# Research Papers — 2025-11 · bundle page 86 of 197 > Full-text markdown of papers #4251–4300 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/86 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-11/page/85.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-11/page/87.md) ### Mitigating Label Length Bias in Large Language Models Authors: Mario Sanz-Guerrero, Katharina von der Wense Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14385v1 Large language models (LLMs) are powerful zero- and few-shot learners. However, when predicting over a set of candidate options, LLMs suffer from label biases, and existing calibration methods overlook biases arising from multi-token class labels. We tackle an issue we call label length bias, where labels of different lengths are treated inconsistently, even after standard length normalization. To mitigate it, we propose normalized contextual calibration (NCC), an effective method that normalizes and calibrates predictions at the full-label level. NCC achieves statistically significant improvements over prior approaches across multiple datasets and models, with gains of up to 10% F1. Moreover, NCC extends bias mitigation to broader tasks such as multiple-choice question answering. Our analysis shows that, when combined with in-context learning, NCC is less sensitive to few-shot example selection, requires fewer examples for competitive performance, and produces more reliable confidence estimates. These findings highlight the importance of mitigating full-label biases to improve the performance and robustness of LLM-based methods, particularly in real-world applications where class labels naturally consist of multiple tokens. --- ### A Quantitative Method for Shoulder Presentation Evaluation in Biometric Identity Documents Authors: Alfonso Pedro Ridao Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14376v1 International standards for biometric identity documents mandate strict compliance with pose requirements, including the square presentation of a subject's shoulders. However, the literature on automated quality assessment offers few quantitative methods for evaluating this specific attribute. This paper proposes a Shoulder Presentation Evaluation (SPE) algorithm to address this gap. The method quantifies shoulder yaw and roll using only the 3D coordinates of two shoulder landmarks provided by common pose estimation frameworks. The algorithm was evaluated on a dataset of 121 portrait images. The resulting SPE scores demonstrated a strong Pearson correlation (r approx. 0.80) with human-assigned labels. An analysis of the metric's filtering performance, using an adapted Error-versus-Discard methodology, confirmed its utility in identifying non-compliant samples. The proposed algorithm is a viable lightweight tool for automated compliance checking in enrolment systems. --- ### Blur-Robust Detection via Feature Restoration: An End-to-End Framework for Prior-Guided Infrared UAV Target Detection Authors: Xiaolin Wang, Houzhang Fang, Qingshan Li, Lu Wang, Yi Chang, Luxin Yan Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14371v1 Infrared unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) target images often suffer from motion blur degradation caused by rapid sensor movement, significantly reducing contrast between target and background. Generally, detection performance heavily depends on the discriminative feature representation between target and background. Existing methods typically treat deblurring as a preprocessing step focused on visual quality, while neglecting the enhancement of task-relevant features crucial for detection. Improving feature representation for detection under blur conditions remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel Joint Feature-Domain Deblurring and Detection end-to-end framework, dubbed JFD3. We design a dual-branch architecture with shared weights, where the clear branch guides the blurred branch to enhance discriminative feature representation. Specifically, we first introduce a lightweight feature restoration network, where features from the clear branch serve as feature-level supervision to guide the blurred branch, thereby enhancing its distinctive capability for detection. We then propose a frequency structure guidance module that refines the structure prior from the restoration network and integrates it into shallow detection layers to enrich target structural information. Finally, a feature consistency self-supervised loss is imposed between the dual-branch detection backbones, driving the blurred branch to approximate the feature representations of the clear one. Wealso construct a benchmark, named IRBlurUAV, containing 30,000 simulated and 4,118 real infrared UAV target images with diverse motion blur. Extensive experiments on IRBlurUAV demonstrate that JFD3 achieves superior detection performance while maintaining real-time efficiency. --- ### O3SLM: Open Weight, Open Data, and Open Vocabulary Sketch-Language Model Authors: Rishi Gupta, Mukilan Karuppasamy, Shyam Marjit, Aditay Tripathi, Anirban Chakraborty Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14368v2 While Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, their ability to interpret abstract visual inputs remains limited. Specifically, they struggle to comprehend hand-drawn sketches, a modality that offers an intuitive means of expressing concepts that are difficult to describe textually. We identify the primary bottleneck as the absence of a large-scale dataset that jointly models sketches, photorealistic images, and corresponding natural language instructions. To address this, we present two key contributions: (1) a new, large-scale dataset of image-sketch-instruction triplets designed to facilitate both pretraining and instruction tuning, and (2) O3SLM, an LVLM trained on this dataset. Comprehensive evaluations on multiple sketch-based tasks: (a) object localization, (b) counting, (c) image retrieval i.e., (SBIR and fine-grained SBIR), and (d) visual question answering (VQA); while incorporating the three existing sketch datasets, namely QuickDraw!, Sketchy, and Tu Berlin, along with our generated SketchVCL dataset, show that O3SLM achieves state-of-the-art performance, substantially outperforming existing LVLMs in sketch comprehension and reasoning. --- ### O3SLM: Open Weight, Open Data, and Open Vocabulary Sketch-Language Model Authors: Rishi Gupta, Mukilan Karuppasamy, Shyam Marjit, Aditay Tripathi, Anirban Chakraborty Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14368v1 While Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, their ability to interpret abstract visual inputs remains limited. Specifically, they struggle to comprehend hand-drawn sketches, a modality that offers an intuitive means of expressing concepts that are difficult to describe textually. We identify the primary bottleneck as the absence of a large-scale dataset that jointly models sketches, photorealistic images, and corresponding natural language instructions. To address this, we present two key contributions: (1) a new, large-scale dataset of image-sketch-instruction triplets designed to facilitate both pretraining and instruction tuning, and (2) O3SLM, an LVLM trained on this dataset. Comprehensive evaluations on multiple sketch-based tasks: (a) object localization, (b) counting, (c) image retrieval i.e., (SBIR and fine-grained SBIR), and (d) visual question answering (VQA); while incorporating the three existing sketch datasets, namely QuickDraw!, Sketchy, and Tu Berlin, along with our generated SketchVCL dataset, show that O3SLM achieves state-of-the-art performance, substantially outperforming existing LVLMs in sketch comprehension and reasoning. --- ### ATLAS: A High-Difficulty, Multidisciplinary Benchmark for Frontier Scientific Reasoning Authors: Hongwei Liu, Junnan Liu, Shudong Liu, Haodong Duan, Yuqiang Li, Mao Su, Xiaohong Liu, Guangtao Zhai, Xinyu Fang, Qianhong Ma, Taolin Zhang, Zihan Ma et al. Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14366v2 The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to performance saturation on many established benchmarks, questioning their ability to distinguish frontier models. Concurrently, existing high-difficulty benchmarks often suffer from narrow disciplinary focus, oversimplified answer formats, and vulnerability to data contamination, creating a fidelity gap with real-world scientific inquiry. To address these challenges, we introduce ATLAS (AGI-Oriented Testbed for Logical Application in Science), a large-scale, high-difficulty, and cross-disciplinary evaluation suite composed of approximately 800 original problems. Developed by domain experts (PhD-level and above), ATLAS spans seven core scientific fields: mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, earth science, and materials science. Its key features include: (1) High Originality and Contamination Resistance, with all questions newly created or substantially adapted to prevent test data leakage; (2) Cross-Disciplinary Focus, designed to assess models' ability to integrate knowledge and reason across scientific domains; (3) High-Fidelity Answers, prioritizing complex, open-ended answers involving multi-step reasoning and LaTeX-formatted expressions over simple multiple-choice questions; and (4) Rigorous Quality Control, employing a multi-stage process of expert peer review and adversarial testing to ensure question difficulty, scientific value, and correctness. We also propose a robust evaluation paradigm using a panel of LLM judges for automated, nuanced assessment of complex answers. Preliminary results on leading models demonstrate ATLAS's effectiveness in differentiating their advanced scientific reasoning capabilities. We plan to develop ATLAS into a long-term, open, community-driven platform to provide a reliable "ruler" for progress toward Artificial General Intelligence. --- ### ATLAS: A High-Difficulty, Multidisciplinary Benchmark for Frontier Scientific Reasoning Authors: Hongwei Liu, Junnan Liu, Shudong Liu, Haodong Duan, Yuqiang Li, Mao Su, Xiaohong Liu, Guangtao Zhai, Xinyu Fang, Qianhong Ma, Taolin Zhang, Zihan Ma et al. Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14366v1 The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to performance saturation on many established benchmarks, questioning their ability to distinguish frontier models. Concurrently, existing high-difficulty benchmarks often suffer from narrow disciplinary focus, oversimplified answer formats, and vulnerability to data contamination, creating a fidelity gap with real-world scientific inquiry. To address these challenges, we introduce ATLAS (AGI-Oriented Testbed for Logical Application in Science), a large-scale, high-difficulty, and cross-disciplinary evaluation suite composed of approximately 800 original problems. Developed by domain experts (PhD-level and above), ATLAS spans seven core scientific fields: mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, earth science, and materials science. Its key features include: (1) High Originality and Contamination Resistance, with all questions newly created or substantially adapted to prevent test data leakage; (2) Cross-Disciplinary Focus, designed to assess models' ability to integrate knowledge and reason across scientific domains; (3) High-Fidelity Answers, prioritizing complex, open-ended answers involving multi-step reasoning and LaTeX-formatted expressions over simple multiple-choice questions; and (4) Rigorous Quality Control, employing a multi-stage process of expert peer review and adversarial testing to ensure question difficulty, scientific value, and correctness. We also propose a robust evaluation paradigm using a panel of LLM judges for automated, nuanced assessment of complex answers. Preliminary results on leading models demonstrate ATLAS's effectiveness in differentiating their advanced scientific reasoning capabilities. We plan to develop ATLAS into a long-term, open, community-driven platform to provide a reliable "ruler" for progress toward Artificial General Intelligence. --- ### The Tokenization Bottleneck: How Vocabulary Extension Improves Chemistry Representation Learning in Pretrained Language Models Authors: Prathamesh Kalamkar, Ned Letcher, Meissane Chami, Sahger Lad, Shayan Mohanty, Prasanna Pendse Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14365v1 The application of large language models (LLMs) to chemistry is frequently hampered by a "tokenization bottleneck", where tokenizers tuned on general-domain text tend to fragment chemical representations such as SMILES into semantically uninformative sub-tokens. This paper introduces a principled methodology to resolve this bottleneck by unifying the representation of natural language and molecular structures within a single model. Our approach involves targeted vocabulary extension-augmenting a pretrained LLM's vocabulary with chemically salient tokens, followed by continued pretraining on chemistry-domain text to integrate this new knowledge. We provide an empirical demonstration of the effectiveness of this strategy, showing that our methodology leads to superior performance on a range of downstream chemical tasks. --- ### SciRAG: Adaptive, Citation-Aware, and Outline-Guided Retrieval and Synthesis for Scientific Literature Authors: Hang Ding, Yilun Zhao, Tiansheng Hu, Manasi Patwardhan, Arman Cohan Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.DL, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14362v1 The accelerating growth of scientific publications has intensified the need for scalable, trustworthy systems to synthesize knowledge across diverse literature. While recent retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods have improved access to scientific information, they often overlook citation graph structure, adapt poorly to complex queries, and yield fragmented, hard-to-verify syntheses. We introduce SciRAG, an open-source framework for scientific literature exploration that addresses these gaps through three key innovations: (1) adaptive retrieval that flexibly alternates between sequential and parallel evidence gathering; (2) citation-aware symbolic reasoning that leverages citation graphs to organize and filter supporting documents; and (3) outline-guided synthesis that plans, critiques, and refines answers to ensure coherence and transparent attribution. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks such as QASA and ScholarQA demonstrate that SciRAG outperforms prior systems in factual accuracy and synthesis quality, establishing a new foundation for reliable, large-scale scientific knowledge aggregation. --- ### Clinically-Validated Innovative Mobile Application for Assessing Blinking and Eyelid Movements Authors: Gustavo Adolpho Bonesso, Carlos Marcelo Gurjão de Godoy, Tammy Hentona Osaki, Midori Hentona Osaki, Bárbara Moreira Ribeiro Trindade dos Santos, Juliana Yuka Washiya, Regina Célia Coelho Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14361v2 Blinking is a vital physiological process that protects and maintains the health of the ocular surface. Objective assessment of eyelid movements remains challenging due to the complexity, cost, and limited clinical applicability of existing tools. This study presents the Bapp (Blink Application), a mobile application developed using the Flutter framework and integrated with Google ML Kit for on-device, real-time analysis of eyelid movements, and its clinical validation. The validation was performed using 45 videos from patients, whose blinks were manually annotated by an ophthalmology specialist as the ground truth. The Bapp's performance was evaluated using standard metrics, with results demonstrating 98.4% precision, 96.9% recall, and an overall accuracy of 98.3%. These outcomes confirm the reliability of the Bapp as a portable, accessible, and objective tool for monitoring eyelid movements. The application offers a promising alternative to traditional manual blink counting, supporting continuous ocular health monitoring and postoperative evaluation in clinical environments. --- ### IBGS: Image-Based Gaussian Splatting Authors: Hoang Chuong Nguyen, Wei Mao, Jose M. Alvarez, Miaomiao Liu Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14357v1 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as a fast, high-quality method for novel view synthesis (NVS). However, its use of low-degree spherical harmonics limits its ability to capture spatially varying color and view-dependent effects such as specular highlights. Existing works augment Gaussians with either a global texture map, which struggles with complex scenes, or per-Gaussian texture maps, which introduces high storage overhead. We propose Image-Based Gaussian Splatting, an efficient alternative that leverages high-resolution source images for fine details and view-specific color modeling. Specifically, we model each pixel color as a combination of a base color from standard 3DGS rendering and a learned residual inferred from neighboring training images. This promotes accurate surface alignment and enables rendering images of high-frequency details and accurate view-dependent effects. Experiments on standard NVS benchmarks show that our method significantly outperforms prior Gaussian Splatting approaches in rendering quality, without increasing the storage footprint. --- ### ARC-Chapter: Structuring Hour-Long Videos into Navigable Chapters and Hierarchical Summaries Authors: Junfu Pu, Teng Wang, Yixiao Ge, Yuying Ge, Chen Li, Ying Shan Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14349v1 The proliferation of hour-long videos (e.g., lectures, podcasts, documentaries) has intensified demand for efficient content structuring. However, existing approaches are constrained by small-scale training with annotations that are typical short and coarse, restricting generalization to nuanced transitions in long videos. We introduce ARC-Chapter, the first large-scale video chaptering model trained on over million-level long video chapters, featuring bilingual, temporally grounded, and hierarchical chapter annotations. To achieve this goal, we curated a bilingual English-Chinese chapter dataset via a structured pipeline that unifies ASR transcripts, scene texts, visual captions into multi-level annotations, from short title to long summaries. We demonstrate clear performance improvements with data scaling, both in data volume and label intensity. Moreover, we design a new evaluation metric termed GRACE, which incorporates many-to-one segment overlaps and semantic similarity, better reflecting real-world chaptering flexibility. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ARC-Chapter establishes a new state-of-the-art by a significant margin, outperforming the previous best by 14.0% in F1 score and 11.3% in SODA score. Moreover, ARC-Chapter shows excellent transferability, improving the state-of-the-art on downstream tasks like dense video captioning on YouCook2. --- ### Enforcing hidden physics in physics-informed neural networks Authors: Nanxi Chen, Sifan Wang, Rujin Ma, Airong Chen, Chuanjie Cui Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.LG, physics.comp-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14348v2 Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) represent a new paradigm for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) by integrating physical laws into the learning process of neural networks. However, ensuring that such frameworks fully reflect the physical structure embedded in the governing equations remains an open challenge, particularly for maintaining robustness across diverse scientific problems. In this work, we address this issue by introducing a simple, generalized, yet robust irreversibility-regularized strategy that enforces hidden physical laws as soft constraints during training, thereby recovering the missing physics associated with irreversible processes in the conventional PINN. This approach ensures that the learned solutions consistently respect the intrinsic one-way nature of irreversible physical processes. Across a wide range of benchmarks spanning traveling wave propagation, steady combustion, ice melting, corrosion evolution, and crack growth, we observe substantial performance improvements over the conventional PINN, demonstrating that our regularization scheme reduces predictive errors by more than an order of magnitude, while requiring only minimal modification to existing PINN frameworks. --- ### Silhouette-to-Contour Registration: Aligning Intraoral Scan Models with Cephalometric Radiographs Authors: Yiyi Miao, Taoyu Wu, Ji Jiang, Tong Chen, Zhe Tang, Zhengyong Jiang, Angelos Stefanidis, Limin Yu, Jionglong Su Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14343v1 Reliable 3D-2D alignment between intraoral scan (IOS) models and lateral cephalometric radiographs is critical for orthodontic diagnosis, yet conventional intensity-driven registration methods struggle under real clinical conditions, where cephalograms exhibit projective magnification, geometric distortion, low-contrast dental crowns, and acquisition-dependent variation. These factors hinder the stability of appearance-based similarity metrics and often lead to convergence failures or anatomically implausible alignments. To address these limitations, we propose DentalSCR, a pose-stable, contour-guided framework for accurate and interpretable silhouette-to-contour registration. Our method first constructs a U-Midline Dental Axis (UMDA) to establish a unified cross-arch anatomical coordinate system, thereby stabilizing initialization and standardizing projection geometry across cases. Using this reference frame, we generate radiograph-like projections via a surface-based DRR formulation with coronal-axis perspective and Gaussian splatting, which preserves clinical source-object-detector magnification and emphasizes external silhouettes. Registration is then formulated as a 2D similarity transform optimized with a symmetric bidirectional Chamfer distance under a hierarchical coarse-to-fine schedule, enabling both large capture range and subpixel-level contour agreement. We evaluate DentalSCR on 34 expert-annotated clinical cases. Experimental results demonstrate substantial reductions in landmark error-particularly at posterior teeth-tighter dispersion on the lower jaw, and low Chamfer and controlled Hausdorff distances at the curve level. These findings indicate that DentalSCR robustly handles real-world cephalograms and delivers high-fidelity, clinically inspectable 3D--2D alignment, outperforming conventional baselines. --- ### ConInstruct: Evaluating Large Language Models on Conflict Detection and Resolution in Instructions Authors: Xingwei He, Qianru Zhang, Pengfei Chen, Guanhua Chen, Linlin Yu, Yuan Yuan, Siu-Ming Yiu Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14342v2 Instruction-following is a critical capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). While existing works primarily focus on assessing how well LLMs adhere to user instructions, they often overlook scenarios where instructions contain conflicting constraints-a common occurrence in complex prompts. The behavior of LLMs under such conditions remains under-explored. To bridge this gap, we introduce ConInstruct, a benchmark specifically designed to assess LLMs' ability to detect and resolve conflicts within user instructions. Using this dataset, we evaluate LLMs' conflict detection performance and analyze their conflict resolution behavior. Our experiments reveal two key findings: (1) Most proprietary LLMs exhibit strong conflict detection capabilities, whereas among open-source models, only DeepSeek-R1 demonstrates similarly strong performance. DeepSeek-R1 and Claude-4.5-Sonnet achieve the highest average F1-scores at 91.5% and 87.3%, respectively, ranking first and second overall. (2) Despite their strong conflict detection abilities, LLMs rarely explicitly notify users about the conflicts or request clarification when faced with conflicting constraints. These results underscore a critical shortcoming in current LLMs and highlight an important area for future improvement when designing instruction-following LLMs. --- ### Going Places: Place Recognition in Artificial and Natural Systems Authors: Michael Milford, Tobias Fischer Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14341v1 Place recognition, the ability to identify previously visited locations, is critical for both biological navigation and autonomous systems. This review synthesizes findings from robotic systems, animal studies, and human research to explore how different systems encode and recall place. We examine the computational and representational strategies employed across artificial systems, animals, and humans, highlighting convergent solutions such as topological mapping, cue integration, and memory management. Animal systems reveal evolved mechanisms for multimodal navigation and environmental adaptation, while human studies provide unique insights into semantic place concepts, cultural influences, and introspective capabilities. Artificial systems showcase scalable architectures and data-driven models. We propose a unifying set of concepts by which to consider and develop place recognition mechanisms and identify key challenges such as generalization, robustness, and environmental variability. This review aims to foster innovations in artificial localization by connecting future developments in artificial place recognition systems to insights from both animal navigation research and human spatial cognition studies. --- ### ArchMap: Arch-Flattening and Knowledge-Guided Vision Language Model for Tooth Counting and Structured Dental Understanding Authors: Bohan Zhang, Yiyi Miao, Taoyu Wu, Tong Chen, Ji Jiang, Zhuoxiao Li, Zhe Tang, Limin Yu, Jionglong Su Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14336v1 A structured understanding of intraoral 3D scans is essential for digital orthodontics. However, existing deep-learning approaches rely heavily on modality-specific training, large annotated datasets, and controlled scanning conditions, which limit generalization across devices and hinder deployment in real clinical workflows. Moreover, raw intraoral meshes exhibit substantial variation in arch pose, incomplete geometry caused by occlusion or tooth contact, and a lack of texture cues, making unified semantic interpretation highly challenging. To address these limitations, we propose ArchMap, a training-free and knowledge-guided framework for robust structured dental understanding. ArchMap first introduces a geometry-aware arch-flattening module that standardizes raw 3D meshes into spatially aligned, continuity-preserving multi-view projections. We then construct a Dental Knowledge Base (DKB) encoding hierarchical tooth ontology, dentition-stage policies, and clinical semantics to constrain the symbolic reasoning space. We validate ArchMap on 1060 pre-/post-orthodontic cases, demonstrating robust performance in tooth counting, anatomical partitioning, dentition-stage classification, and the identification of clinical conditions such as crowding, missing teeth, prosthetics, and caries. Compared with supervised pipelines and prompted VLM baselines, ArchMap achieves higher accuracy, reduced semantic drift, and superior stability under sparse or artifact-prone conditions. As a fully training-free system, ArchMap demonstrates that combining geometric normalization with ontology-guided multimodal reasoning offers a practical and scalable solution for the structured analysis of 3D intraoral scans in modern digital orthodontics. --- ### When Words Change the Model: Sensitivity of LLMs for Constraint Programming Modelling Authors: Alessio Pellegrino, Jacopo Mauro Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14334v2 One of the long-standing goals in optimisation and constraint programming is to describe a problem in natural language and automatically obtain an executable, efficient model. Large language models appear to bring this vision closer, showing impressive results in automatically generating models for classical benchmarks. However, much of this apparent success may derive from data contamination rather than genuine reasoning: many standard CP problems are likely included in the training data of these models. To examine this hypothesis, we systematically rephrased and perturbed a set of well-known CSPLib problems to preserve their structure while modifying their context and introducing misleading elements. We then compared the models produced by three representative LLMs across original and modified descriptions. Our qualitative analysis shows that while LLMs can produce syntactically valid and semantically plausible models, their performance drops sharply under contextual and linguistic variation, revealing shallow understanding and sensitivity to wording. --- ### Step by Step Network Authors: Dongchen Han, Tianzhu Ye, Zhuofan Xia, Kaiyi Chen, Yulin Wang, Hanting Chen, Gao Huang Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14329v1 Scaling up network depth is a fundamental pursuit in neural architecture design, as theory suggests that deeper models offer exponentially greater capability. Benefiting from the residual connections, modern neural networks can scale up to more than one hundred layers and enjoy wide success. However, as networks continue to deepen, current architectures often struggle to realize their theoretical capacity improvements, calling for more advanced designs to further unleash the potential of deeper networks. In this paper, we identify two key barriers that obstruct residual models from scaling deeper: shortcut degradation and limited width. Shortcut degradation hinders deep-layer learning, while the inherent depth-width trade-off imposes limited width. To mitigate these issues, we propose a generalized residual architecture dubbed