# Research Papers — 2025-11 · bundle page 74 of 197 > Full-text markdown of papers #3651–3700 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/74 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-11/page/73.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-11/page/75.md) ### Mixture of Ranks with Degradation-Aware Routing for One-Step Real-World Image Super-Resolution Authors: Xiao He, Zhijun Tu, Kun Cheng, Mingrui Zhu, Jie Hu, Nannan Wang, Xinbo Gao Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16024v3 The demonstrated success of sparsely-gated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures, exemplified by models such as DeepSeek and Grok, has motivated researchers to investigate their adaptation to diverse domains. In real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR), existing approaches mainly rely on fine-tuning pre-trained diffusion models through Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) module to reconstruct high-resolution (HR) images. However, these dense Real-ISR models are limited in their ability to adaptively capture the heterogeneous characteristics of complex real-world degraded samples or enable knowledge sharing between inputs under equivalent computational budgets. To address this, we investigate the integration of sparse MoE into Real-ISR and propose a Mixture-of-Ranks (MoR) architecture for single-step image super-resolution. We introduce a fine-grained expert partitioning strategy that treats each rank in LoRA as an independent expert. This design enables flexible knowledge recombination while isolating fixed-position ranks as shared experts to preserve common-sense features and minimize routing redundancy. Furthermore, we develop a degradation estimation module leveraging CLIP embeddings and predefined positive-negative text pairs to compute relative degradation scores, dynamically guiding expert activation. To better accommodate varying sample complexities, we incorporate zero-expert slots and propose a degradation-aware load-balancing loss, which dynamically adjusts the number of active experts based on degradation severity, ensuring optimal computational resource allocation. Comprehensive experiments validate our framework's effectiveness and state-of-the-art performance. --- ### Physically Realistic Sequence-Level Adversarial Clothing for Robust Human-Detection Evasion Authors: Dingkun Zhou, Patrick P. K. Chan, Hengxu Wu, Shikang Zheng, Ruiqi Huang, Yuanjie Zhao Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16020v2 Deep neural networks used for human detection are highly vulnerable to adversarial manipulation, creating safety and privacy risks in real surveillance environments. Wearable attacks offer a realistic threat model, yet existing approaches usually optimize textures frame by frame and therefore fail to maintain concealment across long video sequences with motion, pose changes, and garment deformation. In this work, a sequence-level optimization framework is introduced to generate natural, printable adversarial textures for shirts, trousers, and hats that remain effective throughout entire walking videos in both digital and physical settings. Product images are first mapped to UV space and converted into a compact palette and control-point parameterization, with ICC locking to keep all colors printable. A physically based human-garment pipeline is then employed to simulate motion, multi-angle camera viewpoints, cloth dynamics, and illumination variation. An expectation-over-transformation objective with temporal weighting is used to optimize the control points so that detection confidence is minimized across whole sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate strong and stable concealment, high robustness to viewpoint changes, and superior cross-model transferability. Physical garments produced with sublimation printing achieve reliable suppression under indoor and outdoor recordings, confirming real-world feasibility. --- ### SpellForger: Prompting Custom Spell Properties In-Game using BERT supervised-trained model Authors: Emanuel C. Silva, Emily S. M. Salum, Gabriel M. Arantes, Matheus P. Pereira, Vinicius F. Oliveira, Alessandro L. Bicho Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16018v1 Introduction: The application of Artificial Intelligence in games has evolved significantly, allowing for dynamic content generation. However, its use as a core gameplay co-creation tool remains underexplored. Objective: This paper proposes SpellForger, a game where players create custom spells by writing natural language prompts, aiming to provide a unique experience of personalization and creativity. Methodology: The system uses a supervisedtrained BERT model to interpret player prompts. This model maps textual descriptions to one of many spell prefabs and balances their parameters (damage, cost, effects) to ensure competitive integrity. The game is developed in the Unity Game Engine, and the AI backend is in Python. Expected Results: We expect to deliver a functional prototype that demonstrates the generation of spells in real time, applied to an engaging gameplay loop, where player creativity is central to the experience, validating the use of AI as a direct gameplay mechanic. --- ### CARE: Turning LLMs Into Causal Reasoning Expert Authors: Juncheng Dong, Yiling Liu, Ahmed Aloui, Vahid Tarokh, David Carlson Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16016v1 Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated impressive capabilities across a range of reasoning and generation tasks. However, research studies have shown that LLMs lack the ability to identify causal relationships, a fundamental cornerstone of human intelligence. We first conduct an exploratory investigation of LLMs' behavior when asked to perform a causal-discovery task and find that they mostly rely on the semantic meaning of variable names, ignoring the observation data. This is unsurprising, given that LLMs were never trained to process structural datasets. To first tackle this challenge, we prompt the LLMs with the outputs of established causal discovery algorithms designed for observational datasets. These algorithm outputs effectively serve as the sufficient statistics of the observation data. However, quite surprisingly, we find that prompting the LLMs with these sufficient statistics decreases the LLMs' performance in causal discovery. To address this current limitation, we propose CARE, a framework that enhances LLMs' causal-reasoning ability by teaching them to effectively utilize the outputs of established causal-discovery algorithms through supervised fine-tuning. Experimental results show that a finetuned Qwen2.5-1.5B model produced by CARE significantly outperforms both traditional causal-discovery algorithms and state-of-the-art LLMs with over a thousand times more parameters, demonstrating effective utilization of its own knowledge and the external algorithmic clues. --- ### Exploiting Inter-Sample Information for Long-tailed Out-of-Distribution Detection Authors: Nimeshika Udayangani, Hadi M. Dolatabadi, Sarah Erfani, Christopher Leckie Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16015v1 Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) data is essential for safe deployment of deep neural networks (DNNs). This problem becomes particularly challenging in the presence of long-tailed in-distribution (ID) datasets, often leading to high false positive rates (FPR) and low tail-class ID classification accuracy. In this paper, we demonstrate that exploiting inter-sample relationships using a graph-based representation can significantly improve OOD detection in long-tailed recognition of vision datasets. To this end, we use the feature space of a pre-trained model to initialize our graph structure. We account for the differences between the activation layer distribution of the pre-training vs. training data, and actively introduce Gaussianization to alleviate any deviations from a standard normal distribution in the activation layers of the pre-trained model. We then refine this initial graph representation using graph convolutional networks (GCNs) to arrive at a feature space suitable for long-tailed OOD detection. This leads us to address the inferior performance observed in ID tail-classes within existing OOD detection methods. Experiments over three benchmarks CIFAR10-LT, CIFAR100-LT, and ImageNet-LT demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin in terms of FPR and tail-class ID classification accuracy. --- ### MUSEKG: A Knowledge Graph Over Museum Collections Authors: Jinhao Li, Jianzhong Qi, Soyeon Caren Han, Eun-Jung Holden Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16014v2 Digitisation in the cultural heritage sector has produced large but fragmented repositories of museum collection data, spanning structured catalogue records, images, and unstructured descriptions. Existing museum information systems often make it difficult to integrate these sources into a unified, queryable representation that supports relation-aware exploration. We present MuseKG, an interactive knowledge graph system that organises heterogeneous museum data into a typed graph that links objects, people, organisations, images, image-derived labels, and extracted semantic entities within a coherent schema. MuseKG supports natural-language queries by grounding user questions to graph entities and retrieving a compact neighbourhood of evidence for answer generation. Through an interactive demonstration on real museum collections, we show that MuseKG supports common exploration tasks such as attribute lookup, relation exploration, and relation-aware retrieval, with answers that remain inspectable via explicit graph structures. --- ### Physics-Guided Inductive Spatiotemporal Kriging for PM2.5 with Satellite Gradient Constraints Authors: Shuo Wang, Mengfan Teng, Yun Cheng, Lothar Thiele, Olga Saukh, Shuangshuang He, Yuanting Zhang, Jiang Zhang, Gangfeng Zhang, Xingyuan Yuan, Jingfang Fan Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16013v1 High-resolution mapping of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is a cornerstone of sustainable urbanism but remains critically hindered by the spatial sparsity of ground monitoring networks. While traditional data-driven methods attempt to bridge this gap using satellite Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD), they often suffer from severe, non-random data missingness (e.g., due to cloud