# Research Papers — 2025-12 · bundle page 119 of 175 > Full-text markdown of papers #5901–5950 of 8703 published in 2025-12, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 8703-paper 2025-12 archive (50 papers per file). Canonical page: https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-12/page/119 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-12/page/118.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-12/page/120.md) ### Data-Driven Dynamic Parameter Learning of manipulator robots Authors: Mohammed Elseiagy, Tsige Tadesse Alemayoh, Ranulfo Bezerra, Shotaro Kojima, Kazunori Ohno Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08767v1 Bridging the sim-to-real gap remains a fundamental challenge in robotics, as accurate dynamic parameter estimation is essential for reliable model-based control, realistic simulation, and safe deployment of manipulators. Traditional analytical approaches often fall short when faced with complex robot structures and interactions. Data-driven methods offer a promising alternative, yet conventional neural networks such as recurrent models struggle to capture long-range dependencies critical for accurate estimation. In this study, we propose a Transformer-based approach for dynamic parameter estimation, supported by an automated pipeline that generates diverse robot models and enriched trajectory data using Jacobian-derived features. The dataset consists of 8,192 robots with varied inertial and frictional properties. Leveraging attention mechanisms, our model effectively captures both temporal and spatial dependencies. Experimental results highlight the influence of sequence length, sampling rate, and architecture, with the best configuration (sequence length 64, 64 Hz, four layers, 32 heads) achieving a validation R2 of 0.8633. Mass and inertia are estimated with near-perfect accuracy, Coulomb friction with moderate-to-high accuracy, while viscous friction and distal link center-of-mass remain more challenging. These results demonstrate that combining Transformers with automated dataset generation and kinematic enrichment enables scalable, accurate dynamic parameter estimation, contributing to improved sim-to-real transfer in robotic systems --- ### Wan-Move: Motion-controllable Video Generation via Latent Trajectory Guidance Authors: Ruihang Chu, Yefei He, Zhekai Chen, Shiwei Zhang, Xiaogang Xu, Bin Xia, Dingdong Wang, Hongwei Yi, Xihui Liu, Hengshuang Zhao, Yu Liu, Yingya Zhang et al. Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08765v1 We present Wan-Move, a simple and scalable framework that brings motion control to video generative models. Existing motion-controllable methods typically suffer from coarse control granularity and limited scalability, leaving their outputs insufficient for practical use. We narrow this gap by achieving precise and high-quality motion control. Our core idea is to directly make the original condition features motion-aware for guiding video synthesis. To this end, we first represent object motions with dense point trajectories, allowing fine-grained control over the scene. We then project these trajectories into latent space and propagate the first frame's features along each trajectory, producing an aligned spatiotemporal feature map that tells how each scene element should move. This feature map serves as the updated latent condition, which is naturally integrated into the off-the-shelf image-to-video model, e.g., Wan-I2V-14B, as motion guidance without any architecture change. It removes the need for auxiliary motion encoders and makes fine-tuning base models easily scalable. Through scaled training, Wan-Move generates 5-second, 480p videos whose motion controllability rivals Kling 1.5 Pro's commercial Motion Brush, as indicated by user studies. To support comprehensive evaluation, we further design MoveBench, a rigorously curated benchmark featuring diverse content categories and hybrid-verified annotations. It is distinguished by larger data volume, longer video durations, and high-quality motion annotations. Extensive experiments on MoveBench and the public dataset consistently show Wan-Move's superior motion quality. Code, models, and benchmark data are made publicly available. --- ### Learning and Editing Universal Graph Prompt Tuning via Reinforcement Learning Authors: Jinfeng Xu, Zheyu Chen, Shuo Yang, Jinze Li, Hewei Wang, Yijie Li, Edith C. H. Ngai Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08763v1 Early graph prompt tuning approaches relied on task-specific designs for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), limiting their adaptability across diverse pre-training strategies. In contrast, another promising line of research has investigated universal graph prompt tuning, which operates directly in the input graph's feature space and builds a theoretical foundation that universal graph prompt tuning can theoretically achieve an equivalent effect of any prompting function, eliminating dependence on specific pre-training strategies. Recent works propose selective node-based graph prompt tuning to pursue more ideal prompts. However, we argue that selective node-based graph prompt tuning inevitably compromises the theoretical foundation of universal graph prompt tuning. In this paper, we strengthen the theoretical foundation of universal graph prompt tuning by introducing stricter constraints, demonstrating that adding prompts to all nodes is a necessary condition for achieving the universality of graph prompts. To this end, we propose a novel model and paradigm, Learning and Editing Universal GrAph Prompt Tuning (LEAP), which preserves the theoretical foundation of universal graph prompt tuning while pursuing more ideal prompts. Specifically, we first build the basic universal graph prompts to preserve the theoretical foundation and then employ actor-critic reinforcement learning to select nodes and edit prompts. Extensive experiments on graph- and node-level tasks across various pre-training strategies in both full-shot and few-shot scenarios show that LEAP consistently outperforms fine-tuning and other prompt-based approaches. --- ### Performance Comparison of Aerial RIS and STAR-RIS in 3D Wireless Environments Authors: Dongdong Yang, Bin Li, Jiguang He Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08755v1 Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) and simultaneously transmitting and reflecting RIS (STAR-RIS) have emerged as key enablers for enhancing wireless coverage and capacity in next-generation networks. When mounted on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), they benefit from flexible deployment and improved line-of-sight conditions. Despite their promising potential, a comprehensive performance comparison between aerial RIS and STAR-RIS architectures has not been thoroughly investigated. This letter presents a detailed performance comparison between aerial RIS and STAR-RIS in three-dimensional wireless environments. Accurate channel models incorporating directional radiation patterns are established, and the influence of deployment altitude and orientation is thoroughly examined. To optimize the system sum-rate, we formulate joint optimization problems for both architectures and propose an efficient solution based on the weighted minimum mean square error and block coordinate descent algorithms. Simulation results reveal that STAR-RIS outperforms RIS in low-altitude scenarios due to its full-space coverage capability, whereas RIS delivers better performance near the base station at higher altitudes. The findings provide practical insights for the deployment of aerial intelligent surfaces in future 6G communication systems. --- ### Skewness-Guided Pruning of Multimodal Swin Transformers for Federated Skin Lesion Classification on Edge Devices Authors: Kuniko Paxton, Koorosh Aslansefat, Dhavalkumar Thakker, Yiannis Papadopoulos Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.CV, cs.DC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08751v1 In recent years, high-performance computer vision models have achieved remarkable success in medical imaging, with some skin lesion classification systems even surpassing dermatology specialists in diagnostic accuracy. However, such models are computationally intensive and large in size, making them unsuitable for deployment on edge devices. In addition, strict privacy constraints hinder centralized data management, motivating the adoption of Federated Learning (FL). To address these challenges, this study proposes a skewness-guided pruning method that selectively prunes the Multi-Head Self-Attention and Multi-Layer Perceptron layers of a multimodal Swin Transformer based on the statistical skewness of their output distributions. The proposed method was validated in a horizontal FL environment