompts are critical for guiding the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet they often contain proprietary logic or sensitive information, making them a prime target for extraction attacks. Adversarial queries can successfully elicit these hidden instructions, posing significant security and privacy risks. Existing defense mechanisms frequently rely on heuristics, incur substantial computational overhead, or are inapplicable to models accessed via black-box APIs. This paper introduces a novel framework for hardening system prompts through shield appending, a lightweight approach that adds a protective textual layer to the original prompt. Our core contribution is the formalization of prompt hardening as a utility-constrained optimization problem. We leverage an LLM-as-optimizer to search the space of possible SHIELDs, seeking to minimize a leakage metric derived from a suite of adversarial attacks, while simultaneously preserving task utility above a specified threshold, measured by semantic fidelity to baseline outputs. This black-box, optimization-driven methodology is lightweight and practical, requiring only API access to the target and optimizer LLMs. We demonstrate empirically that our optimized SHIELDs significantly reduce prompt leakage against a comprehensive set of extraction attacks, outperforming established baseline defenses without compromising the model's intended functionality. Our work presents a paradigm for developing robust, utility-aware defenses in the escalating landscape of LLM security. The code is made public on the following link: https://github.com/psm-defense/psm --- ### Towards Overcoming Data Scarcity in Nuclear Energy: A Study on Critical Heat Flux with Physics-consistent Conditional Diffusion Model Authors: Farah Alsafadi, Alexandra Akins, Xu Wu Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16207v1 Deep generative modeling provides a powerful pathway to overcome data scarcity in energy-related applications where experimental data are often limited, costly, or difficult to obtain. By learning the underlying probability distribution of the training dataset, deep generative models, such as the diffusion model (DM), can generate high-fidelity synthetic samples that statistically resemble the training data. Such synthetic data generation can significantly enrich the size and diversity of the available training data, and more importantly, improve the robustness of downstream machine learning models in predictive tasks. The objective of this paper is to investigate the effectiveness of DM for overcoming data scarcity in nuclear energy applications. By leveraging a public dataset on critical heat flux (CHF) that cover a wide range of commercial nuclear reactor operational conditions, we developed a DM that can generate an arbitrary amount of synthetic samples for augmenting of the CHF dataset. Since a vanilla DM can only generate samples randomly, we also developed a conditional DM capable of generating targeted CHF data under user-specified thermal-hydraulic conditions. The performance of the DM was evaluated based on their ability to capture empirical feature distributions and pair-wise correlations, as well as to maintain physical consistency. The results showed that both the DM and conditional DM can successfully generate realistic and physics-consistent CHF data. Furthermore, uncertainty quantification was performed to establish confidence in the generated data. The results demonstrated that the conditional DM is highly effective in augmenting CHF data while maintaining acceptable levels of uncertainty. --- ### ChemLabs on ChemO: A Multi-Agent System for Multimodal Reasoning on IChO 2025 Authors: Qiang Xu, Shengyuan Bai, Leqing Chen, Zijing Liu, Yu Li Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16205v2 Olympiad-level benchmarks in mathematics and physics are crucial testbeds for advanced AI reasoning, but chemistry, with its unique multimodal symbolic language, has remained an open challenge. We introduce ChemO, a new benchmark built from the International Chemistry Olympiad (IChO) 2025. ChemO features two key innovations for automated assessment: Assessment-Equivalent Reformulation (AER), which converts problems requiring visual outputs (e.g., drawing molecules) into computationally tractable formats, and Structured Visual Enhancement (SVE), a diagnostic mechanism to disentangle a model's visual perception capabilities from its core chemical reasoning. To tackle this benchmark, we propose ChemLabs, a hierarchical multi-agent framework that mimics human expert collaboration through specialized agents for problem decomposition, perception, reasoning, and auditing. Experiments on state-of-the-art multimodal models demonstrate that combining SVE with our multi-agent system yields dramatic performance gains. Our top configuration achieves a score of 93.6 out of 100, surpassing an estimated human gold medal threshold and establishing a new state-of-the-art in automated chemical problem-solving. ChemO Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/IDEA-AI4SCI/ChemO --- ### Causal Synthetic Data Generation in Recruitment Authors: Andrea Iommi, Antonio Mastropietro, Riccardo Guidotti, Anna Monreale, Salvatore Ruggieri Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16204v1 The importance of Synthetic Data Generation (SDG) has increased significantly in domains where data quality is poor or access is limited due to privacy and regulatory constraints. One such domain is recruitment, where publicly available datasets are scarce due to the sensitive nature of information