# Research Papers — 2025-12 · bundle page 113 of 175

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### Drawback of Enforcing Equivariance and its Compensation via the Lens of Expressive Power

Authors: Yuzhu Chen, Tian Qin, Xinmei Tian, Fengxiang He, Dacheng Tao
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.NE, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09673v3

Equivariant neural networks encode the intrinsic symmetry of data as an inductive bias, which has achieved impressive performance in wide domains. However, the understanding to their expressive power remains premature. Focusing on 2-layer ReLU networks, this paper investigates the impact of enforcing equivariance constraints on the expressive power. By examining the boundary hyperplanes and the channel vectors, we constructively demonstrate that enforcing equivariance constraints could undermine the expressive power. Naturally, this drawback can be compensated for by enlarging the model size -- we further prove upper bounds on the required enlargement for compensation. Surprisingly, we show that the enlarged neural architectures have reduced hypothesis space dimensionality, implying even better generalizability.

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### Drawback of Enforcing Equivariance and its Compensation via the Lens of Expressive Power

Authors: Yuzhu Chen, Tian Qin, Xinmei Tian, Fengxiang He, Dacheng Tao
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.NE, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09673v1

Equivariant neural networks encode symmetry as an inductive bias and have achieved strong empirical performance in wide domains. However, their expressive power remains not well understood. Focusing on 2-layer ReLU networks, this paper investigates the impact of equivariance constraints on the expressivity of equivariant and layer-wise equivariant networks. By examining the boundary hyperplanes and the channel vectors of ReLU networks, we construct an example showing that equivariance constraints could strictly limit expressive power. However, we demonstrate that this drawback can be compensated via enlarging the model size. Furthermore, we show that despite a larger model size, the resulting architecture could still correspond to a hypothesis space with lower complexity, implying superior generalizability for equivariant networks.

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### An Automated Tip-and-Cue Framework for Optimized Satellite Tasking and Visual Intelligence

Authors: Gil Weissman, Amir Ivry, Israel Cohen
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CV, eess.SY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09670v1

The proliferation of satellite constellations, coupled with reduced tasking latency and diverse sensor capabilities, has expanded the opportunities for automated Earth observation. This paper introduces a fully automated Tip-and-Cue framework designed for satellite imaging tasking and scheduling. In this context, tips are generated from external data sources or analyses of prior satellite imagery, identifying spatiotemporal targets and prioritizing them for downstream planning. Corresponding cues are the imaging tasks formulated in response, which incorporate sensor constraints, timing requirements, and utility functions. The system autonomously generates candidate tasks, optimizes their scheduling across multiple satellites using continuous utility functions that reflect the expected value of each observation, and processes the resulting imagery using artificial-intelligence-based models, including object detectors and vision-language models. Structured visual reports are generated to support both interpretability and the identification of new insights for downstream tasking. The efficacy of the framework is demonstrated through a maritime vessel tracking scenario, utilizing Automatic Identification System (AIS) data for trajectory prediction, targeted observations, and the generation of actionable outputs. Maritime vessel tracking is a widely researched application, often used to benchmark novel approaches to satellite tasking, forecasting, and analysis. The system is extensible to broader applications such as smart-city monitoring and disaster response, where timely tasking and automated analysis are critical.

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### Neurosymbolic Information Extraction from Transactional Documents

Authors: Arthur Hemmer, Mickaël Coustaty, Nicola Bartolo, Jean-Marc Ogier
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09666v1

This paper presents a neurosymbolic framework for information extraction from documents, evaluated on transactional documents. We introduce a schema-based approach that integrates symbolic validation methods to enable more effective zero-shot output and knowledge distillation. The methodology uses language models to generate candidate extractions, which are then filtered through syntactic-, task-, and domain-level validation to ensure adherence to domain-specific arithmetic constraints. Our contributions include a comprehensive schema for transactional documents, relabeled datasets, and an approach for generating high-quality labels for knowledge distillation. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in $F_1$-scores and accuracy, highlighting the effectiveness of neurosymbolic validation in transactional document processing.

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### OxEnsemble: Fair Ensembles for Low-Data Classification

Authors: Jonathan Rystrøm, Zihao Fu, Chris Russell
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CV, cs.CY, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09665v2

We address the problem of fair classification in settings where data is scarce and unbalanced across demographic groups. Such low-data regimes are common in domains like medical imaging, where false negatives can have fatal consequences. We propose a novel approach \emph{OxEnsemble} for efficiently training ensembles and enforcing fairness in these low-data regimes. Unlike other approaches, we aggregate predictions across ensemble members, each trained to satisfy fairness constraints. By construction, \emph{OxEnsemble} is both data-efficient -- carefully reusing held-out data to enforce fairness reliably -- and compute-efficient, requiring little more compute than used to fine-tune or evaluate an existing model. We validate this approach with new theoretical guarantees. Experimentally, our approach yields more consistent outcomes and stronger fairness-accuracy trade-offs than existing methods across multiple challenging medical imaging classification datasets.

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### OxEnsemble: Fair Ensembles for Low-Data Classification

Authors: Jonathan Rystrøm, Zihao Fu, Chris Russell
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CV, cs.CY, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09665v1

We address the problem of fair classification in settings where data is scarce and unbalanced across demographic groups. Such low-data regimes are common in domains like medical imaging, where false negatives can have fatal consequences. We propose a novel approach \emph{OxEnsemble} for efficiently training ensembles and enforcing fairness in these low-data regimes. Unlike other approaches, we aggregate predictions across ensemble members, each trained to satisfy fairness constraints. By construction, \emph{OxEnsemble} is both data-efficient, carefully reusing held-out data to enforce fairness reliably, and compute-efficient, requiring little more compute than used to fine-tune or evaluate an existing model. We validate this approach with new theoretical guarantees. Experimentally, our approach yields more consistent outcomes and stronger fairness-accuracy trade-offs than existing methods across multiple challenging medical imaging classification datasets.

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### SynthPix: A lightspeed PIV image generator

Authors: Antonio Terpin, Alan Bonomi, Francesco Banelli, Raffaello D'Andrea
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.DC, cs.CV, cs.LG, eess.IV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09664v2

We describe SynthPix, a synthetic image generator for Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) with a focus on performance and parallelism on accelerators, implemented in JAX. SynthPix produces PIV image pairs from prescribed flow fields while exposing a configuration interface aligned with common PIV imaging and acquisition parameters (e.g., seeding density, particle image size, illumination nonuniformity, noise, blur, and timing). In contrast to offline dataset generation workflows, SynthPix is built to stream images on-the-fly directly into learning and benchmarking pipelines, enabling data-hungry methods and closed-loop procedures -- such as adaptive sampling and acquisition/parameter co-design -- without prohibitive storage and input-output costs. We demonstrate that SynthPix is compatible with a broad range of application scenarios, including controlled laboratory experiments and riverine image velocimetry, and supports rapid sweeps over nuisance factors for systematic robustness evaluation. SynthPix is a tool that supports the flow quantification community and in this paper we describe the main ideas behind the software package.

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### SynthPix: A lightspeed PIV images generator

Authors: Antonio Terpin, Alan Bonomi, Francesco Banelli, Raffaello D'Andrea
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.DC, cs.CV, cs.LG, eess.IV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09664v1

We describe SynthPix, a synthetic image generator for Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) with a focus on performance and parallelism on accelerators, implemented in JAX. SynthPix supports the same configuration parameters as existing tools but achieves a throughput several orders of magnitude higher in image-pair generation per second. SynthPix was developed to enable the training of data-hungry reinforcement learning methods for flow estimation and for reducing the iteration times during the development of fast flow estimation methods used in recent active fluids control studies with real-time PIV feedback. We believe SynthPix to be useful for the fluid dynamics community, and in this paper we describe the main ideas behind this software package.