Step by Step Network (StepsNet) to bridge the gap between theoretical potential and practical performance of deep models. Specifically, we separate features along the channel dimension and let the model learn progressively via stacking blocks with increasing width. The resulting method mitigates the two identified problems and serves as a versatile macro design applicable to various models. Extensive experiments show that our method consistently outperforms residual models across diverse tasks, including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, and language modeling. These results position StepsNet as a superior generalization of the widely adopted residual architecture. --- ### LSP-YOLO: A Lightweight Single-Stage Network for Sitting Posture Recognition on Embedded Devices Authors: Nanjun Li, Ziyue Hao, Quanqiang Wang, Xuanyin Wang Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14322v1 With the rise in sedentary behavior, health problems caused by poor sitting posture have drawn increasing attention. Most existing methods, whether using invasive sensors or computer vision, rely on two-stage pipelines, which result in high intrusiveness, intensive computation, and poor real-time performance on embedded edge devices. Inspired by YOLOv11-Pose, a lightweight single-stage network for sitting posture recognition on embedded edge devices termed LSP-YOLO was proposed. By integrating partial convolution(PConv) and Similarity-Aware Activation Module(SimAM), a lightweight module, Light-C3k2, was designed to reduce computational cost while maintaining feature extraction capability. In the recognition head, keypoints were directly mapped to posture classes through pointwise convolution, and intermediate supervision was employed to enable efficient fusion of pose estimation and classification. Furthermore, a dataset containing 5,000 images across six posture categories was constructed for model training and testing. The smallest trained model, LSP-YOLO-n, achieved 94.2% accuracy and 251 Fps on personal computer(PC) with a model size of only 1.9 MB. Meanwhile, real-time and high-accuracy inference under constrained computational resources was demonstrated on the SV830C + GC030A platform. The proposed approach is characterized by high efficiency, lightweight design and deployability, making it suitable for smart classrooms, rehabilitation, and human-computer interaction applications. --- ### Learning with Statistical Equality Constraints Authors: Aneesh Barthakur, Luiz F. O. Chamon Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14320v2 As machine learning applications grow increasingly ubiquitous and complex, they face an increasing set of requirements beyond accuracy. The prevalent approach to handle this challenge is to aggregate a weighted combination of requirement violation penalties into the training objective. To be effective, this approach requires careful tuning of these hyperparameters (weights), involving trial-and-error and cross-validation, which becomes ineffective even for a moderate number of requirements. These issues are exacerbated when the requirements involve parities or equalities, as is the case in fairness and boundary value problems. An alternative technique uses constrained optimization to formulate these learning problems. Yet, existing approximation and generalization guarantees do not apply to problems involving equality constraints. In this work, we derive a generalization theory for equality-constrained statistical learning problems, showing that their solutions can be approximated using samples and rich parametrizations. Using these results, we propose a practical algorithm based on solving a sequence of unconstrained, empirical learning problems. We showcase its effectiveness and the new formulations enabled by equality constraints in fair learning, interpolating classifiers, and boundary value problems. --- ### Intervention Efficiency and Perturbation Validation Framework: Capacity-Aware and Robust Clinical Model Selection under the Rashomon Effect Authors: Yuwen Zhang, Viet Tran, Paul Weng Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14317v7 In clinical machine learning, the coexistence of multiple models with comparable performance (a manifestation of the Rashomon Effect) poses fundamental challenges for trustworthy deployment and evaluation. Small, imbalanced, and noisy datasets, coupled with high-dimensional and weakly identified clinical features, amplify this multiplicity and make conventional validation schemes unreliable. As a result, selecting among equally performing models becomes uncertain, particularly when resource constraints and operational priorities are not considered by conventional metrics like F1 score. To address these issues, we propose two complementary tools for robust model assessment and selection: Intervention Efficiency (IE) and the Perturbation Validation Framework (PVF). IE is a capacity-aware metric that quantifies how efficiently a model identifies actionable true positives when only limited interventions are feasible, thereby linking predictive performance with clinical utility. PVF introduces a structured approach to assess the stability of models under data perturbations, identifying models whose performance remains most invariant across noisy or shifted validation sets. Empirical results on synthetic and real-world healthcare datasets show that using these tools facilitates the selection of models that generalize more robustly and align with capacity constraints, offering a new direction for tackling the Rashomon Effect in clinical settings. --- ### Dental3R: Geometry-Aware Pairing for Intraoral 3D Reconstruction from Sparse-View Photographs Authors: Yiyi Miao, Taoyu Wu, Tong Chen, Ji Jiang, Zhe Tang, Zhengyong Jiang, Angelos Stefanidis, Limin Yu, Jionglong Su Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14315v1 Intraoral 3D reconstruction is fundamental to digital orthodontics, yet conventional methods like intraoral scanning are inaccessible for remote tele-orthodontics, which typically relies on sparse smartphone imagery. While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) shows promise for novel view synthesis, its application to the standard clinical triad of unposed anterior and bilateral buccal photographs is challenging. The large view baselines, inconsistent illumination, and specular surfaces common in intraoral settings can destabilize simultaneous pose and geometry estimation. Furthermore, sparse-view photometric supervision often induces a frequency bias, leading to over-smoothed reconstructions that lose critical diagnostic details. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{Dental3R}, a pose-free, graph-guided pipeline for robust, high-fidelity reconstruction from sparse intraoral photographs. Our method first constructs a Geometry-Aware Pairing Strategy (GAPS) to intelligently select a compact subgraph of high-value image pairs. The GAPS focuses on correspondence matching, thereby improving the stability of the geometry initialization and reducing memory usage. Building on the recovered poses and point cloud, we train the 3DGS model with a wavelet-regularized objective. By enforcing band-limited fidelity using a discrete wavelet transform, our approach preserves fine enamel boundaries and interproximal edges while suppressing high-frequency artifacts. We validate our approach on a large-scale dataset of 950 clinical cases and an additional video-based test set of 195 cases. Experimental results demonstrate that Dental3R effectively handles sparse, unposed inputs and achieves superior novel view synthesis quality for dental occlusion visualization, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. --- ### H-LDM: Hierarchical Latent Diffusion Models for Controllable and Interpretable PCG Synthesis from Clinical Metadata Authors: Chenyang Xu, Siming Li, Hao Wang Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14312v2 Phonocardiogram (PCG) analysis is vital for cardiovascular disease diagnosis, yet the scarcity of labeled pathological data hinders the capability of AI systems. To bridge this, we introduce H-LDM, a Hierarchical Latent Diffusion Model for generating clinically accurate and controllable PCG signals from structured metadata. Our approach features: (1) a multi-scale VAE that learns a physiologically-disentangled latent space, separating rhythm, heart sounds, and murmurs; (2) a hierarchical text-to-biosignal pipeline that leverages rich clinical metadata for fine-grained control over 17 distinct conditions; and (3) an interpretable diffusion process guided by a novel Medical Attention module. Experiments on the PhysioNet CirCor dataset demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, achieving a Fréchet Audio Distance of 9.7, a 92% attribute disentanglement score, and 87.1% clinical validity confirmed by cardiologists. Augmenting diagnostic models with our synthetic data improves the accuracy of rare disease classification by 11.3\%. H-LDM establishes a new direction for data augmentation in cardiac diagnostics, bridging data scarcity with interpretable clinical insights. --- ### Iterative Diffusion-Refined Neural Attenuation Fields for Multi-Source Stationary CT Reconstruction: NAF Meets Diffusion Model Authors: Jiancheng Fang, Shaoyu Wang, Junlin Wang, Weiwen Wu, Yikun Zhang, Qiegen Liu Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14310v2 Multi-source stationary computed tomography (CT) has recently attracted attention for its ability to achieve rapid image reconstruction, making it suitable for time-sensitive clinical and industrial applications. However, practical systems are often constrained by ultra-sparse-view sampling, which significantly degrades reconstruction quality. Traditional methods struggle under ultra-sparse-view settings, where interpolation becomes inaccurate and the resulting reconstructions are unsatisfactory. To address this challenge, this study proposes Diffusion-Refined