typically found in curricula vitae, such as gender, disability status, or age. This lack of accessible, representative data presents a significant obstacle to the development of fair and transparent machine learning models, particularly ranking algorithms that require large volumes of data to effectively learn how to recommend candidates. In the absence of such data, these models are prone to poor generalisation and may fail to perform reliably in real-world scenarios. Recent advances in Causal Generative Models (CGMs) offer a promising solution. CGMs enable the generation of synthetic datasets that preserve the underlying causal relationships within the data, providing greater control over fairness and interpretability in the data generation process. In this study, we present a specialised SDG method involving two CGMs: one modelling job offers and the other modelling curricula. Each model is structured according to a causal graph informed by domain expertise. We use these models to generate synthetic datasets and evaluate the fairness of candidate rankings under controlled scenarios that introduce specific biases. --- ### When Alignment Fails: Multimodal Adversarial Attacks on Vision-Language-Action Models Authors: Yuping Yan, Yuhan Xie, Yixin Zhang, Lingjuan Lyu, Handing Wang, Yaochu Jin Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16203v3 Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) have recently demonstrated remarkable progress in embodied environments, enabling robots to perceive, reason, and act through unified multimodal understanding. Despite their impressive capabilities, the adversarial robustness of these systems remains largely unexplored, especially under realistic multimodal and black-box conditions. Existing studies mainly focus on single-modality perturbations and overlook the cross-modal misalignment that fundamentally affects embodied reasoning and decision-making. In this paper, we introduce VLA-Fool, a comprehensive study of multimodal adversarial robustness in embodied VLA models under both white-box and black-box settings. VLA-Fool unifies three levels of multimodal adversarial attacks: (1) textual perturbations through gradient-based and prompt-based manipulations, (2) visual perturbations via patch and noise distortions, and (3) cross-modal misalignment attacks that intentionally disrupt the semantic correspondence between perception and instruction. We further incorporate a VLA-aware semantic space into linguistic prompts, developing the first automatically crafted and semantically guided prompting framework. Experiments on the LIBERO benchmark using a fine-tuned OpenVLA model reveal that even minor multimodal perturbations can cause significant behavioral deviations, demonstrating the fragility of embodied multimodal alignment. --- ### Multi-Agent Collaborative Reward Design for Enhancing Reasoning in Reinforcement Learning Authors: Pei Yang, Ke Zhang, Ji Wang, Xiao Chen, Yuxin Tang, Eric Yang, Lynn Ai, Bill Shi Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16202v4 We present CRM (Multi-Agent Collaborative Reward Model), a framework that replaces a single black-box reward model with a coordinated team of specialist evaluators to improve robustness and interpretability in RLHF. Conventional reward models struggle to jointly optimize multiple, sometimes conflicting, preference dimensions (e.g., factuality, helpfulness, safety) and offer limited transparency into why a score is assigned. CRM addresses these issues by decomposing preference evaluation into domain-specific agents that each produce partial signals, alongside global evaluators such as ranker-based and embedding-similarity rewards. A centralized aggregator fuses these signals at each timestep, balancing factors like step-wise correctness, multi-agent agreement, and repetition penalties, yielding a single training reward compatible with standard RL pipelines. The policy is optimized with advantage-based updates (e.g., GAE), while a value model regresses to the aggregated reward, enabling multi-perspective reward shaping without requiring additional human annotations beyond those used to train the evaluators. To support training and assessment, we introduce rewardBench, a benchmark and training suite aligned with the collaborative structure of CRM. Together, CRM and rewardBench provide a practical, modular path to more transparent reward modeling and more stable optimization. --- ### From Performance to Understanding: A Vision for Explainable Automated Algorithm Design Authors: Niki van Stein, Anna V. Kononova, Thomas Bäck Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.AI, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16201v1 Automated algorithm design is entering a new phase: Large Language Models can now generate full optimisation (meta)heuristics, explore vast design spaces and adapt through iterative feedback. Yet this rapid progress is largely performance-driven and opaque. Current LLM-based approaches rarely reveal why a generated algorithm works, which components matter or how design choices relate to underlying problem structures. This paper argues that the next breakthrough will come not from more automation, but from coupling automation with understanding from systematic benchmarking. We outline a vision for explainable automated algorithm design, built on three pillars: (i) LLM-driven discovery of algorithmic variants, (ii) explainable benchmarking that attributes performance to components and hyperparameters and (iii) problem-class descriptors that connect algorithm behaviour to landscape structure. Together, these