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### IF-Bench: Benchmarking and Enhancing MLLMs for Infrared Images with Generative Visual Prompting

Authors: Tao Zhang, Yuyang Hong, Yang Xia, Kun Ding, Zeyu Zhang, Ying Wang, Shiming Xiang, Chunhong Pan
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09663v1

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have led to impressive progress across various benchmarks. However, their capability in understanding infrared images remains unexplored. To address this gap, we introduce IF-Bench, the first high-quality benchmark designed for evaluating multimodal understanding of infrared images. IF-Bench consists of 499 images sourced from 23 infrared datasets and 680 carefully curated visual question-answer pairs, covering 10 essential dimensions of image understanding. Based on this benchmark, we systematically evaluate over 40 open-source and closed-source MLLMs, employing cyclic evaluation, bilingual assessment, and hybrid judgment strategies to enhance the reliability of the results. Our analysis reveals how model scale, architecture, and inference paradigms affect infrared image comprehension, providing valuable insights for this area. Furthermore, we propose a training-free generative visual prompting (GenViP) method, which leverages advanced image editing models to translate infrared images into semantically and spatially aligned RGB counterparts, thereby mitigating domain distribution shifts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently yields significant performance improvements across a wide range of MLLMs. The benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/casiatao/IF-Bench.

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### Can LLMs Evaluate What They Cannot Annotate? Revisiting LLM Reliability in Hate Speech Detection

Authors: Paloma Piot, David Otero, Patricia Martín-Rodilla, Javier Parapar
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09662v1

Hate speech spreads widely online, harming individuals and communities, making automatic detection essential for large-scale moderation, yet detecting it remains difficult. Part of the challenge lies in subjectivity: what one person flags as hate speech, another may see as benign. Traditional annotation agreement metrics, such as Cohen's $κ$, oversimplify this disagreement, treating it as an error rather than meaningful diversity. Meanwhile, Large Language Models (LLMs) promise scalable annotation, but prior studies demonstrate that they cannot fully replace human judgement, especially in subjective tasks. In this work, we reexamine LLM reliability using a subjectivity-aware framework, cross-Rater Reliability (xRR), revealing that even under fairer lens, LLMs still diverge from humans. Yet this limitation opens an opportunity: we find that LLM-generated annotations can reliably reflect performance trends across classification models, correlating with human evaluations. We test this by examining whether LLM-generated annotations preserve the relative ordering of model performance derived from human evaluation (i.e. whether models ranked as more reliable by human annotators preserve the same order when evaluated with LLM-generated labels). Our results show that, although LLMs differ from humans at the instance level, they reproduce similar ranking and classification patterns, suggesting their potential as proxy evaluators. While not a substitute for human annotators, they might serve as a scalable proxy for evaluation in subjective NLP tasks.

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### Membership and Dataset Inference Attacks on Large Audio Generative Models

Authors: Jakub Proboszcz, Paweł Kochanski, Karol Korszun, Donato Crisostomi, Giorgio Strano, Emanuele Rodolà, Kamil Deja, Jan Dubinski
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09654v2

Generative audio models, based on diffusion and autoregressive architectures, have advanced rapidly in both quality and expressiveness. This progress, however, raises pressing copyright concerns, as such models are often trained on vast corpora of artistic and commercial works. A central question is whether one can reliably verify if an artist's material was included in training, thereby providing a means for copyright holders to protect their content. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of such verification through membership inference attacks (MIA) on open-source generative audio models, which attempt to determine whether a specific audio sample was part of the training set. Our empirical results show that membership inference alone is of limited effectiveness at scale, as the per-sample membership signal is weak for models trained on large and diverse datasets. However, artists and media owners typically hold collections of works rather than isolated samples. Building on prior work in text and vision domains, in this work we focus on dataset inference (DI), which aggregates diverse membership evidence across multiple samples. We find that DI is successful in the audio domain, offering a more practical mechanism for assessing whether an artist's works contributed to model training. Our results suggest DI as a promising direction for copyright protection and dataset accountability in the era of large audio generative models.

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### Membership and Dataset Inference Attacks on Large Audio Generative Models

Authors: Jakub Proboszcz, Paweł Kochanski, Karol Korszun, Donato Crisostomi, Giorgio Strano, Emanuele Rodolà, Kamil Deja, Jan Dubinski
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09654v1

Generative audio models, based on diffusion and autoregressive architectures, have advanced rapidly in both quality and expressiveness. This progress, however, raises pressing copyright concerns, as such models are often trained on vast corpora of artistic and commercial works. A central question is whether one can reliably verify if an artist's material was included in training, thereby providing a means for copyright holders to protect their content. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of such verification through membership inference attacks (MIA) on open-source generative audio models, which attempt to determine whether a specific audio sample was part of the training set. Our empirical results show that membership inference alone is of limited effectiveness at scale, as the per-sample membership signal is weak for models trained on large and diverse datasets. However, artists and media owners typically hold collections of works rather than isolated samples. Building on prior work in text and vision domains, in this work we focus on dataset inference (DI), which aggregates diverse membership evidence across multiple samples. We find that DI is successful in the audio domain, offering a more practical mechanism for assessing whether an artist's works contributed to model training. Our results suggest DI as a promising direction for copyright protection and dataset accountability in the era of large audio generative models.

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### VHOI: Controllable Video Generation of Human-Object Interactions from Sparse Trajectories via Motion Densification

Authors: Wanyue Zhang, Lin Geng Foo, Thabo Beeler, Rishabh Dabral, Christian Theobalt
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09646v2

Synthesizing realistic human-object interactions (HOI) in video is challenging due to the complex, instance-specific interaction dynamics of both humans and objects. Incorporating controllability in video generation further adds to the complexity. Existing controllable video generation approaches face a trade-off: sparse controls like keypoint trajectories are easy to specify but lack instance-awareness, while dense signals such as optical flow, depths or 3D meshes are informative but costly to obtain. We propose VHOI, a two-stage framework that first densifies sparse trajectories into HOI mask sequences, and then fine-tunes a video diffusion model conditioned on these dense masks. We introduce a novel HOI-aware motion representation that uses color encodings to distinguish not only human and object motion, but also body-part-specific dynamics. This design incorporates a human prior into the conditioning signal and strengthens the model's ability to understand and generate realistic HOI dynamics. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art results in controllable HOI video generation. VHOI is not limited to interaction-only scenarios and can also generate full human navigation leading up to object interactions in an end-to-end manner. Project page: https://vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/vhoi/.

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### VHOI: Controllable Video Generation of Human-Object Interactions from Sparse Trajectories via Motion Densification

Authors: Wanyue Zhang, Lin Geng Foo, Thabo Beeler, Rishabh Dabral, Christian Theobalt
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09646v1

Synthesizing realistic human-object interactions (HOI) in video is challenging due to the complex, instance-specific interaction dynamics of both humans and objects. Incorporating controllability in video generation further adds to the complexity. Existing controllable video generation approaches face a trade-off: sparse controls like keypoint trajectories are easy to specify but lack instance-awareness, while dense signals such as optical flow, depths or 3D meshes are informative but costly to obtain. We propose VHOI, a two-stage framework that first densifies sparse trajectories into HOI mask sequences, and then fine-tunes a video diffusion model conditioned on these dense masks. We introduce a novel HOI-aware motion representation that uses color encodings to distinguish not only human and object motion, but also body-part-specific dynamics. This design incorporates a human prior into the conditioning signal and strengthens the model's ability to understand and generate realistic HOI dynamics. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art results in controllable HOI video generation. VHOI is not limited to interaction-only scenarios and can also generate full human navigation leading up to object interactions in an end-to-end manner. Project page: https://vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/vhoi/.