Neural Attenuation Fields (Diff-NAF), an iterative framework tailored for multi-source stationary CT under ultra-sparse-view conditions. Diff-NAF combines a Neural Attenuation Field representation with a dual-branch conditional diffusion model. The process begins by training an initial NAF using ultra-sparse-view projections. New projections are then generated through an Angle-Prior Guided Projection Synthesis strategy that exploits inter view priors, and are subsequently refined by a Diffusion-driven Reuse Projection Refinement Module. The refined projections are incorporated as pseudo-labels into the training set for the next iteration. Through iterative refinement, Diff-NAF progressively enhances projection completeness and reconstruction fidelity under ultra-sparse-view conditions, ultimately yielding high-quality CT reconstructions. Experimental results on multiple simulated 3D CT volumes and real projection data demonstrate that Diff-NAF achieves the best performance under ultra-sparse-view conditions. --- ### Audio Question Answering with GRPO-Based Fine-Tuning and Calibrated Segment-Level Predictions Authors: Marcel Gibier, Nolwenn Celton, Raphaël Duroselle, Pierre Serrano, Olivier Boeffard, Jean-François Bonastre Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.SD, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14307v1 In this report, we describe our submission to Track 5 of the DCASE 2025 Challenge for the task of Audio Question Answering(AQA). Our system leverages the SSL backbone BEATs to extract frame-level audio features, which are then processed by a classification head to generate segment-level predictions of acoustic events, following the Audioset ontology. These segment-level predictions are subsequently calibrated before producing event-level predictions. Finally, these predictions are incorporated into a structured prompt, along with the question and candidate answers. This prompt is then fed to a fine-tuned version of Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, trained using the GRPO algorithm with a simple reward function. Our method achieves an accuracy of 62.6 % on the development set, demonstrating the effectiveness of combining acoustic event reasoning with instruction-tuned large language models for AQA. --- ### SAM-Fed: SAM-Guided Federated Semi-Supervised Learning for Medical Image Segmentation Authors: Sahar Nasirihaghighi, Negin Ghamsarian, Yiping Li, Marcel Breeuwer, Raphael Sznitman, Klaus Schoeffmann Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14302v1 Medical image segmentation is clinically important, yet data privacy and the cost of expert annotation limit the availability of labeled data. Federated semi-supervised learning (FSSL) offers a solution but faces two challenges: pseudo-label reliability depends on the strength of local models, and client devices often require compact or heterogeneous architectures due to limited computational resources. These constraints reduce the quality and stability of pseudo-labels, while large models, though more accurate, cannot be trained or used for routine inference on client devices. We propose SAM-Fed, a federated semi-supervised framework that leverages a high-capacity segmentation foundation model to guide lightweight clients during training. SAM-Fed combines dual knowledge distillation with an adaptive agreement mechanism to refine pixel-level supervision. Experiments on skin lesion and polyp segmentation across homogeneous and heterogeneous settings show that SAM-Fed consistently outperforms state-of-the-art FSSL methods. --- ### SteganoBackdoor: Evading Data-Poisoning Defenses via Steganographic Backdoors Authors: Eric Xue, Ruiyi Zhang, Pengtao Xie Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CR, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14301v4 Transformer-based models are highly susceptible to backdoor attacks via supervised fine-tuning (SFT). To red-team existing data-poisoning defenses, prior work has increasingly focused on stylized triggers, synthetic artifacts, and token-level perturbations designed to evade detection. However, this trend has shifted threat models away from naturally occurring semantic triggers and realistic low-budget poisoning settings. Addressing this gap, we introduce SteganoBackdoor, an optimization-based framework that transforms semantic-trigger seeds through autoregressive token replacement, sequentially minimizing embedding overlap with the inference-time trigger while preserving a strong per-sample training-time payload. The resulting SteganoPoisons maintain linguistic fluency and encode the payload across ordinary tokens, such that no individual token carries a concentrated signal and the full payload instead emerges from their exact combination and ordering. Across 18 encoder-based and decoder-only models spanning 120M to 14B parameters, SteganoBackdoor achieves high attack success under sub-percent poisoning budgets and exposes limitations in existing data-poisoning defenses. --- ### DataSage: Multi-agent Collaboration for Insight Discovery with External Knowledge Retrieval, Multi-role Debating, and Multi-path Reasoning Authors: Xiaochuan Liu, Yuanfeng Song, Xiaoming Yin, Xing Chen Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14299v2 In today's data-driven era, fully automated end-to-end data analytics, particularly insight discovery, is critical for discovering actionable insights that assist organizations in making effective decisions. With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), LLM-driven agents have emerged as a promising paradigm for automating data analysis and insight discovery. However, existing data insight agents remain limited in several key aspects, often failing to deliver satisfactory results due to: (1) insufficient utilization of domain knowledge, (2) shallow analytical depth, and (3) error-prone code generation during insight generation. To address these issues, we propose DataSage, a novel multi-agent framework that incorporates three innovative features including external knowledge retrieval to enrich the analytical context, a multi-role debating mechanism to simulate diverse analytical perspectives and deepen analytical depth, and multi-path reasoning to improve the accuracy of the generated code and insights. Extensive experiments on InsightBench demonstrate that DataSage consistently outperforms existing data insight agents across all difficulty levels, offering an effective solution for automated data insight discovery. --- ### AraLingBench A Human-Annotated Benchmark for Evaluating Arabic Linguistic Capabilities of Large Language Models Authors: Mohammad Zbeeb, Hasan Abed Al Kader Hammoud, Sina Mukalled, Nadine Rizk, Fatima Karnib, Issam Lakkis, Ammar Mohanna, Bernard Ghanem Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14295v2 We present AraLingBench: a fully human annotated benchmark for evaluating the Arabic linguistic competence of large language models (LLMs). The benchmark spans five core categories: grammar, morphology, spelling, reading comprehension, and syntax, through 150 expert-designed multiple choice questions that directly assess structural language understanding. Evaluating 35 Arabic and bilingual LLMs reveals that current models demonstrate strong surface level proficiency but struggle with deeper grammatical and syntactic reasoning. AraLingBench highlights a persistent gap between high scores on knowledge-based benchmarks and true linguistic mastery, showing that many models succeed through memorization or pattern recognition rather than authentic comprehension. By isolating and measuring fundamental linguistic skills, AraLingBench provides a diagnostic framework for developing Arabic LLMs. The full evaluation code is publicly available on GitHub. --- ### Segmentwise Pruning in Audio-Language Models Authors: Marcel Gibier, Raphaël Duroselle, Pierre Serrano, Olivier Boeffard, Jean-François Bonastre Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.SD, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14293v1 Recent audio-language models have shown impressive performance across a wide range of audio tasks and are increasingly capable of handling long audio inputs. However, the computing costs in these models heavily depend on sequence length, which can become very large given the nature of audio data. In the vision-language domain, token pruning methods have proven effective in reducing token counts while preserving strong performance on standard benchmarks. In this work, we investigate the relevance and effectiveness of such token selection strategies in the context of audio-language models. We also improve them by proposing a lightweight strategy that takes the time dimension into account. While retaining only a quarter of the initial tokens, our approach results in a relative maximum decrease of 2% in CIDEr on Clotho v2 and a relative maximum decrease of 4% in accuracy on MMAU. --- ### GEN3D: Generating Domain-Free 3D Scenes from a Single Image Authors: Yuxin Zhang, Ziyu Lu, Hongbo Duan, Keyu Fan, Pengting Luo, Peiyu Zhuang, Mengyu Yang, Houde Liu Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14291v1 Despite recent advancements in neural 3D reconstruction, the dependence on dense multi-view captures restricts their broader applicability. Additionally, 3D scene generation is vital for advancing embodied AI and world models, which depend on diverse, high-quality scenes for learning and evaluation. In this work, we propose Gen3d, a novel method for generation of high-quality, wide-scope, and generic 3D scenes from a single image. After the initial point cloud is created by lifting the RGBD image, Gen3d maintains and expands its world model. The 3D scene is finalized through optimizing a Gaussian splatting representation. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate the strong generalization capability and superior performance of our method in generating a world model and Synthesizing high-fidelity and consistent novel views. --- ### NeuralBoneReg: An Instance-Specific Label-Free Point Cloud-Based Method for Multi-Modal Bone Surface Registration Authors: Luohong Wu, Matthias Seibold, Nicola A. Cavalcanti, Yunke Ao, Roman Flepp, Aidana Massalimova, Lilian Calvet, Philipp Fürnstahl Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14286v3 In computer- and robot-assisted orthopedic surgery (CAOS), patient-specific surgical plans derived from preoperative imaging define target locations and implant trajectories. During surgery, these plans must be accurately transferred, relying on precise cross-registration between preoperative and intraoperative data. However, substantial modality heterogeneity across imaging modalities makes this registration challenging and error-prone. Robust, automatic, and modality-agnostic bone surface registration is therefore clinically important. We propose NeuralBoneReg, a self-supervised, surface-based framework that registers bone surfaces using 3D point clouds as a modality-agnostic representation. NeuralBoneReg includes two modules: an implicit neural unsigned distance field (UDF) that learns the preoperative bone model, and an MLP-based registration module that performs global initialization and local refinement by generating transformation hypotheses to align the intraoperative point cloud with the neural UDF. Unlike SOTA supervised methods, NeuralBoneReg operates in a self-supervised manner, without requiring inter-subject training data. We evaluated NeuralBoneReg against baseline methods on two publicly available multi-modal datasets: a CT-ultrasound dataset of the fibula and tibia (UltraBones100k) and a CT-RGB-D dataset of spinal vertebrae (SpineDepth). The evaluation also includes a newly introduced CT-ultrasound dataset of cadaveric subjects containing femur and pelvis (UltraBones-Hip), which will be made publicly available. NeuralBoneReg matches or surpasses existing methods across all datasets, achieving mean RRE/RTE of 1.83°/2.02 mm on UltraBones100k, 1.90°/1.56 mm on UltraBones-Hip, and 3.78°/2.80 mm on SpineDepth. These results demonstrate strong generalizability across anatomies and modalities, providing robust and accurate cross-modal alignment for CAOS. --- ### NeuralSSD: A Neural Solver for Signed Distance Surface Reconstruction Authors: Zi-Chen Xi, Jiahui Huang, Hao-Xiang Chen, Francis Williams, Qun-Ce Xu, Tai-Jiang Mu, Shi-Min Hu Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CV, cs.GR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14283v1 We proposed a generalized method, NeuralSSD, for reconstructing a 3D implicit surface from the widely-available point cloud data. NeuralSSD is a solver-based on the neural Galerkin method, aimed at reconstructing higher-quality and accurate surfaces from input point clouds. Implicit method is preferred due to its ability to accurately represent shapes and its robustness in handling topological changes. However, existing parameterizations of implicit fields lack explicit mechanisms to ensure a tight fit between the surface and input data. To address this, we propose a novel energy equation that balances the reliability of point cloud information. Additionally, we introduce a new convolutional network that learns three-dimensional information to achieve superior optimization results. This approach ensures that the reconstructed surface closely adheres to the raw input points and infers valuable inductive biases from point clouds, resulting in a highly accurate and stable surface reconstruction. NeuralSSD is evaluated on a variety of challenging datasets, including the ShapeNet and Matterport datasets, and achieves state-of-the-art results in terms of both surface reconstruction accuracy and generalizability. --- ### Weight Concentration Regularization for Improving Pruning Robustness Under High Sparsity Authors: Vincent-Daniel Yun, Junhyuk Jo, Sunwoo Lee Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14282v2 Deep neural networks achieve outstanding performance across vision and language tasks, yet their large parameter counts limit deployment in resource-constrained settings. One-shot pruning reduces model size without retraining, but models trained with standard objectives often suffer substantial accuracy drops under aggressive sparsity. Prior work mitigates this drop along two directions: regularizers such as $\ell_1$ and DeepHoyer that shape the weight distribution during training, and pruning-robust optimizers such as SAM, CrAM, and S$^2$SAM that flatten the loss landscape. However, existing regularizers either shrink all weights uniformly ($\ell_1$) or induce scale-invariant sparsity (DeepHoyer), without concentrating weight energy onto a small set of informative parameters. We propose a Weight Concentration Regularizer (WCR), a training-time regularizer that amplifies the magnitude of a small subset of parameters while driving the remainder toward zero, so that magnitude pruning predominantly removes parameters with negligible functional contribution. We provide a convergence analysis and evaluate WCR on LLM fine-tuning, image classification, and medical segmentation, demonstrating consistent improvements in pruning robustness across architectures and compatibility with existing pruning-robust optimizers. --- ### Free Lunch to Meet the Gap: Intermediate Domain Reconstruction for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning Authors: Tong Zhang, Yifan Zhao, Liangyu Wang, Jia Li Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14279v1 Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (CDFSL) endeavors to transfer generalized knowledge from the source domain to target domains using only a minimal amount of training data, which faces a triplet of learning challenges in the meantime, i.e., semantic disjoint, large domain discrepancy, and data scarcity. Different from predominant CDFSL works focused on generalized representations, we make novel attempts to construct Intermediate Domain Proxies (IDP) with source feature embeddings as the codebook and reconstruct the target domain feature with this learned codebook. We then conduct an empirical study to explore the intrinsic attributes from perspectives of visual styles and semantic contents in intermediate domain proxies. Reaping benefits from these attributes of intermediate domains, we develop a fast domain alignment method to use these proxies as learning guidance for target domain feature transformation. With the collaborative learning of intermediate domain reconstruction and target feature transformation, our proposed model is able to surpass the state-of-the-art models by a margin on 8 cross-domain few-shot learning benchmarks. --- ### Comparing Task-Agnostic Embedding Models for Tabular Data Authors: Frederik Hoppe, Lars Kleinemeier, Astrid Franz, Udo Göbel Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14276v2 Recent foundation models for tabular data achieve strong task-specific performance via in-context learning. Nevertheless, they focus on direct prediction by encapsulating both representation learning and task-specific inference inside a single, resource-intensive network. This work specifically focuses on representation learning, i.e., on transferable, task-agnostic embeddings. We systematically evaluate task-agnostic representations extracted from tabular foundation models (TabPFN, TabICL and TabSTAR) alongside classical feature engineering (TableVectorizer and a sphere model) across a variety of application tasks as outlier detection (ADBench) and supervised learning (TabArena Lite). We find that simple feature engineering methods achieve comparable or superior performance while requiring significantly less computational resources than tabular foundation models. --- ### Let the Model Distribute Its Doubt: Confidence Estimation through Verbalized Probability Distribution Authors: Ante Wang, Weizhi Ma, Yang Liu Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14275v2 Knowing the reliability of a model's response is essential in practical applications. Given the strong generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs), research has focused on generating verbalized confidence. This approach is further enhanced by integrating chain-of-thought reasoning, which provides logical and transparent estimates. However, how reasoning strategies affect the estimated confidence remains under-explored. In this work, we demonstrate that predicting a verbalized probability distribution effectively promotes reasoning for confidence estimation. It requires an LLM to consider all possible answers rather than relying on a single guess, and the requirement of producing a distribution elicits more careful confidence assignment. We conduct systematic experiments comparing different verbalization-based methods across multiple LLMs and tasks. Our method consistently shows advantages, whether in the simple prompting setup or after optimization via reinforcement learning (RL). Notably, it achieves higher reasoning efficacy during inference-time scaling, saving nearly 6$\times$ the computation to reach the best Brier score of the strongest baseline on MMLU-Pro. Additionally, we reveal its limitations on specific tasks and discuss possible solutions for broader applicability. --- ### Let Language Constrain Geometry: Vision-Language Models as Semantic and Spatial Critics for 3D Generation Authors: Weimin Bai, Yubo Li, Weijian Luo, Zeqiang Lai, Yequan Wang, Wenzheng Chen, He Sun Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14271v2 Text-to-3D generation has advanced rapidly, yet state-of-the-art models, encompassing both optimization-based and feed-forward architectures, still face two fundamental limitations. First, they struggle with coarse semantic alignment, often failing to capture fine-grained prompt details. Second, they lack robust 3D spatial understanding, leading to geometric inconsistencies and catastrophic failures in part assembly and spatial relationships. To