elements form a closed knowledge loop in which discovery, explanation and generalisation reinforce each other. We argue that this integration will shift the field from blind search to interpretable, class-specific algorithm design, accelerating progress while producing reusable scientific insight into when and why optimisation strategies succeed. --- ### SemanticCite: Citation Verification with AI-Powered Full-Text Analysis and Evidence-Based Reasoning Authors: Sebastian Haan Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CL, cs.DL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16198v1 Effective scientific communication depends on accurate citations that validate sources and guide readers to supporting evidence. Yet academic literature faces mounting challenges: semantic citation errors that misrepresent sources, AI-generated hallucinated references, and traditional citation formats that point to entire papers without indicating which sections substantiate specific claims. We introduce SemanticCite, an AI-powered system that verifies citation accuracy through full-text source analysis while providing rich contextual information via detailed reasoning and relevant text snippets. Our approach combines multiple retrieval methods with a four-class classification system (Supported, Partially Supported, Unsupported, Uncertain) that captures nuanced claim-source relationships and enables appropriate remedial actions for different error types. Our experiments show that fine-tuned lightweight language models achieve performance comparable to large commercial systems with significantly lower computational requirements, making large-scale citation verification practically feasible. The system provides transparent, evidence-based explanations that support user understanding and trust. We contribute a comprehensive dataset of over 1,000 citations with detailed alignments, functional classifications, semantic annotations, and bibliometric metadata across eight disciplines, alongside fine-tuned models and the complete verification framework as open-source software. SemanticCite addresses critical challenges in research integrity through scalable citation verification, streamlined peer review, and quality control for AI-generated content, providing an open-source foundation for maintaining citation accuracy at scale. --- ### A Switching Framework for Online Interval Scheduling with Predictions Authors: Antonios Antoniadis, Ali Shahheidar, Golnoosh Shahkarami, Abolfazl Soltani Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16194v1 We study online interval scheduling in the irrevocable setting, where each interval must be immediately accepted or rejected upon arrival. The objective is to maximize the total length of accepted intervals while ensuring that no two accepted intervals overlap. We consider this problem in a learning-augmented setting, where the algorithm has access to (machine-learned) predictions. The goal is to design algorithms that leverage these predictions to improve performance while maintaining robust guarantees in the presence of prediction errors. Our main contribution is the SemiTrust-and-Switch framework, which provides a unified approach for combining prediction-based and classical interval scheduling algorithms. This framework applies to both deterministic and randomized algorithms and captures the trade-off between consistency (performance under accurate predictions) and robustness (performance under adversarial inputs). Moreover, we provide lower bounds, proving the tightness of this framework in particular settings. We further design a randomized algorithm that smoothly interpolates between prediction-based and robust algorithms. This algorithm achieves both robustness and smoothness--its performance degrades gracefully with the quality of the prediction. --- ### Fast LLM Post-training via Decoupled and Fastest-of-N Speculation Authors: Rongxin Cheng, Kai Zhou, Xingda Wei, Siyuan Liu, Mingcong Han, Mingjing Ai, Yeju Zhou, Baoquan Zhong, Wencong Xiao, Rong Chen, Haibo Chen Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.DC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16193v3 Rollout dominates the training time in large language model (LLM) post-training, where the trained model is used to generate tokens given a batch of prompts. This work, SpecActor, achieves fast rollout with speculative decoding that deploys a fast draft path to accelerate the unparallelizable generation, while the correctness is guaranteed by fast parallel verification of the outputs with the original model. SpecActor addresses two foundational challenges that hinder speculation efficiency: (1) a Decoupled speculation method that overcomes the computation inefficiency issue when executing speculative decoding with relative large per-worker batch size -- a common configuration in training but unfriendly to speculation, and (2) a Fastest-of-N speculation method that selects and combines different draft methods according to the rollout progress to approximate the optimal draft method even when the best one is unknown a priori. Extensive evaluations on production traces show that SpecActor accelerates mean rollout speed by 2.0--2.4x, with up to 2.7x speedup, over common post-training baselines. The results are consistent across both dense and MoE models and across different RL algorithms. Notably, SpecActor is 1.1--2.6x faster compared to vanilla speculative rollout in different traces. The accelerated rollout achieves 1.4--2.3x faster end-to-end training time. --- ### ART: A Graph-based Framework for Investigating