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### Kaapana: A Comprehensive Open-Source Platform for Integrating AI in Medical Imaging Research Environments

Authors: Ünal Akünal, Markus Bujotzek, Stefan Denner, Benjamin Hamm, Klaus Kades, Philipp Schader, Jonas Scherer, Marco Nolden, Peter Neher, Ralf Floca, Klaus Maier-Hein
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09644v1

Developing generalizable AI for medical imaging requires both access to large, multi-center datasets and standardized, reproducible tooling within research environments. However, leveraging real-world imaging data in clinical research environments is still hampered by strict regulatory constraints, fragmented software infrastructure, and the challenges inherent in conducting large-cohort multicentre studies. This leads to projects that rely on ad-hoc toolchains that are hard to reproduce, difficult to scale beyond single institutions and poorly suited for collaboration between clinicians and data scientists. We present Kaapana, a comprehensive open-source platform for medical imaging research that is designed to bridge this gap. Rather than building single-use, site-specific tooling, Kaapana provides a modular, extensible framework that unifies data ingestion, cohort curation, processing workflows and result inspection under a common user interface. By bringing the algorithm to the data, it enables institutions to keep control over their sensitive data while still participating in distributed experimentation and model development. By integrating flexible workflow orchestration with user-facing applications for researchers, Kaapana reduces technical overhead, improves reproducibility and enables conducting large-scale, collaborative, multi-centre imaging studies. We describe the core concepts of the platform and illustrate how they can support diverse use cases, from local prototyping to nation-wide research networks. The open-source codebase is available at https://github.com/kaapana/kaapana

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### MiraMind: Benchmarking Reliable Mental Health Reasoning beyond Answer Accuracy

Authors: Mengxi Xiao, Kailai Yang, Pengde Zhao, Enze Zhang, Ziyan Kuang, Zhiwei Liu, Weiguang Han, Shu Liao, Lianting Huang, Guojun Xiong, Victor Gutierrez Basulto, Jinpeng Hu et al.
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09636v3

Mental-health reasoning with large language models (LLMs) is an evidence-constrained judgment problem: models must transform limited, subjective, and often ambiguous evidence into interpretations, decisions, or claims whose specificity, certainty, severity, and actionability remain warranted. Existing benchmarks mainly evaluate specific clinical roles or final answers, leaving the reliability of explicit reasoning trajectories under-specified. We introduce MiraMind, a unified benchmark spanning six task families and 13 datasets across appraisal, diagnosis, intervention, abstraction, and verification. MiraMind evaluates both task outcomes and the trajectories connecting evidence to judgment through usability, logical structure, and informational contribution. Evaluating 20 LLMs reveals a restraint gap, in which the specificity or certainty of model judgments exceeds what limited evidence supports. We further train Mindora, an 8B model that targets evidence-to-judgment transitions through hard-case supervision, structured trajectory rewriting, and consistency-aware optimization. Mindora achieves the best average rank on MiraMind, improves over its backbone across all six task families, and produces more balanced reasoning trajectories. These results show that MiraMind can expose shared restraint failures and evaluate whether targeted post-training improves evidence-constrained mental-health reasoning.

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### MentraSuite: Post-Training Large Language Models for Mental Health Reasoning and Assessment

Authors: Mengxi Xiao, Kailai Yang, Pengde Zhao, Enze Zhang, Ziyan Kuang, Zhiwei Liu, Weiguang Han, Shu Liao, Lianting Huang, Jinpeng Hu, Min Peng, Qianqian Xie et al.
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09636v1

Mental health disorders affect hundreds of millions globally, and the Web now serves as a primary medium for accessing support, information, and assessment. Large language models (LLMs) offer scalable and accessible assistance, yet their deployment in mental-health settings remains risky when their reasoning is incomplete, inconsistent, or ungrounded. Existing psychological LLMs emphasize emotional understanding or knowledge recall but overlook the step-wise, clinically aligned reasoning required for appraisal, diagnosis, intervention planning, abstraction, and verification. To address these issues, we introduce MentraSuite, a unified framework for advancing reliable mental-health reasoning. We propose MentraBench, a comprehensive benchmark spanning five core reasoning aspects, six tasks, and 13 datasets, evaluating both task performance and reasoning quality across five dimensions: conciseness, coherence, hallucination avoidance, task understanding, and internal consistency. We further present Mindora, a post-trained model optimized through a hybrid SFT-RL framework with an inconsistency-detection reward to enforce faithful and coherent reasoning. To support training, we construct high-quality trajectories using a novel reasoning trajectory generation strategy, that strategically filters difficult samples and applies a structured, consistency-oriented rewriting process to produce concise, readable, and well-balanced trajectories. Across 20 evaluated LLMs, Mindora achieves the highest average performance on MentraBench and shows remarkable performances in reasoning reliability, demonstrating its effectiveness for complex mental-health scenarios.

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### Creation of the Estonian Subjectivity Dataset: Assessing the Degree of Subjectivity on a Scale

Authors: Karl Gustav Gailit, Kadri Muischnek, Kairit Sirts
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09634v2

This article presents the creation of an Estonian-language dataset for document-level subjectivity, analyzes the resulting annotations, and reports an initial experiment of automatic subjectivity analysis using a large language model (LLM). The dataset comprises of 1,000 documents-300 journalistic articles and 700 randomly selected web texts-each rated for subjectivity on a continuous scale from 0 (fully objective) to 100 (fully subjective) by four annotators. As the inter-annotator correlations were moderate, with some texts receiving scores at the opposite ends of the scale, a subset of texts with the most divergent scores was re-annotated, with the inter-annotator correlation improving. In addition to human annotations, the dataset includes scores generated by GPT-5 as an experiment on annotation automation. These scores were similar to human annotators, however several differences emerged, suggesting that while LLM based automatic subjectivity scoring is feasible, it is not an interchangeable alternative to human annotation, and its suitability depends on the intended application.

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### Creation of the Estonian Subjectivity Dataset: Assessing the Degree of Subjectivity on a Scale

Authors: Karl Gustav Gailit, Kadri Muischnek, Kairit Sirts
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09634v1

This article presents the creation of an Estonian-language dataset for document-level subjectivity, analyzes the resulting annotations, and reports an initial experiment of automatic subjectivity analysis using a large language model (LLM). The dataset comprises of 1,000 documents-300 journalistic articles and 700 randomly selected web texts-each rated for subjectivity on a continuous scale from 0 (fully objective) to 100 (fully subjective) by four annotators. As the inter-annotator correlations were moderate, with some texts receiving scores at the opposite ends of the scale, a subset of texts with the most divergent scores was re-annotated, with the inter-annotator correlation improving. In addition to human annotations, the dataset includes scores generated by GPT-5 as an experiment on annotation automation. These scores were similar to human annotators, however several differences emerged, suggesting that while LLM based automatic subjectivity scoring is feasible, it is not an interchangeable alternative to human annotation, and its suitability depends on the intended application.

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### Benchmarking SAM2-based Trackers on FMOX

Authors: Senem Aktas, Charles Markham, John McDonald, Rozenn Dahyot
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09633v1

Several object tracking pipelines extending Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) have been proposed in the past year, where the approach is to follow and segment the object from a single exemplar template provided by the user on a initialization frame. We propose to benchmark these high performing trackers (SAM2, EfficientTAM, DAM4SAM and SAMURAI) on datasets containing fast moving objects (FMO) specifically designed to be challenging for tracking approaches. The goal is to understand better current limitations in state-of-the-art trackers by providing more detailed insights on the behavior of these trackers. We show that overall the trackers DAM4SAM and SAMURAI perform well on more challenging sequences.