cover or nighttime) and inversion biases. To overcome these limitations, this study proposes the Spatiotemporal Physics-Guided Inference Network (SPIN), a novel framework designed for inductive spatiotemporal kriging. Unlike conventional approaches, SPIN synergistically integrates domain knowledge into deep learning by explicitly modeling physical advection and diffusion processes via parallel graph kernels. Crucially, we introduce a paradigm-shifting training strategy: rather than using error-prone AOD as a direct input, we repurpose it as a spatial gradient constraint within the loss function. This allows the model to learn structural pollution patterns from satellite data while remaining robust to data voids. Validated in the highly polluted Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and Surrounding Areas (BTHSA), SPIN achieves a new state-of-the-art with a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 9.52 ug/m^3, effectively generating continuous, physically plausible pollution fields even in unmonitored areas. This work provides a robust, low-cost, and all-weather solution for fine-grained environmental management. --- ### Synergizing Deconfounding and Temporal Generalization For Time-series Counterfactual Outcome Estimation Authors: Yiling Liu, Juncheng Dong, Chen Fu, Wei Shi, Ziyang Jiang, Zhigang Hua, David Carlson Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16006v1 Estimating counterfactual outcomes from time-series observations is crucial for effective decision-making, e.g. when to administer a life-saving treatment, yet remains significantly challenging because (i) the counterfactual trajectory is never observed and (ii) confounders evolve with time and distort estimation at every step. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework that synergistically integrates two complementary approaches: Sub-treatment Group Alignment (SGA) and Random Temporal Masking (RTM). Instead of the coarse practice of aligning marginal distributions of the treatments in latent space, SGA uses iterative treatment-agnostic clustering to identify fine-grained sub-treatment groups. Aligning these fine-grained groups achieves improved distributional matching, thus leading to more effective deconfounding. We theoretically demonstrate that SGA optimizes a tighter upper bound on counterfactual risk and empirically verify its deconfounding efficacy. RTM promotes temporal generalization by randomly replacing input covariates with Gaussian noises during training. This encourages the model to rely less on potentially noisy or spuriously correlated covariates at the current step and more on stable historical patterns, thereby improving its ability to generalize across time and better preserve underlying causal relationships. Our experiments demonstrate that while applying SGA and RTM individually improves counterfactual outcome estimation, their synergistic combination consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. This success comes from their distinct yet complementary roles: RTM enhances temporal generalization and robustness across time steps, while SGA improves deconfounding at each specific time point. --- ### InfCode-C++: Intent-Guided Semantic Retrieval and AST-Structured Search for C++ Issue Resolution Authors: Qingao Dong, Mengfei Wang, Hengzhi Zhang, Zhichao Li, Yuan Yuan, Mu Li, Xiang Gao, Hailong Sun, Chunming Hu, Weifeng Lv Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16005v1 Large language model (LLM) agents have recently shown strong performance on repository-level issue resolution, but existing systems are almost exclusively designed for Python and rely heavily on lexical retrieval and shallow code navigation. These approaches transfer poorly to C++ projects, where overloaded identifiers, nested namespaces, template instantiations, and deep control-flow structures make context retrieval and fault localization substantially more difficult. As a result, state-of-the-art Python-oriented agents show a drastic performance drop on the C++ subset of MultiSWE-bench. We introduce INFCODE-C++, the first C++-aware autonomous system for end-to-end issue resolution. The system combines two complementary retrieval mechanisms -- semantic code-intent retrieval and deterministic AST-structured querying -- to construct accurate, language-aware context for repair.These components enable precise localization and robust patch synthesis in large, statically typed C++ repositories. Evaluated on the \texttt{MultiSWE-bench-CPP} benchmark, INFCODE-C++ achieves a resolution rate of 25.58\%, outperforming the strongest prior agent by 10.85 percentage points and more than doubling the performance of MSWE-agent. Ablation and behavioral studies further demonstrate the critical role of semantic retrieval, structural analysis, and accurate reproduction in C++ issue resolution. INFCODE-C++ highlights the need for language-aware reasoning in multi-language software agents and establishes a foundation for future research on scalable, LLM-driven repair for complex, statically typed ecosystems. --- ### InfCode: Adversarial Iterative Refinement of Tests and Patches for Reliable Software Issue Resolution Authors: KeFan Li, Mengfei Wang, Hengzhi Zhang, Zhichao Li, Yuan Yuan, Mu Li, Xiang Gao, Hailong Sun, Chunming Hu, Weifeng Lv Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16004v1 Large language models have advanced software engineering automation, yet resolving real-world software issues remains difficult because it requires repository-level reasoning, accurate diagnostics, and strong verification signals. Existing agent-based and pipeline-based methods often rely on insufficient tests, which can lead to patches that satisfy verification but fail to fix the underlying defect. We present InfCode, an adversarial multi-agent framework for automated repository-level issue resolution. InfCode iteratively refines both tests and patches through adversarial interaction between a Test Patch Generator and a Code Patch Generator, while a Selector agent identifies the most reliable fix. The framework runs inside a containerized environment that supports realistic repository inspection, modification, and validation. Experiments on SWE-bench Lite and SWE-bench Verified using models such as DeepSeek-V3 and Claude 4.5 Sonnet show that InfCode consistently outperforms strong baselines. It achieves 79.4% performance on SWE-bench Verified, establishing a new state-of-the-art. We have released InfCode as an open-source project at https://github.com/Tokfinity/InfCode. --- ### Hiding in the AI Traffic: Abusing MCP for LLM-Powered Agentic Red Teaming Authors: Strahinja Janjusevic, Anna Baron Garcia, Sohrob Kazerounian Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15998v2 Generative AI is reshaping offensive cybersecurity by enabling autonomous red team agents that can plan, execute, and adapt during penetration tests. However, existing approaches face trade-offs between generality and specialization, and practical deployments reveal challenges such as hallucinations, context limitations, and ethical concerns. In this work, we introduce a novel command & control (C2) architecture leveraging the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to coordinate distributed, adaptive reconnaissance agents covertly across networks. Notably, we find that our architecture not only improves goal-directed behavior of the system as whole, but also eliminates key host and network artifacts that can be used to detect and prevent command & control behavior altogether. We begin with a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art generative red teaming methods, from fine-tuned specialist models to modular or agentic frameworks, analyzing their automation capabilities against task-specific accuracy. We then detail how our MCP-based C2 can overcome current limitations by enabling asynchronous, parallel operations and real-time intelligence sharing without periodic beaconing. We furthermore explore advanced adversarial capabilities of this architecture, its detection-evasion techniques, and address dual-use ethical implications, proposing defensive measures and controlled evaluation in lab settings. Experimental comparisons with traditional C2 show drastic reductions in manual effort and detection footprint. We conclude with future directions for integrating autonomous exploitation, defensive LLM agents, predictive evasive maneuvers, and multi-agent swarms. The proposed MCP-enabled C2 framework demonstrates a significant step toward realistic, AI-driven red team operations that can simulate advanced persistent threats while informing the development of next-generation defensive systems. --- ### Sensorium Arc: AI Agent System for Oceanic Data Exploration and Interactive Eco-Art Authors: Noah Bissell, Ethan Paley, Joshua Harrison, Juliano Calil, Myungin Lee Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.AI, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15997v1 Sensorium Arc (AI reflects on climate) is a real-time multimodal interactive AI agent system that personifies the ocean as a poetic speaker and guides users through immersive explorations of complex marine data. Built on a modular multi-agent system and retrieval-augmented large language model (LLM) framework, Sensorium enables natural spoken conversations with AI agents that embodies the ocean's perspective, generating responses that blend scientific insight with ecological poetics. Through keyword detection and semantic parsing, the system dynamically triggers data visualizations and audiovisual playback based on time, location, and thematic cues drawn from the dialogue. Developed in collaboration with the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure and inspired by the eco-aesthetic philosophy of Newton Harrison, Sensorium Arc reimagines ocean data not as an abstract dataset but as a living narrative. The project demonstrates the potential of conversational AI agents to mediate affective, intuitive access to high-dimensional environmental data and proposes a new paradigm for human-machine-ecosystem. --- ### QueryGym: A Toolkit for Reproducible LLM-Based Query Reformulation Authors: Amin Bigdeli, Radin Hamidi Rad, Mert Incesu, Negar Arabzadeh, Charles L. A. Clarke, Ebrahim Bagheri Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.IR, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15996v1 We present QueryGym, a lightweight, extensible Python toolkit that supports large language