and shown to maintain performance while substantially reducing model complexity. Experiments on the compact Swin Transformer demonstrate approximately 36\% model size reduction with no loss in accuracy. These findings highlight the feasibility of achieving efficient model compression and privacy-preserving distributed learning for multimodal medical AI on edge devices. --- ### A Scalable Pipeline Combining Procedural 3D Graphics and Guided Diffusion for Photorealistic Synthetic Training Data Generation in White Button Mushroom Segmentation Authors: Artúr I. Károly, Péter Galambos Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08747v1 Industrial mushroom cultivation increasingly relies on computer vision for monitoring and automated harvesting. However, developing accurate detection and segmentation models requires large, precisely annotated datasets that are costly to produce. Synthetic data provides a scalable alternative, yet often lacks sufficient realism to generalize to real-world scenarios. This paper presents a novel workflow that integrates 3D rendering in Blender with a constrained diffusion model to automatically generate high-quality annotated, photorealistic synthetic images of Agaricus Bisporus mushrooms. This approach preserves full control over 3D scene configuration and annotations while achieving photorealism without the need for specialized computer graphics expertise. We release two synthetic datasets (each containing 6,000 images depicting over 250k mushroom instances) and evaluate Mask R-CNN models trained on them in a zero-shot setting. When tested on two independent real-world datasets (including a newly collected benchmark), our method achieves state-of-the-art segmentation performance (F1 = 0.859 on M18K), despite using only synthetic training data. Although the approach is demonstrated on Agaricus Bisporus mushrooms, the proposed pipeline can be readily adapted to other mushroom species or to other agricultural domains, such as fruit and leaf detection. --- ### Single-Agent Scaling Fails Multi-Agent Intelligence: Towards Foundation Models with Native Multi-Agent Intelligence Authors: Shuyue Hu, Haoyang Yan, Yiqun Zhang, Yang Chen, Dongzhan Zhou, Lei Bai Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08743v3 Foundation models (FMs) are increasingly assuming the role of the ''brain'' of AI agents. While recent efforts have begun to equip FMs with native single-agent abilities -- such as GUI interaction or integrated tool use -- we argue that the next frontier is endowing FMs with native multi-agent intelligence. We identify four core capabilities of FMs in multi-agent contexts: understanding, planning, efficient communication, and adaptation. Contrary to assumptions about the spontaneous emergence of such abilities, we provide extensive empirical evidence, across 41 large language models and 7 challenging benchmarks, showing that scaling single-agent performance alone does not automatically yield robust multi-agent intelligence. To address this gap, we outline key research directions -- spanning dataset construction, evaluation, training paradigms, and safety considerations -- for building FMs with native multi-agent intelligence. --- ### Deconstructing the Dual Black Box:A Plug-and-Play Cognitive Framework for Human-AI Collaborative Enhancement and Its Implications for AI Governance Authors: Yiming Lu Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08740v1 Currently, there exists a fundamental divide between the "cognitive black box" (implicit intuition) of human experts and the "computational black box" (untrustworthy decision-making) of artificial intelligence (AI). This paper proposes a new paradigm of "human-AI collaborative cognitive enhancement," aiming to transform the dual black boxes into a composable, auditable, and extensible "functional white-box" system through structured "meta-interaction." The core breakthrough lies in the "plug-and-play cognitive framework"--a computable knowledge package that can be extracted from expert dialogues and loaded into the Recursive Adversarial Meta-Thinking Network (RAMTN). This enables expert thinking, such as medical diagnostic logic and teaching intuition, to be converted into reusable and scalable public assets, realizing a paradigm shift from "AI as a tool" to "AI as a thinking partner." This work not only provides the first engineering proof for "cognitive equity" but also opens up a new path for AI governance: constructing a verifiable and intervenable governance paradigm through "transparency of interaction protocols" rather than prying into the internal mechanisms of models. The framework is open-sourced to promote technology for good and cognitive inclusion. This paper is an independent exploratory research conducted by the author. All content presented, including the theoretical framework (RAMTN), methodology (meta-interaction), system implementation, and case validation, constitutes the author's individual research achievements. --- ### Pose-Based Sign Language Spotting via an End-to-End Encoder Architecture Authors: Samuel Ebimobowei Johnny, Blessed Guda, Emmanuel Enejo Aaron, Assane Gueye Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08738v1 Automatic Sign Language Recognition (ASLR) has emerged as a vital field for bridging the gap between deaf and hearing communities. However, the problem of sign-to-sign retrieval or detecting a specific sign within a sequence of continuous signs remains largely unexplored. We define this novel task as Sign Language Spotting. In this paper, we present a first step toward sign language retrieval by addressing the challenge of detecting the presence or absence of a query sign video within a sentence-level gloss or sign video. Unlike conventional approaches that rely on intermediate gloss recognition or text-based matching, we propose an end-to-end model that directly operates on pose keypoints extracted from sign videos. Our architecture employs an encoder-only backbone with a binary classification head to determine whether the query sign appears within the target sequence. By focusing on pose representations instead of raw RGB frames, our method significantly reduces computational cost and mitigates visual noise. We evaluate our approach on the Word Presence Prediction dataset from the WSLP 2025 shared task, achieving 61.88\% accuracy and 60.00\% F1-score. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of our pose-based framework for Sign Language Spotting, establishing a strong foundation for future research in automatic sign language retrieval and verification. Code is available at https://github.com/EbimoJohnny/Pose-Based-Sign-Language-Spotting --- ### Mitigating Individual Skin Tone Bias in Skin Lesion Classification through Distribution-Aware Reweighting Authors: Kuniko Paxton, Zeinab Dehghani, Koorosh Aslansefat, Dhavalkumar Thakker, Yiannis Papadopoulos Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08733v1 Skin color has historically been a focal point of discrimination, yet fairness research in machine learning for medical imaging often relies on coarse subgroup categories, overlooking individual-level variations. Such group-based approaches risk obscuring biases faced by outliers within subgroups. This study introduces a distribution-based framework for evaluating and mitigating individual fairness in skin lesion classification. We treat skin tone as a continuous attribute rather than a categorical label, and employ kernel density estimation (KDE) to model its distribution. We further compare twelve statistical distance metrics to quantify disparities between skin tone distributions and propose a distance-based reweighting (DRW) loss function to correct underrepresentation in minority tones. Experiments across CNN and Transformer models demonstrate: (i) the limitations of categorical reweighting in capturing individual-level disparities, and (ii) the superior performance of distribution-based reweighting, particularly with Fidelity Similarity (FS), Wasserstein Distance (WD), Hellinger Metric (HM), and Harmonic Mean Similarity (HS). These findings establish a robust methodology for advancing fairness at individual level in dermatological AI systems, and highlight broader implications for sensitive continuous attributes in medical image analysis. --- ### Neural Ordinary Differential Equations for Simulating Metabolic Pathway Dynamics from Time-Series Multiomics Data Authors: Udesh Habaraduwa, Andrei Lixandru Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.LG, q-bio.SC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08732v1 The advancement of human healthspan and bioengineering relies heavily on predicting the behavior of complex biological systems. While high-throughput multiomics data is becoming increasingly abundant, converting this