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### End-to-end PDDL Planning with Hardcoded and Dynamic Agents

Authors: Emanuele La Malfa, Ping Zhu, Samuele Marro, Sara Bernardini, Michael Wooldridge
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09629v2

We present an end-to-end framework for planning supported by verifiers. An orchestrator receives a human specification written in natural language and converts it into a PDDL (Planning Domain Definition Language) model, where the domain and problem are iteratively refined by sub-modules (agents) to address common planning requirements, such as time constraints and optimality, as well as ambiguities and contradictions that may exist in the human specification. We support two categories of agents: hardcoded, which are informed by logs and error traces and have a pre-defined goal (e.g., fix issues with PDDL syntax, check temporal constraints), and dynamic, which have no predefined goal but adapt to the specific domain and revise the latent planning abstraction. The validated domain and problem are then passed to an external planning engine to generate a plan. The orchestrator and agents are powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) and require no human intervention at any stage of the process. Finally, a module translates the final plan back into natural language to improve human readability while maintaining the correctness of each step. We demonstrate the flexibility and effectiveness of our framework on GPT-\{4o, 5-mini, 5.4\}, and Gemini-\{2.5, 3\}-flash across more than ten domains and tasks, including the Google NaturalPlan benchmark, Planbench, and classic planning problems like Sokoban, Blocksworld and the Tower of Hanoi, where LLMs are known to struggle even with small instances. Our framework can be integrated with any PDDL planning engine and validator (we successfully tested Fast Downward, LPG, POPF, VAL, and uVAL) and represents a significant step toward end-to-end planning aided by LLMs.

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### An End-to-end Planning Framework with Agentic LLMs and PDDL

Authors: Emanuele La Malfa, Ping Zhu, Samuele Marro, Sara Bernardini, Michael Wooldridge
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09629v1

We present an end-to-end framework for planning supported by verifiers. An orchestrator receives a human specification written in natural language and converts it into a PDDL (Planning Domain Definition Language) model, where the domain and problem are iteratively refined by sub-modules (agents) to address common planning requirements, such as time constraints and optimality, as well as ambiguities and contradictions that may exist in the human specification. The validated domain and problem are then passed to an external planning engine to generate a plan. The orchestrator and agents are powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) and require no human intervention at any stage of the process. Finally, a module translates the final plan back into natural language to improve human readability while maintaining the correctness of each step. We demonstrate the flexibility and effectiveness of our framework across various domains and tasks, including the Google NaturalPlan benchmark and PlanBench, as well as planning problems like Blocksworld and the Tower of Hanoi (where LLMs are known to struggle even with small instances). Our framework can be integrated with any PDDL planning engine and validator (such as Fast Downward, LPG, POPF, VAL, and uVAL, which we have tested) and represents a significant step toward end-to-end planning aided by LLMs.

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### Beyond Sequences: A Benchmark for Atomic Hand-Object Interaction Using a Static RNN Encoder

Authors: Yousef Azizi Movahed, Fatemeh Ziaeetabar
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09626v1

Reliably predicting human intent in hand-object interactions is an open challenge for computer vision. Our research concentrates on a fundamental sub-problem: the fine-grained classification of atomic interaction states, namely 'approaching', 'grabbing', and 'holding'. To this end, we introduce a structured data engineering process that converts raw videos from the MANIAC dataset into 27,476 statistical-kinematic feature vectors. Each vector encapsulates relational and dynamic properties from a short temporal window of motion. Our initial hypothesis posited that sequential modeling would be critical, leading us to compare static classifiers (MLPs) against temporal models (RNNs). Counter-intuitively, the key discovery occurred when we set the sequence length of a Bidirectional RNN to one (seq_length=1). This modification converted the network's function, compelling it to act as a high-capacity static feature encoder. This architectural change directly led to a significant accuracy improvement, culminating in a final score of 97.60%. Of particular note, our optimized model successfully overcame the most challenging transitional class, 'grabbing', by achieving a balanced F1-score of 0.90. These findings provide a new benchmark for low-level hand-object interaction recognition using structured, interpretable features and lightweight architectures.

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### Semantic-Aware Cooperative Communication and Computation Framework in Vehicular Networks

Authors: Jingbo Zhang, Maoxin Ji, Qiong Wu, Pingyi Fan, Kezhi Wang, Wen Chen
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09621v1

Semantic Communication (SC) combined with Vehicular edge computing (VEC) provides an efficient edge task processing paradigm for Internet of Vehicles (IoV). Focusing on highway scenarios, this paper proposes a Tripartite Cooperative Semantic Communication (TCSC) framework, which enables Vehicle Users (VUs) to perform semantic task offloading via Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) and Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications. Considering task latency and the number of semantic symbols, the framework constructs a Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) problem, which is transformed into two subproblems. First, we innovatively propose a multi-agent proximal policy optimization task offloading optimization method based on parametric distribution noise (MAPPO-PDN) to solve the optimization problem of the number of semantic symbols; second, linear programming (LP) is used to solve offloading ratio. Simulations show that performance of this scheme is superior to that of other algorithms.

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### FROMAT: Multiview Material Appearance Transfer via Few-Shot Self-Attention Adaptation

Authors: Hubert Kompanowski, Varun Jampani, Aaryaman Vasishta, Binh-Son Hua
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09617v1

Multiview diffusion models have rapidly emerged as a powerful tool for content creation with spatial consistency across viewpoints, offering rich visual realism without requiring explicit geometry and appearance representation. However, compared to meshes or radiance fields, existing multiview diffusion models offer limited appearance manipulation, particularly in terms of material, texture, or style. In this paper, we present a lightweight adaptation technique for appearance transfer in multiview diffusion models. Our method learns to combine object identity from an input image with appearance cues rendered in a separate reference image, producing multi-view-consistent output that reflects the desired materials, textures, or styles. This allows explicit specification of appearance parameters at generation time while preserving the underlying object geometry and view coherence. We leverage three diffusion denoising processes responsible for generating the original object, the reference, and the target images, and perform reverse sampling to aggregate a small subset of layer-wise self-attention features from the object and the reference to influence the target generation. Our method requires only a few training examples to introduce appearance awareness to pretrained multiview models. The experiments show that our method provides a simple yet effective way toward multiview generation with diverse appearance, advocating the adoption of implicit generative 3D representations in practice.

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### Rethinking Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Videos

Authors: Yiwu Zhong, Zi-Yuan Hu, Yin Li, Liwei Wang
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09616v1

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has been highly successful in solving complex tasks in natural language processing, and recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have extended this paradigm to video reasoning. However, these models typically build on lengthy reasoning chains and large numbers of input visual tokens. Motivated by empirical observations from our benchmark study, we hypothesize that concise reasoning combined with a reduced set of visual tokens can be sufficient for effective video reasoning. To evaluate this hypothesis, we design and validate an efficient post-training and inference framework that enhances a video MLLM's reasoning capability. Our framework enables models to operate on compressed visual tokens and generate brief reasoning traces prior to answering. The resulting models achieve substantially improved inference efficiency, deliver competitive performance across diverse benchmarks, and avoid reliance on manual CoT annotations or supervised fine-tuning. Collectively, our results suggest that long, human-like CoT reasoning may not be necessary for general video reasoning, and that concise reasoning can be both effective and efficient. Our code will be released at https://github.com/LaVi-Lab/Rethink_CoT_Video.