Illicit Activity in Monero via Address-Ring-Transaction Structures Authors: Andrea Venturi, Imanol Jerico-Yoldi, Francesco Zola, Raul Orduna Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CR, cs.ET, cs.LG, cs.SI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16192v1 As Law Enforcement Agencies advance in cryptocurrency forensics, criminal actors aiming to conceal illicit fund movements increasingly turn to "mixin" services or privacy-based cryptocurrencies. Monero stands out as a leading choice due to its strong privacy preserving and untraceability properties, making conventional blockchain analysis ineffective. Understanding the behavior and operational patterns of criminal actors within Monero is therefore challenging and it is essential to support future investigative strategies and disrupt illicit activities. In this work, we propose a case study in which we leverage a novel graph-based methodology to extract structural and temporal patterns from Monero transactions linked to already discovered criminal activities. By building Address-Ring-Transaction graphs from flagged transactions, we extract structural and temporal features and use them to train Machine Learning models capable of detecting similar behavioral patterns that could highlight criminal modus operandi. This represents a first partial step toward developing analytical tools that support investigative efforts in privacy-preserving blockchain ecosystems --- ### CausalMamba: Interpretable State Space Modeling for Temporal Rumor Causality Authors: Xiaotong Zhan, Xi Cheng Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.SI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16191v1 Rumor detection on social media remains a challenging task due to the complex propagation dynamics and the limited interpretability of existing models. While recent neural architectures capture content and structural features, they often fail to reveal the underlying causal mechanisms of misinformation spread. We propose CausalMamba, a novel framework that integrates Mamba-based sequence modeling, graph convolutional networks (GCNs), and differentiable causal discovery via NOTEARS. CausalMamba learns joint representations of temporal tweet sequences and reply structures, while uncovering latent causal graphs to identify influential nodes within each propagation chain. Experiments on the Twitter15 dataset show that our model achieves competitive classification performance compared to strong baselines, and uniquely enables counterfactual intervention analysis. Qualitative results demonstrate that removing top-ranked causal nodes significantly alters graph connectivity, offering interpretable insights into rumor dynamics. Our framework provides a unified approach for rumor classification and influence analysis, paving the way for more explainable and actionable misinformation detection systems. --- ### PrIntMesh: Precise Intersection Surfaces for 3D Organ Mesh Reconstruction Authors: Deniz Sayin Mercadier, Hieu Le, Yihong Chen, Jiancheng Yang, Udaranga Wickramasinghe, Pascal Fua Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16186v1 Human organs are composed of interconnected substructures whose geometry and spatial relationships constrain one another. Yet, most deep-learning approaches treat these parts independently, producing anatomically implausible reconstructions. We introduce PrIntMesh, a template-based, topology-preserving framework that reconstructs organs as unified systems. Starting from a connected template, PrIntMesh jointly deforms all substructures to match patient-specific anatomy, while explicitly preserving internal boundaries and enforcing smooth, artifact-free surfaces. We demonstrate its effectiveness on the heart, hippocampus, and lungs, achieving high geometric accuracy, correct topology, and robust performance even with limited or noisy training data. Compared to voxel- and surface-based methods, PrIntMesh better reconstructs shared interfaces, maintains structural consistency, and provides a data-efficient solution suitable for clinical use. --- ### Domain-Shared Learning and Gradual Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification Authors: Nianchang Huang, Yi Xu, Ruida Xi, Ruida Xi, Qiang Zhang Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16184v1 Recently, Visible-Infrared person Re-Identification (VI-ReID) has achieved remarkable performance on public datasets. However, due to the discrepancies between public datasets and real-world data, most existing VI-ReID algorithms struggle in real-life applications. To address this, we take the initiative to investigate Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Visible-Infrared person Re-Identification (UDA-VI-ReID), aiming to transfer the knowledge learned from the public data to real-world data without compromising accuracy and requiring the annotation of new samples. Specifically, we first analyze two basic challenges in UDA-VI-ReID, i.e., inter-domain modality discrepancies and intra-domain modality discrepancies. Then, we design a novel two-stage model, i.e., Domain-Shared Learning and Gradual Alignment (DSLGA), to handle these discrepancies. In the first pre-training stage, DSLGA introduces a Domain-Shared Learning Strategy (DSLS) to mitigate ineffective pre-training caused by inter-domain modality discrepancies via exploiting shared information between the source and target domains. While, in the second fine-tuning stage, DSLGA designs a Gradual Alignment Strategy (GAS) to handle the cross-modality alignment challenges between visible and infrared data caused by the large