data into actionable predictive models remains a bottleneck. High-capacity, datadriven simulation systems are critical in this landscape; unlike classical mechanistic models restricted by prior knowledge, these architectures can infer latent interactions directly from observational data, allowing for the simulation of temporal trajectories and the anticipation of downstream intervention effects in personalized medicine and synthetic biology. To address this challenge, we introduce Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODEs) as a dynamic framework for learning the complex interplay between the proteome and metabolome. We applied this framework to time-series data derived from engineered Escherichia coli strains, modeling the continuous dynamics of metabolic pathways. The proposed NODE architecture demonstrates superior performance in capturing system dynamics compared to traditional machine learning pipelines. Our results show a greater than 90% improvement in root mean squared error over baselines across both Limonene (up to 94.38% improvement) and Isopentenol (up to 97.65% improvement) pathway datasets. Furthermore, the NODE models demonstrated a 1000x acceleration in inference time, establishing them as a scalable, high-fidelity tool for the next generation of metabolic engineering and biological discovery. --- ### SegEarth-OV3: Exploring SAM 3 for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation in Remote Sensing Images Authors: Kaiyu Li, Shengqi Zhang, Yujie Wang, Yupeng Deng, Zhi Wang, Deyu Meng, Xiangyong Cao Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08730v2 Most existing methods for training-free open-vocabulary semantic segmentation are based on CLIP. While these approaches have made progress, they often face challenges in precise localization or require complex pipelines to combine separate modules, especially in remote sensing scenarios where numerous dense and small targets are present. Recently, Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM 3) was proposed, unifying segmentation and recognition in a promptable framework. In this paper, we present a comprehensive exploration of applying SAM 3 to the remote sensing open-vocabulary tasks (i.e., 2D semantic segmentation, change detection, and 3D semantic segmentation) without any training. First, we implement a mask fusion strategy that combines the outputs from SAM 3's semantic segmentation head and the Transformer decoder (instance head). This allows us to leverage the strengths of both heads for better land coverage. Second, we utilize the presence score from the presence head to filter out categories that do not exist in the scene, reducing false positives caused by the vast vocabulary sizes and patch-level processing in geospatial scenes. Furthermore, we extend our method to open-vocabulary change detection by a joint instance- and pixel-level verification strategy built directly upon our fused logits. We evaluate our method on extensive remote sensing datasets and tasks, including 20 segmentation datasets, 3 change detection datasets, and a 3D segmentation dataset. Experiments show that our method achieves promising performance, demonstrating the potential of SAM 3 for remote sensing open-vocabulary tasks. Our code is released at https://github.com/earth-insights/SegEarth-OV-3. --- ### Exposing Hidden Biases in Text-to-Image Models via Automated Prompt Search Authors: Manos Plitsis, Giorgos Bouritsas, Vassilis Katsouros, Yannis Panagakis Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08724v3 Text-to-image (TTI) diffusion models have achieved remarkable visual quality, yet they have been repeatedly shown to exhibit social biases across sensitive attributes such as gender, race and age. To mitigate these biases, existing approaches frequently depend on curated prompt datasets - either manually constructed or generated with large language models (LLMs) - as part of their training and/or evaluation procedures. Beside the curation cost, this also risks overlooking unanticipated, less obvious prompts that trigger biased generation, even in models that have undergone debiasing. In this work, we introduce Bias-Guided Prompt Search (BGPS), a framework that automatically generates prompts that aim to maximize the presence of biases in the resulting images. BGPS comprises two components: (1) an LLM instructed to produce attribute-neutral prompts and (2) attribute classifiers acting on the TTI's internal representations that steer the decoding process of the LLM toward regions of the prompt space that amplify the image attributes of interest. We conduct extensive experiments on Stable Diffusion 1.5 and a state-of-the-art debiased model and discover an array of subtle and previously undocumented biases that severely deteriorate fairness metrics. Crucially, the discovered prompts are interpretable, i.e they may be entered by a typical user, quantitatively improving the perplexity metric compared to a prominent hard prompt optimization counterpart. Our findings uncover TTI vulnerabilities, while BGPS expands the bias search space and can act as a new evaluation tool for bias mitigation. --- ### Multi-domain performance analysis with scores tailored to user preferences Authors: Sébastien Piérard, Adrien Deliège, Marc Van Droogenbroeck Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.PF, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08715v1 The performance of algorithms, methods, and models tends to depend heavily on the distribution of cases on which they are applied, this distribution being specific to the applicative domain. After performing an evaluation in several domains, it is highly informative to compute a (weighted) mean performance and, as shown in this paper, to scrutinize what happens during this averaging. To achieve this goal, we adopt a probabilistic framework and consider a performance as a probability measure (e.g., a normalized confusion matrix for a classification task). It appears that the corresponding weighted mean is known to be the summarization, and that only some remarkable scores assign to the summarized performance a value equal to a weighted arithmetic mean of the values assigned to the domain-specific performances. These scores include the family of ranking scores, a continuum parameterized by user preferences, and that the weights to consider in the arithmetic mean depend on the user preferences. Based on this, we rigorously define four domains, named easiest, most difficult, preponderant, and bottleneck domains, as functions of user preferences. After establishing the theory in a general setting, regardless of the task, we develop new visual tools for two-class classification. --- ### Automatic Essay Scoring and Feedback Generation in Basque Language Learning Authors: Ekhi Azurmendi, Xabier Arregi, Oier Lopez de Lacalle Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08713v2 This paper introduces the first publicly available dataset for Automatic Essay Scoring (AES) and feedback generation in Basque, targeting the CEFR C1 proficiency level. The dataset comprises 3,200 essays from HABE, each annotated by expert evaluators with criterion specific scores covering correctness, richness, coherence, cohesion, and task alignment enriched with detailed feedback and error examples. We fine-tune open-source models, including RoBERTa-EusCrawl and Latxa 8B/70B, for both scoring and explanation generation. Our experiments show that encoder models remain highly reliable for AES, while supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of Latxa significantly enhances performance, surpassing state-of-the-art (SoTA) closed-source systems such as GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 in scoring consistency and feedback quality. We also propose a novel evaluation methodology for assessing feedback generation, combining automatic consistency metrics with expert-based validation of extracted learner errors. Results demonstrate that the fine-tuned Latxa model produces criterion-aligned, pedagogically meaningful feedback and identifies a wider range of error types than proprietary models. This resource and benchmark establish a foundation for transparent, reproducible, and educationally grounded NLP research in low-resource languages such as Basque. --- ### Gradient-Informed Monte Carlo Fine-Tuning of Diffusion Models for Low-Thrust Trajectory Design Authors: Jannik Graebner, Ryne Beeson Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: eess.SY, cs.LG, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08705v1 Preliminary mission design of low-thrust spacecraft trajectories in the Circular Restricted Three-Body Problem is a global search characterized by a complex objective landscape and numerous local minima. Formulating the problem as sampling from an unnormalized