model (LLM)-based query reformulation. This is an important tool development since recent work on llm-based query reformulation has shown notable increase in retrieval effectiveness. However, while different authors have sporadically shared the implementation of their methods, there is no unified toolkit that provides a consistent implementation of such methods, which hinders fair comparison, rapid experimentation, consistent benchmarking and reliable deployment. QueryGym addresses this gap by providing a unified framework for implementing, executing, and comparing llm-based reformulation methods. The toolkit offers: (1) a Python API for applying diverse LLM-based methods, (2) a retrieval-agnostic interface supporting integration with backends such as Pyserini and PyTerrier, (3) a centralized prompt management system with versioning and metadata tracking, (4) built-in support for benchmarks like BEIR and MS MARCO, and (5) a completely open-source extensible implementation available to all researchers. QueryGym is publicly available at https://github.com/radinhamidi/QueryGym. --- ### CARE-RAG - Clinical Assessment and Reasoning in RAG Authors: Deepthi Potluri, Aby Mammen Mathew, Jeffrey B DeWitt, Alexander L. Rasgon, Yide Hao, Junyuan Hong, Ying Ding Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15994v1 Access to the right evidence does not guarantee that large language models (LLMs) will reason with it correctly. This gap between retrieval and reasoning is especially concerning in clinical settings, where outputs must align with structured protocols. We study this gap using Written Exposure Therapy (WET) guidelines as a testbed. In evaluating model responses to curated clinician-vetted questions, we find that errors persist even when authoritative passages are provided. To address this, we propose an evaluation framework that measures accuracy, consistency, and fidelity of reasoning. Our results highlight both the potential and the risks: retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can constrain outputs, but safe deployment requires assessing reasoning as rigorously as retrieval. --- ### Detecting Sleeper Agents in Large Language Models via Semantic Drift Analysis Authors: Shahin Zanbaghi, Ryan Rostampour, Farhan Abid, Salim Al Jarmakani Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15992v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) can be backdoored to exhibit malicious behavior under specific deployment conditions while appearing safe during training a phenomenon known as "sleeper agents." Recent work by Hubinger et al. demonstrated that these backdoors persist through safety training, yet no practical detection methods exist. We present a novel dual-method detection system combining semantic drift analysis with canary baseline comparison to identify backdoored LLMs in real-time. Our approach uses Sentence-BERT embeddings to measure semantic deviation from safe baselines, complemented by injected canary questions that monitor response consistency. Evaluated on the official Cadenza-Labs dolphin-llama3-8B sleeper agent model, our system achieves 92.5% accuracy with 100% precision (zero false positives) and 85% recall. The combined detection method operates in real-time (<1s per query), requires no model modification, and provides the first practical solution to LLM backdoor detection. Our work addresses a critical security gap in AI deployment and demonstrates that embedding-based detection can effectively identify deceptive model behavior without sacrificing deployment efficiency. --- ### Digital Agriculture Sandbox for Collaborative Research Authors: Osama Zafar, Rosemarie Santa González, Alfonso Morales, Erman Ayday Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CR, cs.CY, cs.DC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15990v2 Digital agriculture is transforming the way we grow food by utilizing technology to make farming more efficient, sustainable, and productive. This modern approach to agriculture generates a wealth of valuable data that could help address global food challenges, but farmers are hesitant to share it due to privacy concerns. This limits the extent to which researchers can learn from this data to inform improvements in farming. This paper presents the Digital Agriculture Sandbox, a secure online platform that solves this problem. The platform enables farmers (with limited technical resources) and researchers to collaborate on analyzing farm data without exposing private information. We employ specialized techniques such as federated learning, differential privacy, and data analysis methods to safeguard the data while maintaining its utility for research purposes. The system enables farmers to identify similar farmers in a simplified manner without needing extensive technical knowledge or access to computational resources. Similarly, it enables researchers to learn from the data and build helpful tools without the sensitive information ever leaving the farmer's system. This creates a safe space where farmers feel comfortable sharing data, allowing researchers to make important discoveries. Our platform helps bridge the gap between maintaining farm data privacy and utilizing that data to address critical food and farming challenges worldwide. --- ### Scenario-Aware Control of Segmented Ladder Bus: Design and FPGA Implementation Authors: Phu Khanh Huynh, Francky Catthoor, Anup Das Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15987v1 Large-scale neuromorphic architectures consist of computing tiles that communicate spikes using a shared interconnect. The communication patterns in these systems are inherently sparse, asynchronous, and localized, as neural activity is characterized by temporal sparsity with occasional bursts of high traffic. These characteristics require optimized interconnects to handle high-activity bursts while consuming minimal power during idle periods. Among the proposed interconnect solutions, the dynamic segmented bus has gained attention due to its structural simplicity, scalability, and energy efficiency. Since the benefits of a dynamic segmented bus stem from its simplicity, it is essential to develop a streamlined control plane that can scale efficiently with the network. In this paper, we present a design methodology for a scenario-aware control plane tailored to a segmented ladder bus, with the aim of minimizing control overhead and optimizing energy and area utilization. We evaluated our approach using a combination of FPGA implementation and software simulation to assess scalability. The results demonstrated that our design process effectively reduces the control plane's area footprint compared to the data plane while maintaining scalability with network size. --- ### Fairness in Multi-modal Medical Diagnosis with Demonstration Selection Authors: Dawei Li, Zijian Gu, Peng Wang, Chuhan Song, Zhen Tan, Mohan Zhang, Tianlong Chen, Yu Tian, Song Wang Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CY, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15986v2 Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong potential for medical image reasoning, yet fairness across demographic groups remains a major concern. Existing debiasing methods often rely on large labeled datasets or fine-tuning, which are impractical for foundation-scale models. We explore In-Context Learning (ICL) as a lightweight, tuning-free alternative for improving fairness. Through systematic analysis, we find that conventional demonstration selection (DS) strategies fail to ensure fairness due to demographic imbalance in selected exemplars. To address this, we propose Fairness-Aware Demonstration Selection (FADS), which builds demographically balanced and semantically relevant demonstrations via clustering-based sampling. Experiments on multiple medical imaging benchmarks show that FADS consistently reduces gender-, race-, and ethnicity-related disparities while maintaining strong accuracy, offering an efficient and scalable path toward fair medical image reasoning. These results highlight the potential of fairness-aware in-context learning as a scalable and data-efficient solution for equitable medical image reasoning. --- ### UniDGF: A Unified Detection-to-Generation Framework for Hierarchical Object Visual Recognition Authors: Xinyu Nan, Lingtao Mao, Huangyu Dai, Zexin Zheng, Xinyu Sun, Zihan Liang, Ben Chen, Yuqing Ding, Chenyi Lei, Wenwu Ou, Han Li Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15984v1 Achieving visual semantic understanding requires a unified framework that simultaneously handles object detection, category prediction, and attribute recognition. However, current advanced approaches rely on global similarity and struggle to capture fine-grained category distinctions and category-specific attribute diversity, especially in large-scale e-commerce scenarios. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a detection-guided generative framework that predicts hierarchical category and attribute tokens. For each detected object, we extract refined ROI-level features and employ a BART-based generator to produce semantic tokens in a coarse-to-fine sequence covering category hierarchies and property-value pairs, with support for property-conditioned attribute recognition. Experiments on both large-scale proprietary e-commerce datasets and open-source datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing similarity-based pipelines and multi-stage classification systems, achieving stronger fine-grained recognition and more coherent unified inference. --- ### Descend or Rewind? Stochastic Gradient Descent Unlearning Authors: Siqiao Mu, Diego Klabjan Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15983v2 Machine unlearning algorithms aim to remove the impact of selected training data from a model without the computational expenses of retraining from scratch. Two such algorithms are ``Descent-to-Delete" (D2D) and ``Rewind-to-Delete" (R2D), full-batch gradient descent algorithms that are easy to implement and satisfy provable unlearning guarantees. In particular, the stochastic version of D2D is widely implemented as the ``finetuning" unlearning baseline, despite lacking theoretical backing on nonconvex functions. In this work, we prove $(\varepsilon, δ)$ certified unlearning guarantees for stochastic R2D and D2D for strongly convex, convex, and nonconvex loss functions, by analyzing unlearning through the lens of disturbed or biased gradient