intra-domain modality discrepancies through a cluster-to-holistic alignment way. Finally, a new UDA-VI-ReID testing method i.e., CMDA-XD, is constructed for training and testing different UDA-VI-ReID models. A large amount of experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing domain adaptation methods for VI-ReID and even some supervised methods under various settings. --- ### FOOTPASS: A Multi-Modal Multi-Agent Tactical Context Dataset for Play-by-Play Action Spotting in Soccer Broadcast Videos Authors: Jeremie Ochin, Raphael Chekroun, Bogdan Stanciulescu, Sotiris Manitsaris Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16183v1 Soccer video understanding has motivated the creation of datasets for tasks such as temporal action localization, spatiotemporal action detection (STAD), or multiobject tracking (MOT). The annotation of structured sequences of events (who does what, when, and where) used for soccer analytics requires a holistic approach that integrates both STAD and MOT. However, current action recognition methods remain insufficient for constructing reliable play-by-play data and are typically used to assist rather than fully automate annotation. Parallel research has advanced tactical modeling, trajectory forecasting, and performance analysis, all grounded in game-state and play-by-play data. This motivates leveraging tactical knowledge as a prior to support computer-vision-based predictions, enabling more automated and reliable extraction of play-by-play data. We introduce Footovision Play-by-Play Action Spotting in Soccer Dataset (FOOTPASS), the first benchmark for play-by-play action spotting over entire soccer matches in a multi-modal, multi-agent tactical context. It enables the development of methods for player-centric action spotting that exploit both outputs from computer-vision tasks (e.g., tracking, identification) and prior knowledge of soccer, including its tactical regularities over long time horizons, to generate reliable play-by-play data streams. These streams form an essential input for data-driven sports analytics. --- ### Mantis: A Versatile Vision-Language-Action Model with Disentangled Visual Foresight Authors: Yi Yang, Xueqi Li, Yiyang Chen, Jin Song, Yihan Wang, Zipeng Xiao, Jiadi Su, You Qiaoben, Pengfei Liu, Zhijie Deng Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16175v2 Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models demonstrate that visual signals can effectively complement sparse action supervisions. However, letting VLA directly predict high-dimensional visual states can distribute model capacity and incur prohibitive training cost, while compressing visual states into more compact supervisory signals inevitably incurs information bottlenecks. Moreover, existing methods often suffer from poor comprehension and reasoning capabilities due to the neglect of language supervision. This paper introduces Mantis, a novel framework featuring a Disentangled Visual Foresight (DVF) to tackle these issues. Specifically, Mantis decouples visual foresight prediction from the backbone with the combination of meta queries and a diffusion Transformer (DiT) head. With the current visual state provided to the DiT via a residual connection, a simple next-state prediction objective enables the meta queries to automatically capture the latent actions that delineate the visual trajectory, and hence boost the learning of explicit actions. The disentanglement reduces the burden of the VLA backbone, enabling it to maintain comprehension and reasoning capabilities through language supervision. Empirically, pretrained on human manipulation videos, robot demonstrations, and image-text pairs, Mantis achieves a 96.7% success rate on LIBERO benchmark after fine-tuning, surpassing powerful baselines while exhibiting high convergence speed. Real-world evaluations show that Mantis outperforms $π_{0.5}$, a leading open-source VLA model, particularly in instruction-following capability, generalization to unseen instructions, and reasoning ability. Code and weights are released to support the open-source community. --- ### Target Refocusing via Attention Redistribution for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation: An Explainability Perspective Authors: Jiahao Li, Yang Lu, Yachao Zhang, Yong Xie, Fangyong Wang, Yuan Xie, Yanyun Qu Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16170v1 Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) employs pixel-level vision-language alignment to associate category-related prompts with corresponding pixels. A key challenge is enhancing the multimodal dense prediction capability, specifically this pixel-level multimodal alignment. Although existing methods achieve promising results by leveraging CLIP's vision-language alignment, they rarely investigate the performance boundaries of CLIP for dense prediction from an interpretability mechanisms perspective. In this work, we systematically investigate CLIP's internal mechanisms and identify a critical phenomenon: analogous to human distraction, CLIP diverts significant attention resources from target regions to irrelevant tokens. Our analysis reveals that these tokens arise from dimension-specific over-activation; filtering them enhances CLIP's dense prediction performance. Consequently, we propose ReFocusing CLIP (RF-CLIP), a training-free approach that emulates human distraction-refocusing behavior to redirect attention from distraction tokens back to target regions, thereby refining CLIP's multimodal alignment granularity. Our method achieves SOTA performance on eight benchmarks while