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### ImageTalk: Designing a Multimodal AAC Text Generation System Driven by Image Recognition and Natural Language Generation

Authors: Boyin Yang, Puming Jiang, Per Ola Kristensson
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09610v1

People living with Motor Neuron Disease (plwMND) frequently encounter speech and motor impairments that necessitate a reliance on augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems. This paper tackles the main challenge that traditional symbol-based AAC systems offer a limited vocabulary, while text entry solutions tend to exhibit low communication rates. To help plwMND articulate their needs about the system efficiently and effectively, we iteratively design and develop a novel multimodal text generation system called ImageTalk through a tailored proxy-user-based and an end-user-based design phase. The system demonstrates pronounced keystroke savings of 95.6%, coupled with consistent performance and high user satisfaction. We distill three design guidelines for AI-assisted text generation systems design and outline four user requirement levels tailored for AAC purposes, guiding future research in this field.

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### UrbanNav: Learning Language-Guided Urban Navigation from Web-Scale Human Trajectories

Authors: Yanghong Mei, Yirong Yang, Longteng Guo, Qunbo Wang, Ming-Ming Yu, Xingjian He, Wenjun Wu, Jing Liu
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09607v2

Navigating complex urban environments using natural language instructions poses significant challenges for embodied agents, including noisy language instructions, ambiguous spatial references, diverse landmarks, and dynamic street scenes. Current visual navigation methods are typically limited to simulated or off-street environments, and often rely on precise goal formats, such as specific coordinates or images. This limits their effectiveness for autonomous agents like last-mile delivery robots navigating unfamiliar cities. To address these limitations, we introduce UrbanNav, a scalable framework that trains embodied agents to follow free-form language instructions in diverse urban settings. Leveraging web-scale city walking videos, we develop an scalable annotation pipeline that aligns human navigation trajectories with language instructions grounded in real-world landmarks. UrbanNav encompasses over 1,500 hours of navigation data and 3 million instruction-trajectory-landmark triplets, capturing a wide range of urban scenarios. Our model learns robust navigation policies to tackle complex urban scenarios, demonstrating superior spatial reasoning, robustness to noisy instructions, and generalization to unseen urban settings. Experimental results show that UrbanNav significantly outperforms existing methods, highlighting the potential of large-scale web video data to enable language-guided, real-world urban navigation for embodied agents.

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### UrbanNav: Learning Language-Guided Urban Navigation from Web-Scale Human Trajectories

Authors: Yanghong Mei, Yirong Yang, Longteng Guo, Qunbo Wang, Ming-Ming Yu, Xingjian He, Wenjun Wu, Jing Liu
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09607v1

Navigating complex urban environments using natural language instructions poses significant challenges for embodied agents, including noisy language instructions, ambiguous spatial references, diverse landmarks, and dynamic street scenes. Current visual navigation methods are typically limited to simulated or off-street environments, and often rely on precise goal formats, such as specific coordinates or images. This limits their effectiveness for autonomous agents like last-mile delivery robots navigating unfamiliar cities. To address these limitations, we introduce UrbanNav, a scalable framework that trains embodied agents to follow free-form language instructions in diverse urban settings. Leveraging web-scale city walking videos, we develop an scalable annotation pipeline that aligns human navigation trajectories with language instructions grounded in real-world landmarks. UrbanNav encompasses over 1,500 hours of navigation data and 3 million instruction-trajectory-landmark triplets, capturing a wide range of urban scenarios. Our model learns robust navigation policies to tackle complex urban scenarios, demonstrating superior spatial reasoning, robustness to noisy instructions, and generalization to unseen urban settings. Experimental results show that UrbanNav significantly outperforms existing methods, highlighting the potential of large-scale web video data to enable language-guided, real-world urban navigation for embodied agents.

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### CS3D: An Efficient Facial Expression Recognition via Event Vision

Authors: Zhe Wang, Qijin Song, Yucen Peng, Weibang Bai
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09592v1

Responsive and accurate facial expression recognition is crucial to human-robot interaction for daily service robots. Nowadays, event cameras are becoming more widely adopted as they surpass RGB cameras in capturing facial expression changes due to their high temporal resolution, low latency, computational efficiency, and robustness in low-light conditions. Despite these advantages, event-based approaches still encounter practical challenges, particularly in adopting mainstream deep learning models. Traditional deep learning methods for facial expression analysis are energy-intensive, making them difficult to deploy on edge computing devices and thereby increasing costs, especially for high-frequency, dynamic, event vision-based approaches. To address this challenging issue, we proposed the CS3D framework by decomposing the Convolutional 3D method to reduce the computational complexity and energy consumption. Additionally, by utilizing soft spiking neurons and a spatial-temporal attention mechanism, the ability to retain information is enhanced, thus improving the accuracy of facial expression detection. Experimental results indicate that our proposed CS3D method attains higher accuracy on multiple datasets compared to architectures such as the RNN, Transformer, and C3D, while the energy consumption of the CS3D method is just 21.97\% of the original C3D required on the same device.

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### Stanford Sleep Bench: Evaluating Polysomnography Pre-training Methods for Sleep Foundation Models

Authors: Magnus Ruud Kjaer, Rahul Thapa, Gauri Ganjoo, Hyatt Moore, Poul Joergen Jennum, Brandon M. Westover, James Zou, Emmanuel Mignot, Bryan He, Andreas Brink-Kjaer
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09591v1

Polysomnography (PSG), the gold standard test for sleep analysis, generates vast amounts of multimodal clinical data, presenting an opportunity to leverage self-supervised representation learning (SSRL) for pre-training foundation models to enhance sleep analysis. However, progress in sleep foundation models is hindered by two key limitations: (1) the lack of a shared dataset and benchmark with diverse tasks for training and evaluation, and (2) the absence of a systematic evaluation of SSRL approaches across sleep-related tasks. To address these gaps, we introduce Stanford Sleep Bench, a large-scale PSG dataset comprising 17,467 recordings totaling over 163,000 hours from a major sleep clinic, including 13 clinical disease prediction tasks alongside canonical sleep-related tasks such as sleep staging, apnea diagnosis, and age estimation. We systematically evaluate SSRL pre-training methods on Stanford Sleep Bench, assessing downstream performance across four tasks: sleep staging, apnea diagnosis, age estimation, and disease and mortality prediction. Our results show that multiple pretraining methods achieve comparable performance for sleep staging, apnea diagnosis, and age estimation. However, for mortality and disease prediction, contrastive learning significantly outperforms other approaches while also converging faster during pretraining. To facilitate reproducibility and advance sleep research, we will release Stanford Sleep Bench along with pretrained model weights, training pipelines, and evaluation code.

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### Graph-Based Bayesian Optimization for Quantum Circuit Architecture Search with Uncertainty Calibrated Surrogates

Authors: Prashant Kumar Choudhary, Nouhaila Innan, Muhammad Shafique, Rajeev Singh
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: quant-ph, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.NE, cs.NI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09586v2

Quantum circuit design is a key bottleneck for practical quantum machine learning on complex, real-world data. We present an automated framework that discovers and refines variational quantum circuits (VQCs) using graph-based Bayesian optimization with a graph neural network (GNN) surrogate. Circuits are represented as graphs and mutated and selected via an expected improvement acquisition function informed by surrogate uncertainty with Monte Carlo dropout. Candidate circuits are evaluated with a hybrid quantum-classical variational classifier on the next generation firewall telemetry and network internet of things (NF-ToN-IoT-V2) cybersecurity dataset, after feature selection and scaling for quantum embedding. We benchmark our pipeline against an MLP-based surrogate, random search, and greedy GNN selection. The GNN-guided optimizer consistently finds circuits with lower complexity and competitive or superior classification accuracy compared to all baselines. Robustness is assessed via a noise study across standard quantum noise channels, including amplitude damping, phase damping, thermal relaxation, depolarizing, and readout bit flip noise. The implementation is fully reproducible, with time benchmarking and export of best found circuits, providing a scalable and interpretable route to automated quantum circuit discovery.