systems, which may be contracting, semi-contracting, or expansive respectively. Our argument relies on optimally coupling the random behavior of the unlearning and retraining trajectories, resulting in a sensitivity bound that holds in expectation that yields $(\varepsilon, δ)$ unlearning. We determine that D2D can yield tighter guarantees for strongly convex functions, but R2D is more appropriate for convex and nonconvex functions. Finally, we compare the algorithms empirically, demonstrating the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. --- ### Machine Learning Epidemic Predictions Using Agent-based Wireless Sensor Network Models Authors: Chukwunonso Henry Nwokoye, Blessing Oluchi, Sharna Waldron, Peace Ezzeh Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.NI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15982v1 The lack of epidemiological data in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a fundamental difficulty in constructing robust models to forecast and mitigate threats such as viruses and worms. Many studies have examined different epidemic models for WSNs, focusing on how malware infections spread given the network's specific properties, including energy limits and node mobility. In this study, an agent-based implementation of the susceptible-exposed-infected-recovered-vaccinated (SEIRV) mathematical model was employed for machine learning (ML) predictions. Using tools such as NetLogo's BehaviorSpace and Python, two epidemic synthetic datasets were generated and prepared for the application of several ML algorithms. Posed as a regression problem, the infected and recovered nodes were predicted, and the performance of these algorithms is compared using the error metrics of the train and test sets. The predictions performed well, with low error metrics and high R^2 values (0.997, 1.000, 0.999, 1.000), indicating an effective fit to the training set. The validation values were lower (0.992, 0.998, 0.971, and 0.999), as is typical when evaluating model performance on unseen data. Based on the recorded performances, support vector, linear, Lasso, Ridge, and ElasticNet regression were among the worst-performing algorithms, while Random Forest, XGBoost, Decision Trees, and k-nearest neighbors achieved the best results. --- ### Efficient Chromosome Parallelization for Precision Medicine Genomic Workflows Authors: Daniel Mas Montserrat, Ray Verma, Míriam Barrabés, Francisco M. de la Vega, Carlos D. Bustamante, Alexander G. Ioannidis Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.DC, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.PF, q-bio.GN arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15977v1 Large-scale genomic workflows used in precision medicine can process datasets spanning tens to hundreds of gigabytes per sample, leading to high memory spikes, intensive disk I/O, and task failures due to out-of-memory errors. Simple static resource allocation methods struggle to handle the variability in per-chromosome RAM demands, resulting in poor resource utilization and long runtimes. In this work, we propose multiple mechanisms for adaptive, RAM-efficient parallelization of chromosome-level bioinformatics workflows. First, we develop a symbolic regression model that estimates per-chromosome memory consumption for a given task and introduces an interpolating bias to conservatively minimize over-allocation. Second, we present a dynamic scheduler that adaptively predicts RAM usage with a polynomial regression model, treating task packing as a Knapsack problem to optimally batch jobs based on predicted memory requirements. Additionally, we present a static scheduler that optimizes chromosome processing order to minimize peak memory while preserving throughput. Our proposed methods, evaluated on simulations and real-world genomic pipelines, provide new mechanisms to reduce memory overruns and balance load across threads. We thereby achieve faster end-to-end execution, showcasing the potential to optimize large-scale genomic workflows. --- ### TOD-ProcBench: Benchmarking Complex Instruction-Following in Task-Oriented Dialogues Authors: Sarik Ghazarian, Abhinav Gullapalli, Swair Shah, Anurag Beniwal, Nanyun Peng, Narayanan Sadagopan, Zhou Yu Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15976v1 In real-world task-oriented dialogue (TOD) settings, agents are required to strictly adhere to complex instructions while conducting multi-turn conversations with customers. These instructions are typically presented in natural language format and include general guidelines and step-by-step procedures with complex constraints. Existing TOD benchmarks often oversimplify the complex nature of these instructions by reducing them to simple schemas composed of intents, slots, and API call configurations. To address this gap and systematically benchmark LLMs' instruction-following capabilities, we propose TOD-ProcBench, a challenging benchmark featuring complex process instructions with intricate, fine-grained constraints that evaluates various LLMs' abilities to understand and follow instructions in multi-turn TODs. Our benchmark dataset comprises instruction documents derived from the high-quality ABCD dataset with corresponding conversations under human quality control. We formulate fine-grained constraints and action procedures as multi-level condition-action instruction statements. We design three tasks to comprehensively benchmark LLMs' complex instruction-following capabilities in multi-turn TODs. Task 1 evaluates how LLMs retrieve the most relevant statement from a complex instruction and predict the corresponding next action. In Task 2, we synthesize instruction-violating responses by injecting inconsistencies and manipulating the original instructions, and then we analyze how effectively LLMs can identify instruction-violating responses. Task 3 investigates LLMs' abilities in conditional generation of instruction-following responses based on the original complex instructions. Additionally, we conduct studies on the impact of multilingual settings and different instruction text formats on compliance performance. We release our benchmark under the Llama 3.3 Community License Agreement. --- ### KRAL: Knowledge and Reasoning Augmented Learning for LLM-assisted Clinical Antimicrobial Therapy Authors: Zhe Li, Yehan Qiu, Yujie Chen, Xiang Zhou Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15974v4 Clinical antimicrobial therapy requires the dynamic integration of pathogen profiles,host factors, pharmacological properties of antimicrobials,and the severity of infection. This complexity imposes fundamental limitations on the applicability of Large Language Models (LLMs) in high-stakes clinical decision-making including knowledge gaps, data privacy concerns, high deployment costs, and limited reasoning capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose KRAL (Knowledge and Reasoning Augmented Learning), a low-cost, scalable, privacy-preserving paradigm that leverages teacher-model reasoning to automatically distill knowledge and reasoning trajectories via answer-to-question reverse generation, employs heuristic learning for semi-supervised data augmentation (reducing manual annotation requirements by approximately 80%), and utilizes agentic reinforcement learning to jointly enhance medical knowledge and reasoning while optimizing computational and memory efficiency. A hierarchical evaluation employing diverse teacher-model proxies reduces assessment costs, while modular interface design facilitates seamless system updates. Experimental results demonstrate that KRAL significantly outperforms traditional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) methods. It improves knowledge question-answering capability (Accuracy@1 on the external open-source benchmark MEDQA increased by 1.8% vs. SFT and 3.6% vs. RAG) and reasoning capability (Pass@1 on the external benchmark PUMCH Antimicrobial increased by 27% vs. SFT and 27.2% vs. RAG), achieved at about 20% of SFT's long-term training costs. This establishes KRAL as an effective solution for enhancing local LLMs' clinical diagnostic capabilities, enabling low-cost, high-safety deployment in complex medical decision support. --- ### A Primer on Quantum Machine Learning Authors: Su Yeon Chang, M. Cerezo Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: quant-ph, cs.AI, cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15969v1 Quantum machine learning (QML) is a computational paradigm that seeks to apply quantum-mechanical resources to solve learning problems. As such, the goal of this framework is to leverage quantum processors to tackle optimization, supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning, and generative modeling-among other tasks-more efficiently than classical models. Here we offer a high level overview of QML, focusing on settings where the quantum device is the primary learning or data generating unit. We outline the field's tensions between practicality and guarantees, access models and speedups, and classical baselines and claimed quantum advantages-flagging where evidence is strong, where it is conditional or still lacking, and where open questions remain. By shedding light on these nuances and debates, we aim to provide a friendly map of the QML landscape so that the reader can judge when-and under what assumptions-quantum approaches may offer real benefits. --- ### Externally Validated Breast Ultrasound Segmentation via Multi-task Learning with BI-RADS-Consistent Morphological Priors Authors: Jingru Zhang, Saed Moradi, Ashirbani Saha Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15968v2 External validation of breast ultrasound segmentation models remains limited because internal train--test splits do not capture domain shifts across imaging systems, acquisition protocols, and patient populations. We introduce a novel multi-task framework for breast ultrasound segmentation and malignancy classification. Its central methodological advance is a differentiable morphology-to-malignancy bridge: lesion area, boundary roughness, compactness, and texture are computed from the predicted soft segmentation mask, aggregated with learned weights into a morphology-based malignancy score, and constrained to agree with the image-level classifier. To our knowledge, this is the first breast ultrasound framework to use BI-RADS-inspired morphology derived from its own soft segmentation output as an end-to-end consistency target for malignancy