maintaining high inference efficiency. --- ### EvoVLA: Self-Evolving Vision-Language-Action Model Authors: Zeting Liu, Zida Yang, Zeyu Zhang, Hao Tang Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16166v1 Long-horizon robotic manipulation remains challenging for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models despite recent progress in zero-shot generalization and simulation-to-real-world transfer. Current VLA models suffer from stage hallucination, where agents exploit coarse evaluation signals to shortcut multi-step tasks, reporting high progress without truly completing them. We present EvoVLA, a self-supervised VLA framework that addresses this issue through three complementary components: Stage-Aligned Reward (SAR), which uses triplet contrastive learning with Gemini-generated hard negatives to prevent visual shortcuts; Pose-Based Object Exploration (POE), which grounds curiosity in relative object-gripper pose instead of raw pixels; and Long-Horizon Memory, which uses selective context retention and gated fusion to stabilize intrinsic shaping during extended rollouts. Extensive evaluations on Discoverse-L, a long-horizon manipulation benchmark with three multi-stage tasks, show that EvoVLA improves average task success by 10.2 percentage points over the strongest baseline (OpenVLA-OFT), reaching 69.2 percent. EvoVLA also achieves one-and-a-half times better sample efficiency and reduces stage hallucination from 38.5 percent to 14.8 percent. Real-world deployment on physical robots reaches an average success rate of 54.6 percent across four manipulation tasks, outperforming OpenVLA-OFT by 11 points, demonstrating effective sim-to-real transfer and strong generalization. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/EvoVLA. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/EvoVLA. --- ### Achieving Skilled and Reliable Daily Probabilistic Forecasts of Wind Power at Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Timescales over France Authors: Eloi Lindas, Yannig Goude, Philippe Ciais Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.LG, stat.AP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16164v2 In a growing renewable based energy system, accurate and reliable wind power forecasts are crucial for grid stability, balancing supply and demand and market risk management. Even though short-term weather forecasts have been thoroughly used to provide up to 3 days ahead renewable power predictions, forecasts involving prediction horizons longer than a week still need investigations. Despite the recent progress in subseasonal-to-seasonal weather probabilistic forecasting, their use for wind power prediction usually involves both temporal and spatial aggregation to achieve reasonable skill. In this study, we present a lead time and numerical weather model agnostic forecasting pipeline which enables to transform ECMWF subseasonal-to-seasonal weather forecasts into wind power forecasts for France for lead times ranging from 1 day to 46 days at daily resolution. By leveraging a post-processing step of the resulting power ensembles we show that these forecasts improve the climatological baseline by 15% to 5% for the Continuous Ranked Probability Score and 20% to 5% for ensemble Mean Squared Error up to 16 days in advance, before converging towards the climatological skill. This improvement in skill is jointly obtained with near perfect calibration of the forecasts for every lead time. The results suggest that electricity market players could benefit from the extended forecast range up to two weeks to improve their decision making on renewable supply --- ### An Image Is Worth Ten Thousand Words: Verbose-Text Induction Attacks on VLMs Authors: Zhi Luo, Zenghui Yuan, Wenqi Wei, Daizong Liu, Pan Zhou Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16163v1 With the remarkable success of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on multimodal tasks, concerns regarding their deployment efficiency have become increasingly prominent. In particular, the number of tokens consumed during the generation process has emerged as a key evaluation metric.Prior studies have shown that specific inputs can induce VLMs to generate lengthy outputs with low information density, which significantly increases energy consumption, latency, and token costs. However, existing methods simply delay the occurrence of the EOS token to implicitly prolong output, and fail to directly maximize the output token length as an explicit optimization objective, lacking stability and controllability.To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel verbose-text induction attack (VTIA) to inject imperceptible adversarial perturbations into benign images via a two-stage framework, which identifies the most malicious prompt embeddings for optimizing and maximizing the output token of the perturbed images.Specifically, we first perform adversarial prompt search, employing reinforcement learning strategies to automatically identify adversarial prompts capable of inducing the LLM component within VLMs to produce verbose outputs. We then conduct vision-aligned perturbation optimization to craft adversarial examples on input images, maximizing the similarity between the perturbed image's visual embeddings and those of the adversarial prompt, thereby constructing malicious images that trigger verbose text generation. Comprehensive experiments on four popular VLMs demonstrate that our method achieves significant advantages in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, and generalization capability. --- ### Layer-wise