address these challenges, we propose VLM3D, a general framework that repurposes large vision-language models (VLMs) as powerful, differentiable semantic and spatial critics. Our core contribution is a dual-query critic signal derived from the VLM's Yes or No log-odds, which assesses both semantic fidelity and geometric coherence. We demonstrate the generality of this guidance signal across two distinct paradigms: (1) As a reward objective for optimization-based pipelines, VLM3D significantly outperforms existing methods on standard benchmarks. (2) As a test-time guidance module for feed-forward pipelines, it actively steers the iterative sampling process of SOTA native 3D models to correct severe spatial errors. VLM3D establishes a principled and generalizable path to inject the VLM's rich, language-grounded understanding of both semantics and space into diverse 3D generative pipelines. --- ### Gaussian Splatting-based Low-Rank Tensor Representation for Multi-Dimensional Image Recovery Authors: Yiming Zeng, Xi-Le Zhao, Wei-Hao Wu, Teng-Yu Ji, Chao Wang Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14270v2 Tensor singular value decomposition (t-SVD) is a promising tool for multi-dimensional image representation, which decomposes a multi-dimensional image into a latent tensor and an accompanying transform matrix. However, two critical limitations of t-SVD methods persist: (1) the approximation of the latent tensor (e.g., tensor factorizations) is coarse and fails to accurately capture spatial local high-frequency information; (2) The transform matrix is composed of fixed basis atoms (e.g., complex exponential atoms in DFT and cosine atoms in DCT) and cannot precisely capture local high-frequency information along the mode-3 fibers. To address these two limitations, we propose a Gaussian Splatting-based Low-rank tensor Representation (GSLR) framework, which compactly and continuously represents multi-dimensional images. Specifically, we leverage tailored 2D Gaussian splatting and 1D Gaussian splatting to generate the latent tensor and transform matrix, respectively. The 2D and 1D Gaussian splatting are indispensable and complementary under this representation framework, which enjoys a powerful representation capability, especially for local high-frequency information. To evaluate the representation ability of the proposed GSLR, we develop an unsupervised GSLR-based multi-dimensional image recovery model. Extensive experiments on multi-dimensional image recovery demonstrate that GSLR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly in capturing local high-frequency information. --- ### Statistically controllable microstructure reconstruction framework for heterogeneous materials using sliced-Wasserstein metric and neural networks Authors: Zhenchuan Ma, Qizhi Teng, Pengcheng Yan, Lindong Li, Kirill M. Gerke, Marina V. Karsanina, Xiaohai He Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: physics.comp-ph, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14268v1 Heterogeneous porous materials play a crucial role in various engineering systems. Microstructure characterization and reconstruction provide effective means for modeling these materials, which are critical for conducting physical property simulations, structure-property linkage studies, and enhancing their performance across different applications. To achieve superior controllability and applicability with small sample sizes, we propose a statistically controllable microstructure reconstruction framework that integrates neural networks with sliced-Wasserstein metric. Specifically, our approach leverages local pattern distribution for microstructure characterization and employs a controlled sampling strategy to generate target distributions that satisfy given conditional parameters. A neural network-based model establishes the mapping from the input distribution to the target local pattern distribution, enabling microstructure reconstruction. Combinations of sliced-Wasserstein metric and gradient optimization techniques minimize the distance between these distributions, leading to a stable and reliable model. Our method can perform stochastic and controllable reconstruction tasks even with small sample sizes. Additionally, it can generate large-size (e.g. 512 and 1024) 3D microstructures using a chunking strategy. By introducing spatial location masks, our method excels at generating spatially heterogeneous and complex microstructures. We conducted experiments on stochastic reconstruction, controllable reconstruction, heterogeneous reconstruction, and large-size microstructure reconstruction across various materials. Comparative analysis through visualization, statistical measures, and physical property simulations demonstrates the effectiveness, providing new insights and possibilities for research on structure-property linkage and material inverse design. --- ### Unified Multimodal Vessel Trajectory Prediction with Explainable Navigation Intention Authors: Rui Zhang, Chao Li, Kezhong Liu, Chen Wang, Bolong Zheng, Hongbo Jiang Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14265v1 Vessel trajectory prediction is fundamental to intelligent maritime systems. Within this domain, short-term prediction of rapid behavioral changes in complex maritime environments has established multimodal trajectory prediction (MTP) as a promising research area. However, existing vessel MTP methods suffer from limited scenario applicability and insufficient explainability. To address these challenges, we propose a unified MTP framework incorporating explainable navigation intentions, which we classify into sustained and transient categories. Our method constructs sustained intention trees from historical trajectories and models dynamic transient intentions using a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE), while using a non-local attention mechanism to maintain global scenario consistency. Experiments on real Automatic Identification System (AIS) datasets demonstrates our method's broad applicability across diverse scenarios, achieving significant improvements in both ADE and FDE. Furthermore, our method improves explainability by explicitly revealing the navigational intentions underlying each predicted trajectory. --- ### Algebraformer: A Neural Approach to Linear Systems Authors: Pietro Sittoni, Francesco Tudisco Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14263v1 Recent work in deep learning has opened new possibilities for solving classical algorithmic tasks using end-to-end learned models. In this work, we investigate the fundamental task of solving linear systems, particularly those that are ill-conditioned. Existing numerical methods for ill-conditioned systems often require careful parameter tuning, preconditioning, or domain-specific expertise to ensure accuracy and stability. In this work, we propose Algebraformer, a Transformer-based architecture that learns to solve linear systems end-to-end, even in the presence of severe ill-conditioning. Our model leverages a novel encoding scheme that enables efficient representation of matrix and vector inputs, with a memory complexity of $O(n^2)$, supporting scalable inference. We demonstrate its effectiveness on application-driven linear problems, including interpolation tasks from spectral methods for boundary value problems and acceleration of the Newton method. Algebraformer achieves competitive accuracy with significantly lower computational overhead at test time, demonstrating that general-purpose neural architectures can effectively reduce complexity in traditional scientific computing pipelines. --- ### Object-Centric World Models for Causality-Aware Reinforcement Learning Authors: Yosuke Nishimoto, Takashi Matsubara Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14262v3 World models have been developed to support sample-efficient deep reinforcement learning agents. However, it remains challenging for world models to accurately replicate environments that are high-dimensional, non-stationary, and composed of multiple objects with rich interactions since most world models learn holistic representations of all environmental components. By contrast, humans perceive the environment by decomposing it into discrete objects, facilitating efficient decision-making. Motivated by this insight, we propose \emph{Slot Transformer Imagination with CAusality-aware reinforcement learning} (STICA), a unified framework in which object-centric Transformers serve as the world model and causality-aware policy and value networks. STICA represents each observation as a set of object-centric tokens, together with tokens for the agent action and the resulting reward, enabling the world model to predict token-level dynamics and interactions. The policy and value networks then estimate token-level cause--effect relations and use them in the attention layers, yielding causality-guided decision-making. Experiments on object-rich benchmarks demonstrate that STICA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art agents in both sample efficiency and final performance. --- ### ManipShield: A Unified Framework for Image Manipulation Detection, Localization and Explanation Authors: Zitong Xu, Huiyu Duan, Xiaoyu Wang, Zhaolin Cai, Kaiwei Zhang, Xiongkuo Min, Guangtao Zhai Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14259v4 With the rapid advancement of generative models, powerful image editing methods now enable diverse and highly realistic image manipulations that far surpass traditional deepfake techniques, posing new challenges for manipulation detection. Existing image manipulation detection and localization (IMDL) benchmarks suffer from limited content diversity, narrow generative-model coverage, and insufficient interpretability, which hinders the generalization and explanation capabilities of current manipulation detection methods. To address these limitations, we introduce \textbf{ManipBench}, a large-scale benchmark for