classification. It is also the first 2D B-mode multi-task study to report every directed external transfer among four independent datasets: training on each dataset and testing on the other three yields 12 source--target pairs, assessed with single models and five-fold ensembles. In matched comparisons across all pairs, the proposed single-model configuration outperforms dedicated single-task baselines in segmentation (DC: 0.764 vs. 0.740) and malignancy classification (AUC: 0.818 vs. 0.791). The ensemble achieves a mean external DC of 0.786 and is competitive with SAM-based segmentation methods using an EfficientNet-B7 encoder while also predicting malignancy. The learned morphology weights retain the same ordering across all four datasets, with boundary roughness receiving the greatest weight. These results establish the first complete four-dataset directed benchmark for joint 2D breast ultrasound segmentation and malignancy classification and demonstrate that clinically grounded morphological consistency improves both tasks under domain shift. --- ### InfoCLIP: Bridging Vision-Language Pretraining and Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation via Information-Theoretic Alignment Transfer Authors: Muyao Yuan, Yuanhong Zhang, Weizhan Zhang, Lan Ma, Yuan Gao, Jiangyong Ying, Yudeng Xin Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15967v1 Recently, the strong generalization ability of CLIP has facilitated open-vocabulary semantic segmentation, which labels pixels using arbitrary text. However, existing methods that fine-tune CLIP for segmentation on limited seen categories often lead to overfitting and degrade the pretrained vision-language alignment. To stabilize modality alignment during fine-tuning, we propose InfoCLIP, which leverages an information-theoretic perspective to transfer alignment knowledge from pretrained CLIP to the segmentation task. Specifically, this transfer is guided by two novel objectives grounded in mutual information. First, we compress the pixel-text modality alignment from pretrained CLIP to reduce noise arising from its coarse-grained local semantic representations learned under image-text supervision. Second, we maximize the mutual information between the alignment knowledge of pretrained CLIP and the fine-tuned model to transfer compact local semantic relations suited for the segmentation task. Extensive evaluations across various benchmarks validate the effectiveness of InfoCLIP in enhancing CLIP fine-tuning for open-vocabulary semantic segmentation, demonstrating its adaptability and superiority in asymmetric transfer. --- ### Self-supervised and Multi-fidelity Learning for Extended Predictive Soil Spectroscopy Authors: Luning Sun, José L. Safanelli, Jonathan Sanderman, Katerina Georgiou, Colby Brungard, Kanchan Grover, Bryan G. Hopkins, Shusen Liu, Timo Bremer Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15965v1 We propose a self-supervised machine learning (SSML) framework for multi-fidelity learning and extended predictive soil spectroscopy based on latent space embeddings. A self-supervised representation was pretrained with the large MIR spectral library and the Variational Autoencoder algorithm to obtain a compressed latent space for generating spectral embeddings. At this stage, only unlabeled spectral data were used, allowing us to leverage the full spectral database and the availability of scan repeats for augmented training. We also leveraged and froze the trained MIR decoder for a spectrum conversion task by plugging it into a NIR encoder to learn the mapping between NIR and MIR spectra in an attempt to leverage the predictive capabilities contained in the large MIR library with a low cost portable NIR scanner. This was achieved by using a smaller subset of the KSSL library with paired NIR and MIR spectra. Downstream machine learning models were then trained to map between original spectra, predicted spectra, and latent space embeddings for nine soil properties. The performance of was evaluated independently of the KSSL training data using a gold-standard test set, along with regression goodness-of-fit metrics. Compared to baseline models, the proposed SSML and its embeddings yielded similar or better accuracy in all soil properties prediction tasks. Predictions derived from the spectrum conversion (NIR to MIR) task did not match the performance of the original MIR spectra but were similar or superior to predictive performance of NIR-only models, suggesting the unified spectral latent space can effectively leverage the larger and more diverse MIR dataset for prediction of soil properties not well represented in current NIR libraries. --- ### Machine Learning vs. Randomness: Challenges in Predicting Binary Options Movements Authors: Gabriel M. Arantes, Richard F. Pinto, Bruno L. Dalmazo, Eduardo N. Borges, Giancarlo Lucca, Viviane L. D. de Mattos, Fabian C. Cardoso, Rafael A. Berri Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: q-fin.CP, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15960v1 Binary options trading is often marketed as a field where predictive models can generate consistent profits. However, the inherent randomness and stochastic nature of binary options make price movements highly unpredictable, posing significant challenges for any forecasting approach. This study demonstrates that machine learning algorithms struggle to outperform a simple baseline in predicting binary options movements. Using a dataset of EUR/USD currency pairs from 2021 to 2023, we tested multiple models, including Random Forest, Logistic Regression, Gradient Boosting, and k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN), both before and after hyperparameter optimization. Furthermore, several neural network architectures, including Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLP) and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network, were evaluated under different training conditions. Despite these exhaustive efforts, none of the models surpassed the ZeroR baseline accuracy, highlighting the inherent randomness of binary options. These findings reinforce the notion that binary options lack predictable patterns, making them unsuitable for machine learning-based forecasting. --- ### JudgeBoard: Benchmarking and Enhancing Small Language Models for Reasoning Evaluation Authors: Zhenyu Bi, Gaurav Srivastava, Yang Li, Meng Lu, Swastik Roy, Morteza Ziyadi, Xuan Wang Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15958v1 While small language models (SLMs) have shown promise on various reasoning tasks, their ability to judge the correctness of answers remains unclear compared to large language models (LLMs). Prior work on LLM-as-a-judge frameworks typically relies on comparing candidate answers against ground-truth labels or other candidate answers using predefined metrics like entailment. However, this approach is inherently indirect and difficult to fully automate, offering limited support for fine-grained and scalable evaluation of reasoning outputs. In this work, we propose JudgeBoard, a novel evaluation pipeline that directly queries models to assess the correctness of candidate answers without requiring extra answer comparisons. We focus on two core reasoning domains: mathematical reasoning and science/commonsense reasoning, and construct task-specific evaluation leaderboards using both accuracy-based ranking and an Elo-based rating system across five benchmark datasets, enabling consistent model comparison as judges rather than comparators. To improve judgment performance in lightweight models, we propose MAJ (Multi-Agent Judging), a novel multi-agent evaluation framework that leverages multiple interacting SLMs with distinct reasoning profiles to approximate LLM-level judgment accuracy through collaborative deliberation. Experimental results reveal a significant performance gap between SLMs and LLMs in isolated judging tasks. However, our MAJ framework substantially improves the reliability and consistency of SLMs. On the MATH dataset, MAJ using smaller-sized models as backbones performs comparatively well or even better than their larger-sized counterparts. Our findings highlight that multi-agent SLM systems can potentially match or exceed LLM performance in judgment tasks, with implications for scalable and efficient assessment. --- ### A Scalable NorthPole System with End-to-End Vertical Integration for Low-Latency and Energy-Efficient LLM Inference Authors: Michael V. DeBole, Rathinakumar Appuswamy, Neil McGlohon, Brian Taba, Steven K. Esser, Filipp Akopyan, John V. Arthur, Arnon Amir, Alexander Andreopoulos, Peter J. Carlson, Andrew S. Cassidy, Pallab Datta et al. Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.DC, cs.AI, cs.AR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15950v1 A vertically integrated, end-to-end, research prototype system combines 288 NorthPole neural inference accelerator cards, offline training algorithms, a high-performance runtime stack, and a containerized inference pipeline to deliver a scalable and efficient cloud inference service. The system delivers 115 peta-ops at 4-bit integer precision and 3.7 PB/s of memory bandwidth across 18 2U servers, while consuming only 30 kW of power and weighing 730 kg in a 0.67 m^2 42U rack footprint. The system can run 3 simultaneous instances of the 8-billion-parameter open-source IBM Granite-3.3-8b-instruct model at 2,048 context length with 28 simultaneous users and a per-user inter-token latency of 2.8 ms. The system is scalable, modular, and reconfigurable, supporting various model sizes and context lengths, and is ideal for deploying agentic workflows for enterprise AI applications in existing data center (cloud, on-prem) environments. For example, the system can support 18 instances of a 3-billion-parameter model or a single instance of a 70-billion-parameter model. --- ### Click2Graph: Interactive Panoptic Video Scene Graphs from a Single Click Authors: Raphael Ruschel, Hardikkumar Prajapati, Awsafur Rahman, B. S. Manjunath Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15948v2 State-of-the-art Video Scene Graph Generation (VSGG) systems provide structured visual understanding but operate as closed, feed-forward pipelines with no ability to incorporate human guidance. In contrast, promptable segmentation models such as SAM2 enable precise user interaction but lack semantic or relational reasoning. We introduce Click2Graph, the first interactive framework for Panoptic Video Scene Graph Generation (PVSG) that unifies visual prompting with spatial, temporal, and semantic understanding. From a single user cue, such as a click or bounding box, Click2Graph segments and tracks the subject across time, autonomously discovers interacting objects, and predicts <subject, object, predicate> triplets to form a temporally consistent scene graph. Our framework introduces two key components: a Dynamic Interaction Discovery Module that generates subject-conditioned object prompts, and a Semantic Classification Head that performs joint entity and predicate reasoning. Experiments on the OpenPVSG benchmark demonstrate that Click2Graph establishes a strong foundation for user-guided PVSG, showing how human prompting can be combined with panoptic grounding and relational inference to enable controllable and interpretable video scene understanding. --- ### Automated Interpretable 2D Video Extraction from 3D Echocardiography Authors: Milos Vukadinovic, Hirotaka Ieki, Yuki Sahashi, David Ouyang, Bryan He Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15946v2 Although the heart has complex three-dimensional (3D) anatomy, conventional medical imaging with cardiac ultrasound relies on a series of 2D videos showing individual cardiac structures. 