Noise Guided Selective Wavelet Reconstruction for Robust Medical Image Segmentation Authors: Yuting Lu, Ziliang Wang, Weixin Xu, Wei Zhang, Yongqiang Zhao, Yang Yu, Xiaohong Zhang Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16162v1 Clinical deployment requires segmentation models to stay stable under distribution shifts and perturbations. The mainstream solution is adversarial training (AT) to improve robustness; however, AT often brings a clean--robustness trade-off and high training/tuning cost, which limits scalability and maintainability in medical imaging. We propose \emph{Layer-wise Noise-Guided Selective Wavelet Reconstruction (LNG-SWR)}. During training, we inject small, zero-mean noise at multiple layers to learn a frequency-bias prior that steers representations away from noise-sensitive directions. We then apply prior-guided selective wavelet reconstruction on the input/feature branch to achieve frequency adaptation: suppress noise-sensitive bands, enhance directional structures and shape cues, and stabilize boundary responses while maintaining spectral consistency. The framework is backbone-agnostic and adds low additional inference overhead. It can serve as a plug-in enhancement to AT and also improves robustness without AT. On CT and ultrasound datasets, under a unified protocol with PGD-$L_{\infty}/L_{2}$ and SSAH, LNG-SWR delivers consistent gains on clean Dice/IoU and significantly reduces the performance drop under strong attacks; combining LNG-SWR with AT yields additive gains. When combined with adversarial training, robustness improves further without sacrificing clean accuracy, indicating an engineering-friendly and scalable path to robust segmentation. These results indicate that LNG-SWR provides a simple, effective, and engineering-friendly path to robust medical image segmentation in both adversarial and standard training regimes. --- ### Simba: Towards High-Fidelity and Geometrically-Consistent Point Cloud Completion via Transformation Diffusion Authors: Lirui Zhang, Zhengkai Zhao, Zhi Zuo, Pan Gao, Jie Qin Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16161v1 Point cloud completion is a fundamental task in 3D vision. A persistent challenge in this field is simultaneously preserving fine-grained details present in the input while ensuring the global structural integrity of the completed shape. While recent works leveraging local symmetry transformations via direct regression have significantly improved the preservation of geometric structure details, these methods suffer from two major limitations: (1) These regression-based methods are prone to overfitting which tend to memorize instant-specific transformations instead of learning a generalizable geometric prior. (2) Their reliance on point-wise transformation regression lead to high sensitivity to input noise, severely degrading their robustness and generalization. To address these challenges, we introduce Simba, a novel framework that reformulates point-wise transformation regression as a distribution learning problem. Our approach integrates symmetry priors with the powerful generative capabilities of diffusion models, avoiding instance-specific memorization while capturing robust geometric structures. Additionally, we introduce a hierarchical Mamba-based architecture to achieve high-fidelity upsampling. Extensive experiments across the PCN, ShapeNet, and KITTI benchmarks validate our method's state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. --- ### Video2Layout: Recall and Reconstruct Metric-Grounded Cognitive Map for Spatial Reasoning Authors: Yibin Huang, Wang Xu, Wanyue Zhang, Helu Zhi, Jingjing Huang, Yangbin Xu, Yangang Sun, Conghui Zhu, Tiejun Zhao Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16160v2 Spatial intelligence is a critical frontier for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), empowering them to comprehend the physical world. Drawing inspiration from human perception mechanisms, prior studies attempt to construct a spatial understanding via grid-based cognitive maps. However, current grid-based map methods rely on discretized representations, which limit the model's ability in fine-grained spatial reasoning. To overcome this limitation, we propose Video2Layout, a framework for reconstructing metric-grounded spatial layouts from video. The framework uses continuous object boundary coordinates to enable quantitative spatial computation, which effectively reduces ambiguity in natural language descriptions of spatial relationships. Specifically, our method comprises two stages. First, in supervised fine-tuning stage, we construct a high-quality dataset from the AI2THOR simulator, which enables the model to learn the mapping from visual inputs to precise boundary coordinates. Subsequently, a reinforcement fine-tuning stage enhances the model's real-world generalization capabilities. Based on the above framework, we investigate factors that affect cognitive map accuracy and quantify its relationship with task performance. Evaluated on mainstream spatial reasoning benchmarks, our model, V2LO-7B, achieves an average improvement of 3.24\% over the model trained on grid maps, validating the superiority of our method. --- ### MagBotSim: Physics-Based Simulation and Reinforcement Learning Environments for Magnetic Robotics Authors: Lara Bergmann, Cedric Grothues, Klaus Neumann Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16158v1 Magnetic levitation is about to revolutionize in-machine material flow in industrial automation. Such systems are flexibly configurable and can include a large number