image manipulation detection and localization focusing on AI-edited images. ManipBench contains over 450K manipulated images produced by 25 state-of-the-art image editing models across 12 manipulation categories, among which 100K images are further annotated with bounding boxes, judgment cues, and textual explanations to support interpretable detection. Building upon ManipBench, we propose \textbf{ManipShield}, an all-in-one model based on a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) that leverages contrastive LoRA fine-tuning and task-specific decoders to achieve unified image manipulation detection, localization, and explanation. Extensive experiments on ManipBench and several public datasets demonstrate that ManipShield achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibits strong generality to unseen manipulation models. The project is available at https://github.com/IntMeGroup/ManipShield. --- ### Entropy-Guided Reasoning Compression Authors: Hourun Zhu, Yang Gao, Wenlong Fei, Jiawei Li, Huashan Sun Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14258v2 Large reasoning models have demonstrated remarkable performance on complex reasoning tasks, yet the excessive length of their chain-of-thought outputs remains a major practical bottleneck due to high computation cost and poor deployability. Existing compression methods have achieved partial success but overlook a crucial phenomenon in the training process -- the entropy conflict. During compression training, entropy decreases, leading to shorter reasoning but limited exploration, while accuracy-oriented objectives increase entropy, lengthening reasoning chains. This can cause the model to get stuck in a local dilemma. Our analysis further reveals the origin of the entropy conflict: many high-entropy tokens are logical connectors that receive larger gradients and are encouraged under the performance objective, while the compression objective simultaneously penalizes these potentially redundant connectors. This opposing pressure creates a direct source of entropy conflict. To address these issues, we adopt an entropy-guided training framework. As entropy descends, the model is guided toward efficient reasoning by encouraging concise thought steps; as entropy rises, exploration is reinforced under the compact reasoning mode to improve robustness. Experiments on six mathematical benchmarks show that our method compresses reasoning length to 20% of the original while maintaining or even surpassing baseline accuracy. Code and models will be released publicly. --- ### PathMind: A Retrieve-Prioritize-Reason Framework for Knowledge Graph Reasoning with Large Language Models Authors: Yu Liu, Xixun Lin, Yanmin Shang, Yangxi Li, Shi Wang, Yanan Cao Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.AI, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14256v2 Knowledge graph reasoning (KGR) is the task of inferring new knowledge by performing logical deductions on knowledge graphs. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in complex reasoning tasks. Despite promising success, current LLM-based KGR methods still face two critical limitations. First, existing methods often extract reasoning paths indiscriminately, without assessing their different importance, which may introduce irrelevant noise that misleads LLMs. Second, while many methods leverage LLMs to dynamically explore potential reasoning paths, they require high retrieval demands and frequent LLM calls. To address these limitations, we propose PathMind, a novel framework designed to enhance faithful and interpretable reasoning by selectively guiding LLMs with important reasoning paths. Specifically, PathMind follows a "Retrieve-Prioritize-Reason" paradigm. First, it retrieves a query subgraph from KG through the retrieval module. Next, it introduces a path prioritization mechanism that identifies important reasoning paths using a semantic-aware path priority function, which simultaneously considers the accumulative cost and the estimated future cost for reaching the target. Finally, PathMind generates accurate and logically consistent responses via a dual-phase training strategy, including task-specific instruction tuning and path-wise preference alignment. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that PathMind consistently outperforms competitive baselines, particularly on complex reasoning tasks with fewer input tokens, by identifying essential reasoning paths. --- ### AfriSpeech-MultiBench: A Verticalized Multidomain Multicountry Benchmark Suite for African Accented English ASR Authors: Gabrial Zencha Ashungafac, Mardhiyah Sanni, Busayo Awobade, Alex Gichamba, Tobi Olatunji Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14255v1 Recent advances in speech-enabled AI, including Google's NotebookLM and OpenAI's speech-to-speech API, are driving widespread interest in voice interfaces globally. Despite this momentum, there exists no publicly available application-specific model evaluation that caters to Africa's linguistic diversity. We present AfriSpeech-MultiBench, the first domain-specific evaluation suite for over 100 African English accents across 10+ countries and seven application domains: Finance, Legal, Medical, General dialogue, Call Center, Named Entities and Hallucination Robustness. We benchmark a diverse range of open, closed, unimodal ASR and multimodal LLM-based speech recognition systems using both spontaneous and non-spontaneous speech conversation drawn from various open African accented English speech datasets. Our empirical analysis reveals systematic variation: open-source ASR models excels in spontaneous speech contexts but degrades on noisy, non-native dialogue; multimodal LLMs are more accent-robust yet struggle with domain-specific named entities; proprietary models deliver high accuracy on clean speech but vary significantly by country and domain. Models fine-tuned on African English achieve competitive accuracy with lower latency, a practical advantage for deployment, hallucinations still remain a big problem for most SOTA models. By releasing this comprehensive benchmark, we empower practitioners and researchers to select voice technologies suited to African use-cases, fostering inclusive voice applications for underserved communities. --- ### Count The Notes: Histogram-Based Supervision for Automatic Music Transcription Authors: Jonathan Yaffe, Ben Maman, Meinard Müller, Amit H. Bermano Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.SD, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14250v1 Automatic Music Transcription (AMT) converts audio recordings into symbolic musical representations. Training deep neural networks (DNNs) for AMT typically requires strongly aligned training pairs with precise frame-level annotations. Since creating such datasets is costly and impractical for many musical contexts, weakly aligned approaches using segment-level annotations have gained traction. However, existing methods often rely on Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) or soft alignment loss functions, both of which still require local semantic correspondences, making them error-prone and computationally expensive. In this article, we introduce CountEM, a novel AMT framework that eliminates the need for explicit local alignment by leveraging note event histograms as supervision, enabling lighter computations and greater flexibility. Using an Expectation-Maximization (EM) approach, CountEM iteratively refines predictions based solely on note occurrence counts, significantly reducing annotation efforts while maintaining high transcription accuracy. Experiments on piano, guitar, and multi-instrument datasets demonstrate that CountEM matches or surpasses existing weakly supervised methods, improving AMT's robustness, scalability, and efficiency. Our project page is available at https://yoni-yaffe.github.io/count-the-notes. --- ### Towards Authentic Movie Dubbing with Retrieve-Augmented Director-Actor Interaction Learning Authors: Rui Liu, Yuan Zhao, Zhenqi Jia Published: 2025-11-18 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14249v1 The automatic movie dubbing model generates vivid speech from given scripts, replicating a speaker's timbre from a brief timbre prompt while ensuring lip-sync with the silent video. Existing approaches simulate a simplified workflow where actors dub directly without preparation, overlooking the critical director-actor interaction. In contrast, authentic workflows involve a dynamic collaboration: directors actively engage with actors, guiding them to internalize the context cues, specifically emotion, before performance. To address this issue, we propose a new Retrieve-Augmented Director-Actor Interaction Learning scheme to achieve authentic movie dubbing, termed Authentic-Dubber, which contains three novel mechanisms: (1) We construct a multimodal Reference Footage library to simulate the learning footage provided by directors. Note that we integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) to achieve deep comprehension of emotional representations across multimodal signals. (2) To emulate how actors efficiently and comprehensively internalize director-provided footage during dubbing, we propose an Emotion-Similarity-based Retrieval-Augmentation strategy. This strategy retrieves the most relevant multimodal information that aligns with the target silent video. (3) We develop a Progressive Graph-based speech generation approach that incrementally incorporates the retrieved multimodal emotional knowledge, thereby simulating the actor's final dubbing process. The above mechanisms enable the Authentic-Dubber to faithfully replicate the authentic dubbing workflow, achieving comprehensive improvements in emotional expressiveness. Both subjective and objective evaluations on the V2C Animation benchmark dataset validate the effectiveness. The code and demos are available at https://github.com/AI-S2-Lab/Authentic-Dubber. ---