distribution supported on neighborhoods of locally optimal solutions, provides the opportunity to deploy Markov chain Monte Carlo methods and generative machine learning. In this work, we extend our previous self-supervised diffusion model fine-tuning framework to employ gradient-informed Markov chain Monte Carlo. We compare two algorithms - the Metropolis-Adjusted Langevin Algorithm and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo - both initialized from a distribution learned by a diffusion model. Derivatives of an objective function that balances fuel consumption, time of flight and constraint violations are computed analytically using state transition matrices. We show that incorporating the gradient drift term accelerates mixing and improves convergence of the Markov chain for a multi-revolution transfer in the Saturn-Titan system. Among the evaluated methods, MALA provides the best trade-off between performance and computational cost. Starting from samples generated by a baseline diffusion model trained on a related transfer, MALA explicitly targets Pareto-optimal solutions. Compared to a random walk Metropolis algorithm, it increases the feasibility rate from 17.34% to 63.01% and produces a denser, more diverse coverage of the Pareto front. By fine-tuning a diffusion model on the generated samples and associated reward values with reward-weighted likelihood maximization, we learn the global solution structure of the problem and eliminate the need for a tedious separate data generation phase. --- ### Scale-invariant and View-relational Representation Learning for Full Surround Monocular Depth Authors: Kyumin Hwang, Wonhyeok Choi, Kiljoon Han, Wonjoon Choi, Minwoo Choi, Yongcheon Na, Minwoo Park, Sunghoon Im Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08700v1 Recent foundation models demonstrate strong generalization capabilities in monocular depth estimation. However, directly applying these models to Full Surround Monocular Depth Estimation (FSMDE) presents two major challenges: (1) high computational cost, which limits real-time performance, and (2) difficulty in estimating metric-scale depth, as these models are typically trained to predict only relative depth. To address these limitations, we propose a novel knowledge distillation strategy that transfers robust depth knowledge from a foundation model to a lightweight FSMDE network. Our approach leverages a hybrid regression framework combining the knowledge distillation scheme--traditionally used in classification--with a depth binning module to enhance scale consistency. Specifically, we introduce a cross-interaction knowledge distillation scheme that distills the scale-invariant depth bin probabilities of a foundation model into the student network while guiding it to infer metric-scale depth bin centers from ground-truth depth. Furthermore, we propose view-relational knowledge distillation, which encodes structural relationships among adjacent camera views and transfers them to enhance cross-view depth consistency. Experiments on DDAD and nuScenes demonstrate the effectiveness of our method compared to conventional supervised methods and existing knowledge distillation approaches. Moreover, our method achieves a favorable trade-off between performance and efficiency, meeting real-time requirements. --- ### A Dynamic Time Warping-Transfer Learning Approach to Transferring Knowledge in Stress-strain Behaviors from Polymers to Metals: An Affordable and Generalizable Additive Manufacturing Part Qualification Framework Authors: Chenglong Duan, Dazhong Wu Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08699v2 Part qualification in additive manufacturing (AM) ensures that additively manufactured parts can be consistently produced and reliably used in critical applications. One crucial aspect of part qualification is to determine the complex stress-strain behavior of additively manufactured parts. However, conventional part qualification techniques such as the destructive testing and non-destructive testing are costly and time consuming, especially for metal AM. To address this challenge, we develop a dynamic time warping (DTW)-transfer learning (TL) framework for AM part qualification by transferring knowledge gained from the stress-strain behaviors of additively manufactured low-cost polymers to high-performance, expensive metals. Specifically, the framework selects one single optimal polymer dataset that is the most similar to the metal dataset in the target domain using DTW among multiple polymer datasets, including Nylon, PLA, CF-ABS, and Resin. A long short-term memory (LSTM) model is then trained on one single optimal polymer dataset and tested on one of three target metal datasets, including AlSi10Mg, Ti6Al4V, and carbon steel datasets. Experimental results show that the Resin dataset is selected as the optimal polymer dataset in the source domain for the AlSi10Mg and Ti6Al4V datasets, while the Nylon dataset is selected as the optimal polymer dataset in the source domain for the carbon steel dataset. The DTWTL model trained on one single optimal polymer dataset as the source domain achieves the best predictive performance, including an average mean absolute percentage error of 12.41%, an average root mean squared error of 63.75, and an average coefficient of determination of 0.96 when three metals are used as the target domain, outperforming the vanilla LSTM model without TL as well as the TL model trained on all four polymer datasets as the source domain. --- ### What really matters for person re-identification? A Mixture-of-Experts Framework for Semantic Attribute Importance Authors: Athena Psalta, Vasileios Tsironis, Konstantinos Karantzalos Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08697v1 State-of-the-art person re-identification methods achieve impressive accuracy but remain largely opaque, leaving open the question: which high-level semantic attributes do these models actually rely on? We propose MoSAIC-ReID, a Mixture-of-Experts framework that systematically quantifies the importance of pedestrian attributes for re-identification. Our approach uses LoRA-based experts, each linked to a single attribute, and an oracle router that enables controlled attribution analysis. While MoSAIC-ReID achieves competitive performance on Market-1501 and DukeMTMC under the assumption that attribute annotations are available at test time, its primary value lies in providing a large-scale, quantitative study of attribute importance across intrinsic and extrinsic cues. Using generalized linear models, statistical tests, and feature-importance analyses, we reveal which attributes, such as clothing colors and intrinsic characteristics, contribute most strongly, while infrequent cues (e.g. accessories) have limited effect. This work offers a principled framework for interpretable ReID and highlights the requirements for integrating explicit semantic knowledge in practice. Code is available at https://github.com/psaltaath/MoSAIC-ReID --- ### Multi-Agent Intelligence for Multidisciplinary Decision-Making in Gastrointestinal Oncology Authors: Rongzhao Zhang, Junqiao Wang, Shuyun Yang, Mouxiao Bian, Chihao Zhang, Dongyang Wang, Qiujuan Yan, Yun Zhong, Yuwei Bai, Guanxu Zhu, Kangkun Mao, Miao Wang et al. Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08674v2 Multimodal clinical reasoning in the field of gastrointestinal (GI) oncology necessitates the integrated interpretation of endoscopic imagery, radiological data, and biochemical markers. Despite the evident potential exhibited by Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), they frequently encounter challenges such as context dilution and hallucination when confronted with intricate, heterogeneous medical histories. In order to address these limitations, a hierarchical Multi-Agent Framework is proposed, which emulates the collaborative workflow of a human Multidisciplinary Team (MDT). The system attained a composite expert evaluation score of 4.60/5.00, thereby demonstrating a substantial improvement over the monolithic baseline. It is noteworthy that the agent-based architecture yielded the most substantial enhancements in reasoning logic and medical accuracy. The findings indicate that mimetic, agent-based collaboration provides a scalable, interpretable, and clinically robust paradigm for automated decision support in oncology. --- ### Dual-Branch Center-Surrounding Contrast: Rethinking Contrastive Learning for 3D Point Clouds Authors: Shaofeng Zhang, Xuanqi Chen, Xiangdong Zhang, Sitong Wu, Junchi Yan Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08673v1 Most existing self-supervised learning (SSL) approaches for 3D point clouds are dominated by generative methods based on Masked Autoencoders (MAE). However, these generative methods have been proven to struggle to capture high-level discriminative features effectively, leading to poor performance on linear probing and other downstream tasks. In contrast, contrastive methods excel in discriminative feature representation and generalization ability on image data. Despite this, contrastive learning (CL) in 3D data remains scarce. Besides, simply applying CL methods designed for 2D data to 3D fails to effectively learn 3D local details. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Dual-Branch \textbf{C}enter-\textbf{S}urrounding \textbf{Con}trast (CSCon) framework. Specifically, we apply masking to the center and surrounding parts separately, constructing dual-branch inputs with center-biased and surrounding-biased representations to better capture rich geometric information. Meanwhile, we introduce a patch-level contrastive loss to further enhance both high-level information and local sensitivity. Under the FULL and ALL protocols, CSCon achieves performance comparable to generative methods; under the MLP-LINEAR, MLP-3, and ONLY-NEW protocols, our method attains state-of-the-art results, even surpassing cross-modal approaches. In particular, under the MLP-LINEAR protocol, our method outperforms the baseline (Point-MAE) by \textbf{7.9\%}, \textbf{6.7\%}, and \textbf{10.3\%} on the three variants of ScanObjectNN, respectively. The code will be made publicly available. --- ### DS FedProxGrad: Asymptotic Stationarity Without Noise Floor in Fair Federated Learning Authors: Huzaifa Arif Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08671v4 Recent work \cite{arifgroup} introduced Federated Proximal Gradient \textbf{(\texttt{FedProxGrad})} for solving non-convex composite optimization problems in group fair federated learning. However, the original analysis established convergence only to a \textit{noise-dominated neighborhood of stationarity}, with explicit dependence on a variance-induced noise floor. In this work, we provide an improved asymptotic convergence analysis for a generalized \texttt{FedProxGrad}-type analytical framework with inexact local proximal solutions and explicit fairness regularization. We call this extended analytical framework \textbf{DS \texttt{FedProxGrad}} (Decay Step Size \texttt{FedProxGrad}). Under a Robbins-Monro step-size schedule \cite{robbins1951stochastic} and a mild decay condition on local inexactness, we prove that $\liminf_{r\to\infty} \mathbb{E}(\|\nabla F(\mathbf{x}^r)\|^2) = 0$, i.e., the algorithm is asymptotically stationary and the convergence rate does not depend on a variance-induced noise floor. --- ### Direct transfer of optimized controllers to similar systems using dimensionless MPC Authors: Josip Kir Hromatko, Shambhuraj Sawant, Šandor Ileš, Sébastien Gros Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: eess.SY, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08667v1 Scaled model experiments are commonly used in various engineering fields to reduce experimentation costs and overcome constraints associated with full-scale systems. The relevance of such experiments relies on dimensional analysis and the principle of dynamic similarity. However, transferring controllers to full-scale systems often requires additional tuning. In this paper, we propose a method to enable a direct controller transfer using dimensionless model predictive control, tuned automatically for closed-loop performance. With this reformulation, the closed-loop behavior of an optimized controller transfers directly to a new, dynamically similar system. Additionally, the dimensionless formulation allows for the use of data from systems of different scales during parameter optimization. We demonstrate the method on a cartpole swing-up and a car racing problem, applying either reinforcement learning or Bayesian optimization for tuning the controller parameters. Software used to obtain the results in this paper is publicly available at https://github.com/josipkh/dimensionless-mpcrl. --- ### An Agentic AI System for Multi-Framework Communication Coding Authors: Bohao Yang, Rui Yang, Joshua M. Biro, Haoyuan Wang, Jessica L. Handley, Brianna N. Richardson, Sophia Bessias, Nicoleta Economou-Zavlanos, Armando D. Bedoya, Monica Agrawal, Michael M. Zavlanos, Anand Chowdhury et al. Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08659v2 Clinical communication is central to patient outcomes, yet large-scale human annotation of patient-provider conversation remains labor-intensive, inconsistent, and difficult to scale. Existing approaches based on large language models typically rely on single-task models that lack adaptability, interpretability, and reliability, especially when applied across various communication frameworks and clinical domains. In this study, we developed a Multi-framework Structured Agentic AI system for Clinical Communication (MOSAIC), built on a LangGraph-based architecture that orchestrates four core agents, including a Plan Agent for codebook selection and workflow planning, an Update Agent for maintaining up-to-date retrieval databases, a set of Annotation Agents that applies codebook-guided retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with dynamic few-shot prompting, and a Verification Agent that provides consistency checks and feedback. To evaluate performance, we compared MOSAIC outputs against gold-standard annotations created by trained human coders. We developed and evaluated MOSAIC using 26 gold standard annotated transcripts for training and 50 transcripts for testing, spanning rheumatology and OB/GYN domains. On the test set, MOSAIC achieved an overall F1 score of 0.928. Performance was highest in the Rheumatology subset (F1 = 0.962) and strongest for Patient Behavior (e.g., patients asking questions, expressing preferences, or showing assertiveness). Ablations revealed that MOSAIC outperforms baseline benchmarking. --- ### Reusability in MLOps: Leveraging Ports and Adapters to Build a Microservices Architecture for the Maritime Domain Authors: Renato Cordeiro Ferreira, Aditya Dhinavahi, Rowanne Trapmann, Willem-Jan van den Heuvel Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08657v1 ML-Enabled Systems (MLES) are inherently complex since they require multiple components to achieve their business goal. This experience report showcases the software architecture reusability techniques applied while building Ocean Guard, an MLES for anomaly detection in the maritime domain. In particular, it highlights the challenges and lessons learned to reuse the Ports and Adapters pattern to support building multiple microservices from a single codebase. This experience report hopes to inspire software engineers, machine learning engineers, and data scientists to apply the Hexagonal Architecture pattern to build their MLES. --- ### Repulsor: Accelerating Generative Modeling with a Contrastive Memory Bank Authors: Shaofeng Zhang, Xuanqi Chen, Ning Liao, Haoxiang Zhao, Xiaoxing Wang, Haoru Tan, Sitong Wu, Xiaosong Jia, Qi Fan, Junchi Yan Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08648v2 The dominance of denoising generative models (e.g., diffusion, flow-matching) in visual synthesis is tempered by their substantial training costs and inefficiencies in representation learning. While injecting discriminative representations via auxiliary alignment has proven effective, this approach still faces key limitations: the reliance on external, pre-trained encoders introduces overhead and domain shift. A dispersed-based strategy that encourages strong separation among in-batch latent representations alleviates this specific dependency. To assess the effect of the number of negative samples in generative modeling, we propose {\mname}, a plug-and-play training framework that requires no external encoders. Our method integrates a memory bank mechanism that maintains a large, dynamically updated queue of negative samples across training iterations. This decouples the number of negatives from the mini-batch size, providing abundant and high-quality negatives for a contrastive objective without a multiplicative increase in computational cost. A low-dimensional projection head is used to further minimize memory and bandwidth overhead. {\mname} offers three principal advantages: (1) it is self-contained, eliminating dependency on pretrained vision foundation models and their associated forward-pass overhead; (2) it introduces no additional parameters or computational cost during inference; and (3) it enables substantially faster convergence, achieving superior generative quality more efficiently. On ImageNet-256, {\mname} achieves a state-of-the-art FID of \textbf{2.40} within 400k steps, significantly outperforming comparable methods. --- ### C-DIRA: Computationally Efficient Dynamic ROI Routing and Domain-Invariant Adversarial Learning for Lightweight