of independently actuated shuttles (movers) that dynamically rebalance production capacity. Beyond their capabilities for dynamic transportation, these systems possess the inherent yet unexploited potential to perform manipulation. By merging the fields of transportation and manipulation into a coordinated swarm of magnetic robots (MagBots), we enable manufacturing systems to achieve significantly higher efficiency, adaptability, and compactness. To support the development of intelligent algorithms for magnetic levitation systems, we introduce MagBotSim (Magnetic Robotics Simulation): a physics-based simulation for magnetic levitation systems. By framing magnetic levitation systems as robot swarms and providing a dedicated simulation, this work lays the foundation for next generation manufacturing systems powered by Magnetic Robotics. MagBotSim's documentation, videos, experiments, and code are available at: https://ubi-coro.github.io/MagBotSim/ --- ### Pluggable Pruning with Contiguous Layer Distillation for Diffusion Transformers Authors: Jian Ma, Qirong Peng, Xujie Zhu, Peixing Xie, Chen Chen, Haonan Lu Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16156v2 Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have shown exceptional performance in image generation, yet their large parameter counts incur high computational costs, impeding deployment in resource-constrained settings. To address this, we propose Pluggable Pruning with Contiguous Layer Distillation (PPCL), a flexible structured pruning framework specifically designed for DiT architectures. First, we identify redundant layer intervals through a linear probing mechanism combined with the first-order differential trend analysis of similarity metrics. Subsequently, we propose a plug-and-play teacher-student alternating distillation scheme tailored to integrate depth-wise and width-wise pruning within a single training phase. This distillation framework enables flexible knowledge transfer across diverse pruning ratios, eliminating the need for per-configuration retraining. Extensive experiments on multiple Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformer architecture models demonstrate that PPCL achieves a 50\% reduction in parameter count compared to the full model, with less than 3\% degradation in key objective metrics. Notably, our method maintains high-quality image generation capabilities while achieving higher compression ratios, rendering it well-suited for resource-constrained environments. The open-source code, checkpoints for PPCL can be found at the following link: https://github.com/OPPO-Mente-Lab/Qwen-Image-Pruning. --- ### Reasoning Guided Embeddings: Leveraging MLLM Reasoning for Improved Multimodal Retrieval Authors: Chunxu Liu, Jiyuan Yang, Ruopeng Gao, Yuhan Zhu, Feng Zhu, Rui Zhao, Limin Wang Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16150v1 Multimodal embeddings are widely used in downstream tasks such as multimodal retrieval, enabling alignment of interleaved modalities in a shared representation space. While recent studies show that Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can serve as strong embedding extractors, existing approaches treat embedding extraction as a direct encoding step, overlooking the fact that MLLMs possess the generative capability for reasoning that could be leveraged to enhance representation quality. In this work, we explore how to explicitly incorporate reasoning into the embedding process. To this end, we propose Reasoning Guided Embeddings (RGE), which preserves the generative rationale process of MLLMs and couples it with contrastive training. Our method first enables the model to perform structured rationale generation conditioned on the instruction, and then extracts representations after reasoning has unfolded. This simple design enhances the context-conditional inference signals within the embedding, leading to improved multimodal representation quality. Experiments on the MMEB benchmark show that reasoning-guided conditioning improves multimodal retrieval performance by 4.9% over the non-reasoning baseline, confirming that explicit reasoning can effectively enhance embedding quality. --- ### Approximation rates of quantum neural networks for periodic functions via Jackson's inequality Authors: Ariel Neufeld, Philipp Schmocker, Viet Khoa Tran Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: quant-ph, cs.LG, math.NA, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16149v2 Quantum neural networks (QNNs) are an analog of classical neural networks in the world of quantum computing, which are represented by a unitary matrix with trainable parameters. Inspired by the universal approximation property of classical neural networks, ensuring that every continuous function can be arbitrarily well approximated uniformly on a compact set of a Euclidean space, some recent works have established analogous results for QNNs, ranging from single-qubit to multi-qubit QNNs, and even hybrid classical-quantum models. In this paper, we study the approximation capabilities of QNNs for periodic functions with respect to the supremum norm. We use the Jackson inequality to approximate a given function by implementing its approximating trigonometric polynomial via a suitable QNN. In particular, we see that by restricting to the class of periodic functions, one can achieve a quadratic reduction of the number of parameters, producing better approximation results than in the literature. Moreover, the smoother the function, the fewer parameters are needed to construct a QNN to approximate the function. ---