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### Graph-Based Bayesian Optimization for Quantum Circuit Architecture Search with Uncertainty Calibrated Surrogates

Authors: Prashant Kumar Choudhary, Nouhaila Innan, Muhammad Shafique, Rajeev Singh
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: quant-ph, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.NE, cs.NI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09586v1

Quantum circuit design is a key bottleneck for practical quantum machine learning on complex, real-world data. We present an automated framework that discovers and refines variational quantum circuits (VQCs) using graph-based Bayesian optimization with a graph neural network (GNN) surrogate. Circuits are represented as graphs and mutated and selected via an expected improvement acquisition function informed by surrogate uncertainty with Monte Carlo dropout. Candidate circuits are evaluated with a hybrid quantum-classical variational classifier on the next generation firewall telemetry and network internet of things (NF-ToN-IoT-V2) cybersecurity dataset, after feature selection and scaling for quantum embedding. We benchmark our pipeline against an MLP-based surrogate, random search, and greedy GNN selection. The GNN-guided optimizer consistently finds circuits with lower complexity and competitive or superior classification accuracy compared to all baselines. Robustness is assessed via a noise study across standard quantum noise channels, including amplitude damping, phase damping, thermal relaxation, depolarizing, and readout bit flip noise. The implementation is fully reproducible, with time benchmarking and export of best found circuits, providing a scalable and interpretable route to automated quantum circuit discovery.

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### UnReflectAnything: RGB-Only Highlight Removal by Rendering Synthetic Specular Supervision

Authors: Alberto Rota, Mert Kiray, Mert Asim Karaoglu, Patrick Ruhkamp, Elena De Momi, Nassir Navab, Benjamin Busam
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09583v2

Specular highlights distort appearance, obscure texture, and hinder geometric reasoning in both natural and surgical imagery. We present UnReflectAnything, an RGB-only framework that removes highlights from a single image by predicting a highlight map together with a reflection-free diffuse reconstruction. The model uses a frozen vision transformer encoder to extract multi-scale features, a lightweight head to localize specular regions, and a token-level inpainting module that restores corrupted feature patches before producing the final diffuse image. To overcome the lack of paired supervision, we introduce a Virtual Highlight Synthesis pipeline that renders physically plausible specularities using monocular geometry, Fresnel-aware shading, and randomized lighting which enables training on arbitrary RGB images with correct geometric structure. UnReflectAnything generalizes across natural and surgical domains where non-Lambertian surfaces and non-uniform lighting create severe highlights and it achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art results on several benchmarks. Project Page: https://alberto-rota.github.io/UnReflectAnything/

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### UnReflectAnything: RGB-Only Highlight Removal by Rendering Synthetic Specular Supervision

Authors: Alberto Rota, Mert Kiray, Mert Asim Karaoglu, Patrick Ruhkamp, Elena De Momi, Nassir Navabm, Benjamin Busam
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09583v1

Specular highlights distort appearance, obscure texture, and hinder geometric reasoning in both natural and surgical imagery. We present UnReflectAnything, an RGB-only framework that removes highlights from a single image by predicting a highlight map together with a reflection-free diffuse reconstruction. The model uses a frozen vision transformer encoder to extract multi-scale features, a lightweight head to localize specular regions, and a token-level inpainting module that restores corrupted feature patches before producing the final diffuse image. To overcome the lack of paired supervision, we introduce a Virtual Highlight Synthesis pipeline that renders physically plausible specularities using monocular geometry, Fresnel-aware shading, and randomized lighting which enables training on arbitrary RGB images with correct geometric structure. UnReflectAnything generalizes across natural and surgical domains where non-Lambertian surfaces and non-uniform lighting create severe highlights and it achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art results on several benchmarks. Project Page: https://alberto-rota.github.io/UnReflectAnything/

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### Content-Adaptive Image Retouching Guided by Attribute-Based Text Representation

Authors: Hancheng Zhu, Xinyu Liu, Rui Yao, Kunyang Sun, Leida Li, Abdulmotaleb El Saddik
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09580v1

Image retouching has received significant attention due to its ability to achieve high-quality visual content. Existing approaches mainly rely on uniform pixel-wise color mapping across entire images, neglecting the inherent color variations induced by image content. This limitation hinders existing approaches from achieving adaptive retouching that accommodates both diverse color distributions and user-defined style preferences. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Content-Adaptive image retouching method guided by Attribute-based Text Representation (CA-ATP). Specifically, we propose a content-adaptive curve mapping module, which leverages a series of basis curves to establish multiple color mapping relationships and learns the corresponding weight maps, enabling content-aware color adjustments. The proposed module can capture color diversity within the image content, allowing similar color values to receive distinct transformations based on their spatial context. In addition, we propose an attribute text prediction module that generates text representations from multiple image attributes, which explicitly represent user-defined style preferences. These attribute-based text representations are subsequently integrated with visual features via a multimodal model, providing user-friendly guidance for image retouching. Extensive experiments on several public datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

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### Hands-on Evaluation of Visual Transformers for Object Recognition and Detection

Authors: Dimitrios N. Vlachogiannis, Dimitrios A. Koutsomitropoulos
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09579v1

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for computer vision sometimes struggle with understanding images in a global context, as they mainly focus on local patterns. On the other hand, Vision Transformers (ViTs), inspired by models originally created for language processing, use self-attention mechanisms, which allow them to understand relationships across the entire image. In this paper, we compare different types of ViTs (pure, hierarchical, and hybrid) against traditional CNN models across various tasks, including object recognition, detection, and medical image classification. We conduct thorough tests on standard datasets like ImageNet for image classification and COCO for object detection. Additionally, we apply these models to medical imaging using the ChestX-ray14 dataset. We find that hybrid and hierarchical transformers, especially Swin and CvT, offer a strong balance between accuracy and computational resources. Furthermore, by experimenting with data augmentation techniques on medical images, we discover significant performance improvements, particularly with the Swin Transformer model. Overall, our results indicate that Vision Transformers are competitive and, in many cases, outperform traditional CNNs, especially in scenarios requiring the understanding of global visual contexts like medical imaging.

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### Auto-BenchmarkCard: Automated Synthesis of Benchmark Documentation

Authors: Aris Hofmann, Inge Vejsbjerg, Dhaval Salwala, Elizabeth M. Daly
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09577v1

We present Auto-BenchmarkCard, a workflow for generating validated descriptions of AI benchmarks. Benchmark documentation is often incomplete or inconsistent, making it difficult to interpret and compare benchmarks across tasks or domains. Auto-BenchmarkCard addresses this gap by combining multi-agent data extraction from heterogeneous sources (e.g., Hugging Face, Unitxt, academic papers) with LLM-driven synthesis. A validation phase evaluates factual accuracy through atomic entailment scoring using the FactReasoner tool. This workflow has the potential to promote transparency, comparability, and reusability in AI benchmark reporting, enabling researchers and practitioners to better navigate and evaluate benchmark choices.