3D echocardiography is a developing modality that now offers adequate image quality for clinical use, with potential to streamline acquisition and improve assessment of off-axis features. We propose an automated method to select standard 2D views from 3D cardiac ultrasound volumes, allowing physicians to interpret the data in their usual format while benefiting from the speed and usability of 3D scanning. Applying a deep learning view classifier and downstream heuristics based on anatomical landmarks together with heuristics provided by cardiologists, we reconstruct standard echocardiography views. This approach was validated by three cardiologists in blinded evaluation (96\% accuracy in 1,600 videos from 2 hospitals). The downstream 2D videos were also validated in their ability to detect cardiac abnormalities using AI echocardiography models (EchoPrime and PanEcho) as well as ability to generate clinical-grade measurements of cardiac anatomy (EchoNet-Measurement). We demonstrated that the extracted 2D videos preserve spatial calibration and diagnostic features, allowing clinicians to obtain accurate real-world interpretations from 3D volumes. We release the code and a dataset of 29 3D echocardiography videos https://github.com/echonet/3d-echo . --- ### Boosting Medical Visual Understanding From Multi-Granular Language Learning Authors: Zihan Li, Yiqing Wang, Sina Farsiu, Paul Kinahan Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15943v2 Recent advances in image-text pretraining have significantly enhanced visual understanding by aligning visual and textual representations. Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) has played a pivotal role in multimodal learning. However, its focus on single-label, single-granularity alignment limits its effectiveness in complex domains such as medical imaging, where images often correspond to multiple high-level labels (e.g., disease categories) across different annotation granularities (e.g., diagnostic description, clinical explanation). To address this, we propose Multi-Granular Language Learning (MGLL), a contrastive learning framework designed to improve both multi-label and cross-granularity alignment. MGLL leverages structured multi-label supervision, integrates textual descriptions across granularities, and introduces soft-label supervision with point-wise constraints to enhance alignment. MGLL employs smooth Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence to ensure cross-granularity consistency while maintaining computational efficiency as a plug-and-play module for vision-language models. Pretrained on our constructed large-scale multi-granular datasets and evaluated across multiple datasets, MGLL outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in downstream tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/HUANGLIZI/MGLL. --- ### iLTM: Integrated Large Tabular Model Authors: David Bonet, Marçal Comajoan Cara, Alvaro Calafell, Daniel Mas Montserrat, Alexander G. Ioannidis Published: 2025-11-20 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15941v2 Tabular data underpins decisions across science, industry, and public services. Despite rapid progress, advances in deep learning have not fully carried over to the tabular domain, where gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDTs) remain a default choice in practice. We present iLTM, an integrated Large Tabular Model that unifies tree-derived embeddings, dimensionality-agnostic representations, a meta-trained hypernetwork, multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), and retrieval within a single architecture. Pre-trained on more than 1,800 heterogeneous classification datasets, iLTM achieves consistently superior performance across tabular classification and regression tasks, from small datasets to large and high-dimensional tasks. After light fine-tuning, the meta-trained hypernetwork transfers to regression targets, matching or surpassing strong baselines. Extensive experiments show that iLTM outperforms well-tuned GBDTs and leading deep tabular models while requiring less task-specific tuning. By bridging the gap between tree-based and neural methods, iLTM offers a new framework for tabular foundation models for robust, adaptable, and scalable tabular learning. --- ### C$^2$-Cite: Contextual-Aware Citation Generation for Attributed Large Language Models Authors: Yue Yu, Ting Bai, HengZhi Lan, Li Qian, Li Peng, Jie Wu, Wei Liu, Jian Luan, Chuan Shi Published: 2025-11-19 Categories: cs.IR, cs.CL, cs.DL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00004v2 The attribution technique enhances the credibility of LLMs by adding citations to the generated sentences, enabling users to trace back to the original sources and verify the reliability of the output. However, existing instruction-tuned attributed LLMs often fail to properly interpret the contextual semantics of citation symbols (e.g., (i)) during text generation. This shortcoming arises from their insufficient awareness of the context information surrounding citation markers, which in turn leads to disjointed references and poor integration of retrieved knowledge into the generated content. To address this issue, we propose a novel \textbf{C}ontextual-aware \textbf{C}itation generation framework (\textbf{C$^2$}-\textbf{Cite}) that explicitly integrates the semantic relationships between citation markers and their referenced content. Specifically, a contextual citation alignment mechanism is adopted: it first encodes the retrieved document contexts into the symbol representation of citations, then aligns the marker numbers by decoding information from a citation router function. This mechanism enables the transformation of citation markers from generic placeholders into active knowledge pointers that link to the referenced source information. Experimental results on the ALCE benchmark across three datasets validate our framework C$^2$-Cite++: it outperforms the SOTA baseline by an average of 5.8\% in citation quality and 17.4\% in response correctness. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/BAI-LAB/c2cite --- ### Enhancing Reliability across Short and Long-Form QA via Reinforcement Learning Authors: Yudong Wang, Zhe Yang, Wenhan Ma, Zhifang Sui, Liang Zhao Published: 2025-11-19 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08944v1 While reinforcement learning has unlocked unprecedented complex reasoning in large language models, it has also amplified their propensity for hallucination, creating a critical trade-off between capability and reliability. This work confronts this challenge by introducing a targeted RL framework designed to mitigate both intrinsic and extrinsic hallucinations across short and long-form question answering. We address extrinsic hallucinations (flawed internal knowledge) by creating a novel training set from open-ended conversions of TriviaQA. Concurrently, we tackle intrinsic hallucinations (unfaithfulness to context) by leveraging long-form texts from FineWeb in a fact-grounding reward scheme. To further bolster reliability, our framework explicitly rewards the model for refusing to answer unanswerable questions, thereby cultivating crucial cautiousness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our methodology yields significant performance gains across a diverse suite of benchmarks, substantially reducing both hallucination types. Ultimately, this research contributes a practical framework for resolving the critical tension between advanced reasoning and factual trustworthiness, paving the way for more capable and reliable large language models. --- ### Noise-Robust Abstractive Compression in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models Authors: Singon Kim Published: 2025-11-19 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08943v1 Abstractive compression utilizes smaller langauge models to condense query-relevant context, reducing computational costs in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). However, retrieved documents often include information that is either irrelevant to answering the query or misleading due to factual incorrect content, despite having high relevance scores. This behavior indicates that abstractive compressors are more likely to omit important information essential for the correct answer, especially in long contexts where attention dispersion occurs. To address this issue, we categorize retrieved documents in a more fine-grained manner and propose Abstractive Compression Robust against Noise (ACoRN), which introduces two novel training steps. First, we use offline data augmentation on the training dataset to enhance compressor robustness against two distinct types of retrieval noise. Second, since the language model based compressor cannot fully utilize information from multiple retrieved documents and exhibits positional bias, we perform finetuning to generate summaries centered around key information that directly supports the correct answer. Our experiments demonstrate that T5-large, trained with ACoRN as a compressor, improves EM and F1 scores while preserving the answer string, which could serve as direct evidence. ACoRN excels on datasets with many accuracy