Driver Behavior Recognition Authors: Keito Inoshita Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08647v2 Driver distraction behavior recognition using in-vehicle cameras demands real-time inference on edge devices. However, lightweight models often fail to capture fine-grained behavioral cues, resulting in reduced performance on unseen drivers or under varying conditions. ROI-based methods also increase computational cost, making it difficult to balance efficiency and accuracy. This work addresses the need for a lightweight architecture that overcomes these constraints. We propose Computationally efficient Dynamic region of Interest Routing and domain-invariant Adversarial learning for lightweight driver behavior recognition (C-DIRA). The framework combines saliency-driven Top-K ROI pooling and fused classification for local feature extraction and integration. Dynamic ROI routing enables selective computation by applying ROI inference only to high difficulty data samples. Moreover, pseudo-domain labeling and adversarial learning are used to learn domain-invariant features robust to driver and background variation. Experiments on the State Farm Distracted Driver Detection Dataset show that C-DIRA maintains high accuracy with significantly fewer FLOPs and lower latency than prior lightweight models. It also demonstrates robustness under visual degradation such as blur and low-light, and stable performance across unseen domains. These results confirm C-DIRA's effectiveness in achieving compactness, efficiency, and generalization. --- ### QSTN: A Modular Framework for Robust Questionnaire Inference with Large Language Models Authors: Maximilian Kreutner, Jens Rupprecht, Georg Ahnert, Ahmed Salem, Markus Strohmaier Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08646v2 We introduce QSTN, an open-source Python framework for systematically generating responses from questionnaire-style prompts to support in-silico surveys and annotation tasks with large language models (LLMs). QSTN enables robust evaluation of questionnaire presentation, prompt perturbations, and response generation methods. Our extensive evaluation (>40 million survey responses) shows that question structure and response generation methods have a significant impact on the alignment of generated survey responses with human answers. We also find that answers can be obtained for a fraction of the compute cost, by changing the presentation method. In addition, we offer a no-code user interface that allows researchers to set up robust experiments with LLMs \emph{without coding knowledge}. We hope that QSTN will support the reproducibility and reliability of LLM-based research in the future. --- ### Chain-of-Image Generation: Toward Monitorable and Controllable Image Generation Authors: Young Kyung Kim, Oded Schlesinger, Yuzhou Zhao, J. Matias Di Martino, Guillermo Sapiro Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08645v1 While state-of-the-art image generation models achieve remarkable visual quality, their internal generative processes remain a "black box." This opacity limits human observation and intervention, and poses a barrier to ensuring model reliability, safety, and control. Furthermore, their non-human-like workflows make them difficult for human observers to interpret. To address this, we introduce the Chain-of-Image Generation (CoIG) framework, which reframes image generation as a sequential, semantic process analogous to how humans create art. Similar to the advantages in monitorability and performance that Chain-of-Thought (CoT) brought to large language models (LLMs), CoIG can produce equivalent benefits in text-to-image generation. CoIG utilizes an LLM to decompose a complex prompt into a sequence of simple, step-by-step instructions. The image generation model then executes this plan by progressively generating and editing the image. Each step focuses on a single semantic entity, enabling direct monitoring. We formally assess this property using two novel metrics: CoIG Readability, which evaluates the clarity of each intermediate step via its corresponding output; and Causal Relevance, which quantifies the impact of each procedural step on the final generated image. We further show that our framework mitigates entity collapse by decomposing the complex generation task into simple subproblems, analogous to the procedural reasoning employed by CoT. Our experimental results indicate that CoIG substantially enhances quantitative monitorability while achieving competitive compositional robustness compared to established baseline models. The framework is model-agnostic and can be integrated with any image generation model. --- ### Aerial Vision-Language Navigation with a Unified Framework for Spatial, Temporal and Embodied Reasoning Authors: Huilin Xu, Zhuoyang Liu, Yixiang Luomei, Feng Xu Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08639v3 Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) aims to enable unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to interpret natural language instructions and navigate complex urban environments using onboard visual observation. This task holds promise for real-world applications such as low-altitude inspection, search-and-rescue, and autonomous aerial delivery. Existing methods often rely on panoramic images, depth inputs, or odometry to support spatial reasoning and action planning. These requirements increase system cost and integration complexity, thus hindering practical deployment for lightweight UAVs. We present a unified aerial VLN framework that operates solely on egocentric monocular RGB observations and natural language instructions. The model formulates navigation as a next-token prediction problem, jointly optimizing spatial perception, trajectory reasoning, and action prediction through prompt-guided multi-task learning. Moreover, we propose a keyframe selection strategy to reduce visual redundancy by retaining semantically informative frames, along with an action merging and label reweighting mechanism that mitigates long-tailed supervision imbalance and facilitates stable multi-task co-training. Extensive experiments on the AerialVLN and OpenFly benchmark validate the effectiveness of our method. Under the challenging monocular RGB-only setting, our model achieves strong results across both seen and unseen environments. It significantly outperforms existing RGB-only baselines and narrows the performance gap with state-of-the-art panoramic RGB-D counterparts. Comprehensive ablation studies further demonstrate the contribution of our task design and architectural choices. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/return-sleep/AeroAct. --- ### See-Control: A Multimodal Agent Framework for Smartphone Interaction with a Robotic Arm Authors: Haoyu Zhao, Weizhong Ding, Yuhao Yang, Zheng Tian, Linyi Yang, Kun Shao, Jun Wang Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08629v1 Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have enabled their use as intelligent agents for smartphone operation. However, existing methods depend on the Android Debug Bridge (ADB) for data transmission and action execution, limiting their applicability to Android devices. In this work, we introduce the novel Embodied Smartphone Operation (ESO) task and present See-Control, a framework that enables smartphone operation via direct physical interaction with a low-DoF robotic arm, offering a platform-agnostic solution. See-Control comprises three key components: (1) an ESO benchmark with 155 tasks and corresponding evaluation metrics; (2) an MLLM-based embodied agent that generates robotic control commands without requiring ADB or system back-end access; and (3) a richly annotated dataset of operation episodes, offering valuable resources for future research. By bridging the gap between digital agents and the physical world, See-Control provides a concrete step toward enabling home robots to perform smartphone-dependent tasks in realistic environments. --- ### Trajectory Densification and Depth from Perspective-based Blur Authors: Tianchen Qiu, Qirun Zhang, Jiajian He, Zhengyue Zhuge, Jiahui Xu, Yueting Chen Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08627v1 In the absence of a mechanical stabilizer, the camera undergoes inevitable rotational dynamics during capturing, which induces perspective-based blur especially under long-exposure scenarios. From an optical standpoint, perspective-based blur is depth-position-dependent: objects residing at distinct spatial locations incur different blur levels even under the same imaging settings. Inspired by this, we propose a novel method that estimate metric depth by examining the blur pattern of a video stream and dense trajectory via joint optical design algorithm. Specifically, we employ off-the-shelf