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### Seeing Soil from Space: Towards Robust and Scalable Remote Soil Nutrient Analysis

Authors: David Seu, Nicolas Longepe, Gabriel Cioltea, Erik Maidik, Calin Andrei
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CV, physics.geo-ph
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09576v1

Environmental variables are increasingly affecting agricultural decision-making, yet accessible and scalable tools for soil assessment remain limited. This study presents a robust and scalable modeling system for estimating soil properties in croplands, including soil organic carbon (SOC), total nitrogen (N), available phosphorus (P), exchangeable potassium (K), and pH, using remote sensing data and environmental covariates. The system employs a hybrid modeling approach, combining the indirect methods of modeling soil through proxies and drivers with direct spectral modeling. We extend current approaches by using interpretable physics-informed covariates derived from radiative transfer models (RTMs) and complex, nonlinear embeddings from a foundation model. We validate the system on a harmonized dataset that covers Europes cropland soils across diverse pedoclimatic zones. Evaluation is conducted under a robust validation framework that enforces strict spatial blocking, stratified splits, and statistically distinct train-test sets, which deliberately make the evaluation harder and produce more realistic error estimates for unseen regions. The models achieved their highest accuracy for SOC and N. This performance held across unseen locations, under both spatial cross-validation and an independent test set. SOC obtained a MAE of 5.12 g/kg and a CCC of 0.77, and N obtained a MAE of 0.44 g/kg and a CCC of 0.77. We also assess uncertainty through conformal calibration, achieving 90 percent coverage at the target confidence level. This study contributes to the digital advancement of agriculture through the application of scalable, data-driven soil analysis frameworks that can be extended to related domains requiring quantitative soil evaluation, such as carbon markets.

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### Investigate the Low-level Visual Perception in Vision-Language based Image Quality Assessment

Authors: Yuan Li, Zitang Sun, Yen-Ju Chen, Shin'ya Nishida
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09573v1

Recent advances in Image Quality Assessment (IQA) have leveraged Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to generate descriptive explanations. However, despite their strong visual perception modules, these models often fail to reliably detect basic low-level distortions such as blur, noise, and compression, and may produce inconsistent evaluations across repeated inferences. This raises an essential question: do MLLM-based IQA systems truly perceive the visual features that matter? To examine this issue, we introduce a low-level distortion perception task that requires models to classify specific distortion types. Our component-wise analysis shows that although MLLMs are structurally capable of representing such distortions, they tend to overfit training templates, leading to biases in quality scoring. As a result, critical low-level features are weakened or lost during the vision-language alignment transfer stage. Furthermore, by computing the semantic distance between visual features and corresponding semantic tokens before and after component-wise fine-tuning, we show that improving the alignment of the vision encoder dramatically enhances distortion recognition accuracy, increasing it from 14.92% to 84.43%. Overall, these findings indicate that incorporating dedicated constraints on the vision encoder can strengthen text-explainable visual representations and enable MLLM-based pipelines to produce more coherent and interpretable reasoning in vision-centric tasks.

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### Lazy Diffusion: Mitigating spectral collapse in generative diffusion-based stable autoregressive emulation of turbulent flows

Authors: Anish Sambamurthy, Ashesh Chattopadhyay
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: physics.flu-dyn, cs.AI, math.DS, nlin.CD, physics.ao-ph
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09572v1

Turbulent flows posses broadband, power-law spectra in which multiscale interactions couple high-wavenumber fluctuations to large-scale dynamics. Although diffusion-based generative models offer a principled probabilistic forecasting framework, we show that standard DDPMs induce a fundamental \emph{spectral collapse}: a Fourier-space analysis of the forward SDE reveals a closed-form, mode-wise signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) that decays monotonically in wavenumber, $|k|$ for spectra $S(k)\!\propto\!|k|^{-λ}$, rendering high-wavenumber modes indistinguishable from noise and producing an intrinsic spectral bias. We reinterpret the noise schedule as a spectral regularizer and introduce power-law schedules $β(τ)\!\propto\!τ^γ$ that preserve fine-scale structure deeper into diffusion time, along with \emph{Lazy Diffusion}, a one-step distillation method that leverages the learned score geometry to bypass long reverse-time trajectories and prevent high-$k$ degradation. Applied to high-Reynolds-number 2D Kolmogorov turbulence and $1/12^\circ$ Gulf of Mexico ocean reanalysis, these methods resolve spectral collapse, stabilize long-horizon autoregression, and restore physically realistic inertial-range scaling. Together, they show that naïve Gaussian scheduling is structurally incompatible with power-law physics and that physics-aware diffusion processes can yield accurate, efficient, and fully probabilistic surrogates for multiscale dynamical systems.

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### The Gender Code: Gendering the Global Governance of Artificial Intelligence

Authors: Jelena Cupac
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09570v1

This paper examines how international AI governance frameworks address gender issues and gender-based harms. The analysis covers binding regulations, such as the EU AI Act; soft law instruments, like the UNESCO Recommendations on AI Ethics; and global initiatives, such as the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI). These instruments reveal emerging trends, including the integration of gender concerns into broader human rights frameworks, a shift toward explicit gender-related provisions, and a growing emphasis on inclusivity and diversity. Yet, some critical gaps persist, including inconsistent treatment of gender across governance documents, limited engagement with intersectionality, and a lack of robust enforcement mechanisms. However, this paper argues that effective AI governance must be intersectional, enforceable, and inclusive. This is key to moving beyond tokenism toward meaningful equity and preventing reinforcement of existing inequalities. The study contributes to ethical AI debates by highlighting the importance of gender-sensitive governance in building a just technological future.

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### Toward Closed-loop Molecular Discovery via Language Model, Property Alignment and Strategic Search

Authors: Junkai Ji, Zhangfan Yang, Dong Xu, Ruibin Bai, Jianqiang Li, Tingjun Hou, Zexuan Zhu
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09566v3

Drug discovery is a time-consuming and expensive process, with traditional high-throughput and docking-based virtual screening hampered by low success rates and limited scalability. Recent advances in generative modelling, including autoregressive, diffusion, and flow-based approaches, have enabled de novo ligand design beyond the limits of enumerative screening. Yet these models often suffer from inadequate generalization, limited interpretability, and an overemphasis on binding affinity at the expense of key pharmacological properties, thereby restricting their translational utility. Here we present Trio, a molecular generation framework integrating fragment-based molecular language modeling, reinforcement learning, and Monte Carlo tree search, for effective and interpretable closed-loop targeted molecular design. Through the three key components, Trio enables context-aware fragment assembly, enforces physicochemical and synthetic feasibility, and guides a balanced search between the exploration of novel chemotypes and the exploitation of promising intermediates within protein binding pockets. Experimental results show that Trio reliably achieves chemically valid and pharmacologically enhanced ligands, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches with improved binding affinity (+7.85%), drug-likeness (+11.10%) and synthetic accessibility (+12.05%), while expanding molecular diversity more than fourfold. By combining generalization, plausibility, and interpretability, Trio establishes a closed-loop generative paradigm that redefines how chemical space can be navigated, offering a transformative foundation for the next era of AI-driven drug discovery.

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### From Graphs to Gates: DNS-HyXNet, A Lightweight and Deployable Sequential Model for Real-Time DNS Tunnel Detection

Authors: Faraz Ali, Muhammad Afaq, Mahmood Niazi, Muzammil Behzad
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09565v1

Domain Name System (DNS) tunneling remains a covert channel for data exfiltration and command-and-control communication. Although graph-based methods such as GraphTunnel achieve strong accuracy, they introduce significant latency and computational overhead due to recursive parsing and graph construction, limiting their suitability for real-time deployment. This work presents DNS-HyXNet, a lightweight extended Long Short-Term Memory (xLSTM) hybrid framework designed for efficient sequence-based DNS tunnel detection. DNS-HyXNet integrates tokenized domain embeddings with normalized numerical DNS features and processes them through a two-layer xLSTM network that directly learns temporal dependencies from packet sequences, eliminating the need for graph reconstruction and enabling single-stage multi-class classification. The model was trained and evaluated on two public benchmark datasets with carefully tuned hyperparameters to ensure low memory consumption and fast inference. Across all experimental splits of the DNS-Tunnel-Datasets, DNS-HyXNet achieved up to 99.99% accuracy, with macro-averaged precision, recall, and F1-scores exceeding 99.96%, and demonstrated a per-sample detection latency of just 0.041 ms, confirming its scalability and real-time readiness. These results show that sequential modeling with xLSTM can effectively replace computationally expensive recursive graph generation, offering a deployable and energy-efficient alternative for real-time DNS tunnel detection on commodity hardware.