reducing documents, making it highly useful in real-world scenarios. --- ### The Specification Trap: Why Static Value Alignment Alone Is Insufficient for Robust Alignment Authors: Austin Spizzirri Published: 2025-11-19 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.LG, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03048v5 Static content-based AI value alignment is insufficient for robust alignment under capability scaling, distributional shift, and increasing autonomy. This holds for any approach that treats alignment as optimizing toward a fixed formal value-object, whether reward function, utility function, constitutional principles, or learned preference representation. Three philosophical results create compounding difficulties: Hume's is-ought gap (behavioral data underdetermines normative content), Berlin's value pluralism (human values resist consistent formalization), and the extended frame problem (any value encoding will misfit future contexts that advanced AI creates). RLHF, Constitutional AI, inverse reinforcement learning, and cooperative assistance games each instantiate this specification trap, and their failure modes reflect structural vulnerabilities, not merely engineering limitations that better data or algorithms will straightforwardly resolve. Known workarounds for individual components face mutually reinforcing difficulties when the specification is closed: the moment it ceases to update from the process it governs. Drawing on compatibilist philosophy, the paper argues that behavioral compliance under training conditions does not guarantee robust alignment under novel conditions, and that this gap grows with system capability. For value-laden autonomous systems, known closed approaches face structural vulnerabilities that worsen with capability. The constructive burden shifts to open, developmentally responsive approaches, though whether such approaches can be achieved remains an empirical question. --- ### Entropy-Based Measurement of Value Drift and Alignment Work in Large Language Models Authors: Samih Fadli Published: 2025-11-19 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03047v1 Large language model safety is usually assessed with static benchmarks, but key failures are dynamic: value drift under distribution shift, jailbreak attacks, and slow degradation of alignment in deployment. Building on a recent Second Law of Intelligence that treats ethical entropy as a state variable which tends to increase unless countered by alignment work, we make this framework operational for large language models. We define a five-way behavioral taxonomy, train a classifier to estimate ethical entropy S(t) from model transcripts, and measure entropy dynamics for base and instruction-tuned variants of four frontier models across stress tests. Base models show sustained entropy growth, while tuned variants suppress drift and reduce ethical entropy by roughly eighty percent. From these trajectories we estimate an effective alignment work rate gamma_eff and embed S(t) and gamma_eff in a monitoring pipeline that raises alerts when entropy drift exceeds a stability threshold, enabling run-time oversight of value drift. --- ### Pharmacophore-based design by learning on voxel grids Authors: Omar Mahmood, Pedro O. Pinheiro, Richard Bonneau, Saeed Saremi, Vishnu Sresht Published: 2025-11-19 Categories: cs.LG, q-bio.BM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.02031v1 Ligand-based drug discovery (LBDD) relies on making use of known binders to a protein target to find structurally diverse molecules similarly likely to bind. This process typically involves a brute force search of the known binder (query) against a molecular library using some metric of molecular similarity. One popular approach overlays the pharmacophore-shape profile of the known binder to 3D conformations enumerated for each of the library molecules, computes overlaps, and picks a set of diverse library molecules with high overlaps. While this virtual screening workflow has had considerable success in hit diversification, scaffold hopping, and patent busting, it scales poorly with library sizes and restricts candidate generation to existing library compounds. Leveraging recent advances in voxel-based generative modelling, we propose a pharmacophore-based generative model and workflows that address the scaling and fecundity issues of conventional pharmacophore-based virtual screening. We introduce \emph{VoxCap}, a voxel captioning method for generating SMILES strings from voxelised molecular representations. We propose two workflows as practical use cases as well as benchmarks for pharmacophore-based generation: \emph{de-novo} design, in which we aim to generate new molecules with high pharmacophore-shape similarities to query molecules, and fast search, which aims to combine generative design with a cheap 2D substructure similarity search for efficient hit identification. Our results show that VoxCap significantly outperforms previous methods in generating diverse \textit{de-novo} hits. When combined with our fast search workflow, VoxCap reduces computational time by orders of magnitude while returning hits for all query molecules, enabling the search of large libraries that are intractable to search by brute force. --- ### Generative design and validation of therapeutic peptides for glioblastoma based on a potential target ATP5A Authors: Hao Qian, Pu You, Lin Zeng, Jingyuan Zhou, Dengdeng Huang, Kaicheng Li, Shikui Tu, Lei Xu Published: 2025-11-19 Categories: q-bio.BM, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.02030v1 Glioblastoma (GBM) remains the most aggressive tumor, urgently requiring novel therapeutic strategies. Here, we present a dry-to-wet framework combining generative modeling and experimental validation to optimize peptides targeting ATP5A, a potential peptide-binding protein for GBM. Our framework introduces the first lead-conditioned generative model, which focuses exploration on geometrically relevant regions around lead peptides and mitigates the combinatorial complexity of de novo methods. Specifically, we propose POTFlow, a \underline{P}rior and \underline{O}ptimal \underline{T}ransport-based \underline{Flow}-matching model for peptide optimization. POTFlow employs secondary structure information (e.g., helix, sheet, loop) as geometric constraints, which are further refined by optimal transport to produce shorter flow paths. With this design, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with five popular approaches. When applied to GBM, our method generates peptides that selectively inhibit cell viability and significantly prolong survival in a patient-derived xenograft (PDX) model. As the first lead peptide-conditioned flow matching model, POTFlow holds strong potential as a generalizable framework for therapeutic peptide design. --- ### Seizure-NGCLNet: Representation Learning of SEEG Spatial Pathological Patterns for Epileptic Seizure Detection via Node-Graph Dual Contrastive Learning Authors: Yiping Wang, Peiren Wang, Zhenye Li, Fang Liu, Jinguo Huang Published: 2025-11-19 Categories: eess.SP, cs.LG, q-bio.NC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.02028v1 Complex spatial connectivity patterns, such as interictal suppression and ictal propagation, complicate accurate drug-resistant epilepsy (DRE) seizure detection using stereotactic electroencephalography (SEEG) and traditional machine learning methods. Two critical challenges remain:(1)a low signal-to-noise ratio in functional connectivity estimates, making it difficult to learn seizure-related interactions; and (2)expert labels for spatial pathological connectivity patterns are difficult to obtain, meanwhile lacking the patterns' representation to improve seizure detection. To address these issues, we propose a novel node-graph dual contrastive learning framework, Seizure-NGCLNet, to learn SEEG interictal suppression and ictal propagation patterns for detecting DRE seizures with high precision. First, an adaptive graph augmentation strategy guided by centrality metrics is developed to generate seizure-related brain networks. Second, a dual-contrastive learning approach is integrated, combining global graph-level contrast with local node-graph contrast, to encode both spatial structural and semantic epileptogenic features. Third, the pretrained embeddings are fine-tuned via a top-k localized graph attention network to perform the final classification. Extensive experiments on a large-scale public SEEG dataset from 33 DRE patients demonstrate that Seizure-NGCLNet achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an average accuracy of 95.93%, sensitivity of 96.25%, and specificity of 94.12%. Visualizations confirm that the learned embeddings clearly separate ictal from interictal states, reflecting suppression and propagation patterns that correspond to the clinical mechanisms. These results highlight Seizure-NGCLNet's ability to learn interpretable spatial pathological patterns, enhancing both seizure detection and seizure onset zone localization. --- ### Coarse-to-Fine Non-Rigid Registration for Side-Scan Sonar Mosaicking Authors: Can Lei, Nuno Gracias, Rafael Garcia, Hayat Rajani, Huigang Wang Published: 2025-11-19 Categories: physics.geo-ph, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.00052v1 Side-scan sonar mosaicking plays a crucial role in large-scale seabed mapping but is challenged by complex non-linear, spatially varying distortions due to diverse sonar acquisition conditions. Existing rigid or affine registration methods fail to model such complex deformations, whereas traditional non-rigid techniques tend to overfit and lack robustness in sparse-texture sonar data. To address these challenges, we propose a coarse-to-fine hierarchical non-rigid registration framework tailored for large-scale side-scan sonar images. Our method begins with a global Thin Plate Spline initialization from sparse correspondences, followed by superpixel-guided segmentation that partitions the image into structurally consistent patches preserving terrain integrity. Each patch is then refined by a pretrained SynthMorph network in an unsupervised manner, enabling dense and flexible alignment without task-specific training. Finally, a fusion strategy integrates both global and local deformations into a smooth, unified deformation field. Extensive quantitative and visual evaluations demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art rigid, classical