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### System Report for CCL25-Eval Task 10: Prompt-Driven Large Language Model Merge for Fine-Grained Chinese Hate Speech Detection

Authors: Binglin Wu, Jiaxiu Zou, Xianneng Li
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09563v1

The proliferation of hate speech on Chinese social media poses urgent societal risks, yet traditional systems struggle to decode context-dependent rhetorical strategies and evolving slang. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel three-stage LLM-based framework: Prompt Engineering, Supervised Fine-tuning, and LLM Merging. First, context-aware prompts are designed to guide LLMs in extracting implicit hate patterns. Next, task-specific features are integrated during supervised fine-tuning to enhance domain adaptation. Finally, merging fine-tuned LLMs improves robustness against out-of-distribution cases. Evaluations on the STATE-ToxiCN benchmark validate the framework's effectiveness, demonstrating superior performance over baseline methods in detecting fine-grained hate speech.

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### Building Reasonable Inference for Vision-Language Models in Blind Image Quality Assessment

Authors: Yuan Li, Zitang Sun, Yen-ju Chen, Shin'ya Nishida
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09555v1

Recent progress in BIQA has been driven by VLMs, whose semantic reasoning abilities suggest that they might extract visual features, generate descriptive text, and infer quality in a human-like manner. However, these models often produce textual descriptions that contradict their final quality predictions, and the predicted scores can change unstably during inference - behaviors not aligned with human reasoning. To understand these issues, we analyze the factors that cause contradictory assessments and instability. We first estimate the relationship between the final quality predictions and the generated visual features, finding that the predictions are not fully grounded in the features and that the logical connection between them is weak. Moreover, decoding intermediate VLM layers shows that the model frequently relies on a limited set of candidate tokens, which contributes to prediction instability. To encourage more human-like reasoning, we introduce a two-stage tuning method that explicitly separates visual perception from quality inference. In the first stage, the model learns visual features; in the second, it infers quality solely from these features. Experiments on SPAQ and KONIQ demonstrate that our approach reduces prediction instability from 22.00% to 12.39% and achieves average gains of 0.3124/0.3507 in SRCC/PLCC across LIVE, CSIQ, SPAQ, and KONIQ compared to the baseline. Further analyses show that our method improves both stability and the reliability of the inference process.

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### Systematic Framework of Application Methods for Large Language Models in Language Sciences

Authors: Kun Sun, Rong Wang
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09552v1

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming language sciences. However, their widespread deployment currently suffers from methodological fragmentation and a lack of systematic soundness. This study proposes two comprehensive methodological frameworks designed to guide the strategic and responsible application of LLMs in language sciences. The first method-selection framework defines and systematizes three distinct, complementary approaches, each linked to a specific research goal: (1) prompt-based interaction with general-use models for exploratory analysis and hypothesis generation; (2) fine-tuning of open-source models for confirmatory, theory-driven investigation and high-quality data generation; and (3) extraction of contextualized embeddings for further quantitative analysis and probing of model internal mechanisms. We detail the technical implementation and inherent trade-offs of each method, supported by empirical case studies. Based on the method-selection framework, the second systematic framework proposed provides constructed configurations that guide the practical implementation of multi-stage research pipelines based on these approaches. We then conducted a series of empirical experiments to validate our proposed framework, employing retrospective analysis, prospective application, and an expert evaluation survey. By enforcing the strategic alignment of research questions with the appropriate LLM methodology, the frameworks enable a critical paradigm shift in language science research. We believe that this system is fundamental for ensuring reproducibility, facilitating the critical evaluation of LLM mechanisms, and providing the structure necessary to move traditional linguistics from ad-hoc utility to verifiable, robust science.

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### A Dual-Domain Convolutional Network for Hyperspectral Single-Image Super-Resolution

Authors: Murat Karayaka, Usman Muhammad, Jorma Laaksonen, Md Ziaul Hoque, Tapio Seppänen
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09546v1

This study presents a lightweight dual-domain super-resolution network (DDSRNet) that combines Spatial-Net with the discrete wavelet transform (DWT). Specifically, our proposed model comprises three main components: (1) a shallow feature extraction module, termed Spatial-Net, which performs residual learning and bilinear interpolation; (2) a low-frequency enhancement branch based on the DWT that refines coarse image structures; and (3) a shared high-frequency refinement branch that simultaneously enhances the LH (horizontal), HL (vertical), and HH (diagonal) wavelet subbands using a single CNN with shared weights. As a result, the DWT enables subband decomposition, while the inverse DWT reconstructs the final high-resolution output. By doing so, the integration of spatial- and frequency-domain learning enables DDSRNet to achieve highly competitive performance with low computational cost on three hyperspectral image datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness for hyperspectral image super-resolution.

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### SWEnergy: An Empirical Study on Energy Efficiency in Agentic Issue Resolution Frameworks with SLMs

Authors: Arihant Tripathy, Ch Pavan Harshit, Karthik Vaidhyanathan
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09543v2

Context. LLM-based autonomous agents in software engineering rely on large, proprietary models, limiting local deployment. This has spurred interest in Small Language Models (SLMs), but their practical effectiveness and efficiency within complex agentic frameworks for automated issue resolution remain poorly understood. Goal. We investigate the performance, energy efficiency, and resource consumption of four leading agentic issue resolution frameworks when deliberately constrained to using SLMs. We aim to assess the viability of these systems for this task in resource-limited settings and characterize the resulting trade-offs. Method. We conduct a controlled evaluation of four leading agentic frameworks (SWE-Agent, OpenHands, Mini SWE Agent, AutoCodeRover) using two SLMs (Gemma-3 4B, Qwen-3 1.7B) on the SWE-bench Verified Mini benchmark. On fixed hardware, we measure energy, duration, token usage, and memory over 150 runs per configuration. Results. We find that framework architecture is the primary driver of energy consumption. The most energy-intensive framework, AutoCodeRover (Gemma), consumed 9.4x more energy on average than the least energy-intensive, OpenHands (Gemma). However, this energy is largely wasted. Task resolution rates were near-zero, demonstrating that current frameworks, when paired with SLMs, consume significant energy on unproductive reasoning loops. The SLM's limited reasoning was the bottleneck for success, but the framework's design was the bottleneck for efficiency. Conclusions. Current agentic frameworks, designed for powerful LLMs, fail to operate efficiently with SLMs. We find that framework architecture is the primary driver of energy consumption, but this energy is largely wasted due to the SLMs' limited reasoning. Viable low-energy solutions require shifting from passive orchestration to architectures that actively manage SLM weaknesses.

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### Comparative Analysis of Hash-based Malware Clustering via K-Means

Authors: Aink Acrie Soe Thein, Nikolaos Pitropakis, Pavlos Papadopoulos, Sam Grierson, Sana Ullah Jan
Published: 2025-12-10
Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09539v1

With the adoption of multiple digital devices in everyday life, the cyber-attack surface has increased. Adversaries are continuously exploring new avenues to exploit them and deploy malware. On the other hand, detection approaches typically employ hashing-based algorithms such as SSDeep, TLSH, and IMPHash to capture structural and behavioural similarities among binaries. This work focuses on the analysis and evaluation of these techniques for clustering malware samples using the K-means algorithm. More specifically, we experimented with established malware families and traits and found that TLSH and IMPHash produce more distinct, semantically meaningful clusters, whereas SSDeep is more efficient for broader classification tasks. The findings of this work can guide the development of more robust threat-detection mechanisms and adaptive security mechanisms.

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