non-rigid, and learning-based methods in accuracy, structural consistency, and deformation smoothness on the challenging sonar dataset. --- ### German General Social Survey Personas: A Survey-Derived Persona Prompt Collection for Population-Aligned LLM Studies Authors: Jens Rupprecht, Leon Fröhling, Claudia Wagner, Markus Strohmaier Published: 2025-11-19 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21722v2 The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for simulating human perspectives via persona prompting is gaining traction in computational social science. However, well-curated, empirically grounded persona collections remain scarce, limiting the accuracy and representativeness of such simulations. Here, we introduce the German General Social Survey Personas (GGSS Personas) collection, a comprehensive and representative persona prompt collection built from the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS). The GGSS Personas and their persona prompts are designed to be easily plugged into prompts for all types of LLMs and tasks, steering models to generate responses aligned with the underlying German population. We evaluate GGSS Personas by prompting various LLMs to simulate survey response distributions across diverse topics, demonstrating that GGSS Personas-guided LLMs outperform state-of-the-art classifiers, particularly under data scarcity. Furthermore, we analyze how the representativity and attribute selection within persona prompts affect alignment with population responses. Our findings suggest that GGSS Personas provide a potentially valuable resource for research on LLM-based social simulations that enables more systematic explorations of population-aligned persona prompting in NLP and social science research. --- ### PeerCoPilot: A Language Model-Powered Assistant for Behavioral Health Organizations Authors: Gao Mo, Naveen Raman, Megan Chai, Cindy Peng, Shannon Pagdon, Nev Jones, Hong Shen, Peggy Swarbrick, Fei Fang Published: 2025-11-19 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CY, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21721v1 Behavioral health conditions, which include mental health and substance use disorders, are the leading disease burden in the United States. Peer-run behavioral health organizations (PROs) critically assist individuals facing these conditions by combining mental health services with assistance for needs such as income, employment, and housing. However, limited funds and staffing make it difficult for PROs to address all service user needs. To assist peer providers at PROs with their day-to-day tasks, we introduce PeerCoPilot, a large language model (LLM)-powered assistant that helps peer providers create wellness plans, construct step-by-step goals, and locate organizational resources to support these goals. PeerCoPilot ensures information reliability through a retrieval-augmented generation pipeline backed by a large database of over 1,300 vetted resources. We conducted human evaluations with 15 peer providers and 6 service users and found that over 90% of users supported using PeerCoPilot. Moreover, we demonstrated that PeerCoPilot provides more reliable and specific information than a baseline LLM. PeerCoPilot is now used by a group of 5-10 peer providers at CSPNJ, a large behavioral health organization serving over 10,000 service users, and we are actively expanding PeerCoPilot's use. --- ### When Harmless Words Harm: A New Threat to LLM Safety via Conceptual Triggers Authors: Zhaoxin Zhang, Borui Chen, Yiming Hu, Youyang Qu, Tianqing Zhu, Longxiang Gao Published: 2025-11-19 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21718v1 Recent research on large language model (LLM) jailbreaks has primarily focused on techniques that bypass safety mechanisms to elicit overtly harmful outputs. However, such efforts often overlook attacks that exploit the model's capacity for abstract generalization, creating a critical blind spot in current alignment strategies. This gap enables adversaries to induce objectionable content by subtly manipulating the implicit social values embedded in model outputs. In this paper, we introduce MICM, a novel, model-agnostic jailbreak method that targets the aggregate value structure reflected in LLM responses. Drawing on conceptual morphology theory, MICM encodes specific configurations of nuanced concepts into a fixed prompt template through a predefined set of phrases. These phrases act as conceptual triggers, steering model outputs toward a specific value stance without triggering conventional safety filters. We evaluate MICM across five advanced LLMs, including GPT-4o, Deepseek-R1, and Qwen3-8B. Experimental results show that MICM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art jailbreak techniques, achieving high success rates with minimal rejection. Our findings reveal a critical vulnerability in commercial LLMs: their safety mechanisms remain susceptible to covert manipulation of underlying value alignment. --- ### CrossCheck-Bench: Diagnosing Compositional Failures in Multimodal Conflict Resolution Authors: Baoliang Tian, Yuxuan Si, Jilong Wang, Lingyao Li, Zhongyuan Bao, Zineng Zhou, Tao Wang, Sixu Li, Ziyao Xu, Mingze Wang, Zhouzhuo Zhang, Zhihao Wang et al. Published: 2025-11-19 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21717v2 Multimodal Large Language Models are primarily trained and evaluated on aligned image-text pairs, which leaves their ability to detect and resolve real-world inconsistencies largely unexplored. In open-domain applications visual and textual cues often conflict, requiring models to perform structured reasoning beyond surface-level alignment. We introduce CrossCheck-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating contradiction detection in multimodal inputs. The benchmark adopts a hierarchical task framework covering three levels of reasoning complexity and defines seven atomic capabilities essential for resolving cross-modal inconsistencies. CrossCheck-Bench includes 15k question-answer pairs sourced from real-world artifacts with synthetically injected contradictions. The dataset is constructed through a multi-stage annotation pipeline involving more than 450 expert hours to ensure semantic validity and calibrated difficulty across perception, integration, and reasoning. We evaluate 13 state-of-the-art vision-language models and observe a consistent performance drop as tasks shift from perceptual matching to logical contradiction detection. Most models perform well on isolated entity recognition but fail when multiple clues must be synthesized for conflict reasoning. Capability-level analysis further reveals uneven skill acquisition, especially in tasks requiring multi-step inference or rule-based validation. Additional probing shows that conventional prompting strategies such as Chain-of-Thought and Set-of-Mark yield only marginal gains. By contrast, methods that interleave symbolic reasoning with grounded visual processing achieve more stable improvements. These results highlight a persistent bottleneck in multimodal reasoning and suggest new directions for building models capable of robust cross-modal verification. --- ### An Optimized Machine Learning Classifier for Detecting Fake Reviews Using Extracted Features Authors: Shabbir Anees, Anshuman, Ayush Chaurasia, Prathmesh Bogar Published: 2025-11-19 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21716v1 It is well known that fraudulent reviews cast doubt on the legitimacy and dependability of online purchases. The most recent development that leads customers towards darkness is the appearance of human reviews in computer-generated (CG) ones. In this work, we present an advanced machine-learning-based system that analyses these reviews produced by AI with remarkable precision. Our method integrates advanced text preprocessing, multi-modal feature extraction, Harris Hawks Optimization (HHO) for feature selection, and a stacking ensemble classifier. We implemented this methodology on a public dataset of 40,432 Original (OR) and Computer-Generated (CG) reviews. From an initial set of 13,539 features, HHO selected the most applicable 1,368 features, achieving an 89.9% dimensionality reduction. Our final stacking model achieved 95.40% accuracy, 92.81% precision, 95.01% recall, and a 93.90% F1-Score, which demonstrates that the combination of ensemble learning and bio-inspired optimisation is an effective method for machine-generated text recognition. Because large-scale review analytics commonly run on cloud platforms, privacy-preserving techniques such as differential approaches and secure outsourcing are essential to protect user data in these systems. --- ### TTF: A Trapezoidal Temporal Fusion Framework for LTV Forecasting in Douyin Authors: Yibing Wan, Zhengxiong Guan, Chaoli Zhang, Xiaoyang Li, Lai Xu, Beibei Jia, Zhenzhe Zheng, Fan Wu Published: 2025-11-19 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17639v1 In the user growth scenario, Internet companies invest heavily in paid acquisition channels to acquire new users. But sustainable growth depends on acquired users' generating lifetime value (LTV) exceeding customer acquisition cost (CAC). In order to maximize LTV/CAC ratio, it is crucial to predict channel-level LTV in an early stage for further optimization of budget allocation. The LTV forecasting problem is significantly different from traditional time series forecasting problems, and there are three main challenges. Firstly, it is an unaligned multi-time series forecasting problem that each channel has a number of LTV series of different activation dates. Secondly, to predict in the early stage, it faces the imbalanced short-input long-output (SILO) challenge. Moreover, compared with the commonly used time series datasets, the real LTV series are volatile and non-stationary, with more frequent fluctuations and higher variance. In this work, we propose a novel framework called Trapezoidal Temporal Fusion (TTF) to address the above challenges. We introduce a trapezoidal multi-time series module to deal with data unalignment and SILO challenges, and output accurate predictions with a multi-tower structure called MT-FusionNet. The framework has been deployed to the online system for Douyin. Compared to the previously deployed online model, MAPEp decreased by 4.3%, and MAPEa decreased by 3.2%, where MAPEp denotes the point-wise MAPE of the LTV curve and MAPEa denotes the MAPE of the aggregated LTV. ---