vision encoder and point tracker to extract video information. Then, we estimate depth map via windowed embedding and multi-window aggregation, and densify the sparse trajectory from the optical algorithm using a vision-language model. Evaluations on multiple depth datasets demonstrate that our method attains strong performance over large depth range, while maintaining favorable generalization. Relative to the real trajectory in handheld shooting settings, our optical algorithm achieves superior precision and the dense reconstruction maintains strong accuracy. --- ### OpenMonoGS-SLAM: Monocular Gaussian Splatting SLAM with Open-set Semantics Authors: Jisang Yoo, Gyeongjin Kang, Hyun-kyu Ko, Hyeonwoo Yu, Eunbyung Park Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08625v2 Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is a foundational component in robotics, AR/VR, and autonomous systems. With the rising focus on spatial AI in recent years, combining SLAM with semantic understanding has become increasingly important for enabling intelligent perception and interaction. Recent efforts have explored this integration, but they often rely on depth sensors or closed-set semantic models, limiting their scalability and adaptability in open-world environments. In this work, we present OpenMonoGS-SLAM, the first monocular SLAM framework that unifies 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) with open-set semantic understanding. To achieve our goal, we leverage recent advances in Visual Foundation Models (VFMs), including MASt3R for visual geometry and SAM and CLIP for open-vocabulary semantics. These models provide robust generalization across diverse tasks, enabling accurate monocular camera tracking and mapping, as well as a rich understanding of semantics in open-world environments. Our method operates without any depth input or 3D semantic ground truth, relying solely on self-supervised learning objectives. Furthermore, we propose a memory mechanism specifically designed to manage high-dimensional semantic features, which effectively constructs Gaussian semantic feature maps, leading to strong overall performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves performance comparable to or surpassing existing baselines in both closed-set and open-set segmentation tasks, all without relying on supplementary sensors such as depth maps or semantic annotations. --- ### HealthcareNLP: where are we and what is next? Authors: Lifeng Han, Paul Rayson, Andrew Moore, Goran Nenadic, Suzan Verberne Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08617v2 This tutorial focused on Healthcare Domain Applications of NLP, what we have achieved around HealthcareNLP, and the challenges that lie ahead for the future. Existing reviews in this domain either overlook some important tasks, such as synthetic data generation for addressing privacy concerns, or explainable clinical NLP for improved integration and implementation, or fail to mention important methodologies, including retrieval augmented generation and the neural symbolic integration of LLMs and KGs. In light of this, the goal of this tutorial is to provide an introductory overview of the most important sub-areas of a patient- and resource-oriented HealthcareNLP, with three layers of hierarchy: data/resource layer: annotation guidelines, ethical approvals, governance, synthetic data; NLP-Eval layer: NLP tasks such as NER, RE, sentiment analysis, and linking/coding with categorised methods, leading to explainable HealthAI; patients layer: Patient Public Involvement and Engagement (PPIE), health literacy, translation, simplification, and summarisation (also NLP tasks), and shared decision-making support. A hands-on session will be included in the tutorial for the audience to use HealthcareNLP applications. The target audience includes NLP practitioners in the healthcare application domain, NLP researchers who are interested in domain applications, healthcare researchers, and students from NLP fields. The type of tutorial is "Introductory to CL/NLP topics (HealthcareNLP)" and the audience does not need prior knowledge to attend this. Tutorial materials: https://github.com/4dpicture/HealthNLP --- ### Protein Secondary Structure Prediction Using Transformers Authors: Manzi Kevin Maxime Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08613v1 Predicting protein secondary structures such as alpha helices, beta sheets, and coils from amino acid sequences is essential for understanding protein function. This work presents a transformer-based model that applies attention mechanisms to protein sequence data to predict structural motifs. A sliding-window data augmentation technique is used on the CB513 dataset to expand the training samples. The transformer shows strong ability to generalize across variable-length sequences while effectively capturing both local and long-range residue interactions. --- ### CogMCTS: A Novel Cognitive-Guided Monte Carlo Tree Search Framework for Iterative Heuristic Evolution with Large Language Models Authors: Hui Wang, Yang Liu, Xiaoyu Zhang, Chaoxu Mu Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08609v2 Automatic Heuristic Design (AHD) is an effective framework for solving complex optimization problems. The development of large language models (LLMs) enables the automated generation of heuristics. Existing LLM-based evolutionary methods rely on population strategies and are prone to local optima. Integrating LLMs with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) improves the trade-off between exploration and exploitation, but multi-round cognitive integration remains limited and search diversity is constrained. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a novel cognitive-guided MCTS framework (CogMCTS). CogMCTS tightly integrates the cognitive guidance mechanism of LLMs with MCTS to achieve efficient automated heuristic optimization. The framework employs multi-round cognitive feedback to incorporate historical experience, node information, and negative outcomes, dynamically improving heuristic generation. Dual-track node expansion combined with elite heuristic management balances the exploration of diverse heuristics and the exploitation of high-quality experience. In addition, strategic mutation modifies the heuristic forms and parameters to further enhance the diversity of the solution and the overall optimization performance. The experimental results indicate that CogMCTS outperforms existing LLM-based AHD methods in stability, efficiency, and solution quality. --- ### Decoupling Template Bias in CLIP: Harnessing Empty Prompts for Enhanced Few-Shot Learning Authors: Zhenyu Zhang, Guangyao Chen, Yixiong Zou, Zhimeng Huang, Yuhua Li Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08606v2 The Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) model excels in few-shot learning by aligning visual and textual representations. Our study shows that template-sample similarity (TSS), defined as the resemblance between a text template and an image sample, introduces bias. This bias leads the model to rely on template proximity rather than true sample-to-category alignment, reducing both accuracy and robustness in classification. We present a framework that uses empty prompts, textual inputs that convey the idea of "emptiness" without category information. These prompts capture unbiased template features and offset TSS bias. The framework employs two stages. During pre-training, empty prompts reveal and reduce template-induced bias within the CLIP encoder. During few-shot fine-tuning, a bias calibration loss enforces correct alignment between images and their categories, ensuring the model focuses on relevant visual cues. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our template correction method significantly reduces performance fluctuations caused by TSS, yielding higher classification accuracy and stronger robustness. The repository of this project is available at https://github.com/zhenyuZ-HUST/Decoupling-Template-Bias-in-CLIP. --- ### Heuristics for Combinatorial Optimization via Value-based Reinforcement Learning: A Unified Framework and Analysis Authors: Orit Davidovich, Shimrit Shtern, Segev Wasserkrug, Nimrod Megiddo Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08601v2 Since the 1990s, considerable empirical work has been carried out to train statistical models, such as neural networks (NNs), as learned heuristics for combinatorial optimization (CO) problems. When successful, such an approach eliminates the need for experts to design heuristics per problem type. Due to their structure, many hard CO problems are amenable to treatment through reinforcement learning (RL). Indeed, we find a wealth of literature training NNs using value-based, policy gradient, or actor-critic approaches, with promising results, both in terms of empirical optimality gaps and inference runtimes. Nevertheless, there has been a paucity of theoretical work undergirding the use of RL for CO problems. To this end, we introduce a unified framework to model CO problems through Markov decision processes (MDPs) and solve them using RL techniques. We provide easy-to-test assumptions under which CO problems can be formulated as equivalent undiscounted MDPs that provide optimal solutions to the original CO problems. Moreover, we establish conditions under which value-based RL techniques converge to approximate solutions of the CO problem with a guarantee on the associated optimality gap. Our convergence analysis provides: (1) a sufficient rate of increase in batch size and projected gradient descent steps at each RL iteration; (2) the resulting optimality gap in terms of problem parameters and targeted RL accuracy; and (3) the importance of a choice of state-space embedding. Together, our analysis illuminates the success (and limitations) of the celebrated deep Q-learning algorithm in this problem context. --- ### Examining Student Interactions with a Pedagogical AI-Assistant for Essay Writing and their Impact on Students Writing Quality Authors: Wicaksono Febriantoro, Qi Zhou, Wannapon Suraworachet, Sahan Bulathwela, Andrea Gauthier, Eva Millan, Mutlu Cukurova Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08596v1 The dynamic nature of interactions between students and GenAI, as well as their relationship to writing quality, remains underexplored. While most research has examined how general-purpose GenAI can support writing, fewer studies have investigated how students interact with pedagogically designed systems across different phases of the writing process. To address this gap, we evaluated a GenAI-driven essay-writing assistant (EWA) designed to support higher education students in argumentative writing. Drawing on 1,282 interaction logs from 32 undergraduates during a two-hour writing session, Sequential Pattern Mining and K-Means clustering were used to identify behavioral patterns. Two clusters emerged: Cluster 1 emphasized outline planning and essay structure, while Cluster 2 focused on content development. A Mann-Whitney U test revealed a moderate effect size (r = 0.36) in the essay Organization dimension, with Cluster 1 showing higher scores. Qualitative analysis indicated that students with better performance actively wrote and shared essay sections with EWA for feedback, rather than interacted passively by asking questions. These findings suggest implications for teaching and system design. Teachers can encourage active engagement, while future EWAs may integrate automatic labeling and monitoring to prompt students to move from questioning to writing, enabling fuller benefits from GenAI-supported learning. --- ### The SMART+ Framework for AI Systems Authors: Laxmiraju Kandikatla, Branislav Radeljic Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.HC, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08592v1 Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are now an integral part of multiple industries. In clinical research, AI supports automated adverse event detection in clinical trials, patient eligibility screening for protocol enrollment, and data quality validation. Beyond healthcare, AI is transforming finance through real-time fraud detection, automated loan risk assessment, and algorithmic decision-making. Similarly, in manufacturing, AI enables predictive maintenance to reduce equipment downtime, enhances quality control through computer-vision inspection, and optimizes production workflows using real-time operational data. While these technologies enhance operational efficiency, they introduce new challenges regarding safety, accountability, and regulatory compliance. To address these concerns, we introduce the SMART+ Framework - a structured model built on the pillars of Safety, Monitoring, Accountability, Reliability, and Transparency, and further enhanced with Privacy & Security, Data Governance, Fairness & Bias, and Guardrails. SMART+ offers a practical, comprehensive approach to evaluating and governing AI systems across industries. This framework aligns with evolving mechanisms and regulatory guidance to integrate operational safeguards, oversight procedures, and strengthened privacy and governance controls. SMART+ demonstrates risk mitigation, trust-building, and compliance readiness. By enabling responsible AI adoption and ensuring auditability, SMART+ provides a robust foundation for effective AI governance in clinical research. --- ### Long-Sequence LSTM Modeling for NBA Game Outcome Prediction Using a Novel Multi-Season Dataset Authors: Charles Rios, Longzhen Han, Almas Baimagambetov, Nikolaos Polatidis Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.LG, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08591v1 Predicting the outcomes of professional basketball games, particularly in the National Basketball Association (NBA), has become increasingly important for coaching strategy, fan engagement, and sports betting. However, many existing prediction models struggle with concept drift, limited temporal context, and instability across seasons. To advance forecasting in this domain, we introduce a newly constructed longitudinal NBA dataset covering the 2004-05 to 2024-25 seasons and present a deep learning framework designed to model long-term performance trends. Our primary contribution is a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) architecture that leverages an extended sequence length of 9,840 games equivalent to eight full NBA seasons to capture evolving team dynamics and season-over-season dependencies. We compare this model against several traditional Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) baselines, including Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The LSTM achieves the best performance across all metrics, with 72.35 accuracy, 73.15 precision and 76.13 AUC-ROC. These results demonstrate the importance of long-sequence temporal modeling in basketball outcome prediction and highlight the value of our new multi-season dataset for developing robust, generalizable NBA forecasting systems. --- ### Automated Pollen Recognition in Optical and Holographic Microscopy Images Authors: Swarn Singh Warshaneyan, Maksims Ivanovs, Blaž Cugmas, Inese Bērziņa, Laura Goldberga, Mindaugas Tamosiunas, Roberts Kadiķis Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG, q-bio.QM, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08589v1 This study explores the application of deep learning to improve and automate pollen grain detection and classification in both optical and holographic microscopy images, with a particular focus on veterinary cytology use cases. We used YOLOv8s for object detection and MobileNetV3L for the classification task, evaluating their performance across imaging modalities. The models achieved 91.3% mAP50 for detection and 97% overall accuracy for classification on optical images, whereas the initial performance on greyscale holographic images was substantially lower. We addressed the performance gap issue through dataset expansion using automated labeling and bounding box area enlargement. These techniques, applied to holographic images, improved detection performance from 2.49% to 13.3% mAP50 and classification performance from 42% to 54%. Our work demonstrates that, at least for image classification tasks, it is possible to pair deep learning techniques with cost-effective lensless digital holographic microscopy devices. --- ### Mind to Hand: Purposeful Robotic Control via Embodied Reasoning Authors: Peijun Tang, Shangjin Xie, Binyan Sun, Baifu Huang, Kuncheng Luo, Haotian Yang, Weiqi Jin, Jianan Wang Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08580v2 Humans act with context and intention, with reasoning playing a central role. While internet-scale data has enabled broad reasoning capabilities in AI systems, grounding these abilities in physical action remains a major challenge. We introduce Lumo-1, a generalist vision-language-action (VLA) model that unifies robot reasoning ("mind") with robot action ("hand"). Our approach builds upon the general multi-modal reasoning capabilities of pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), progressively extending them to embodied reasoning and action prediction, and ultimately towards structured reasoning and reasoning-action alignment. This results in a three-stage pre-training pipeline: (1) Continued VLM pre-training on curated vision-language data to enhance embodied reasoning skills such as planning, spatial understanding, and trajectory prediction; (2) Co-training on cross-embodiment robot data alongside vision-language data; and (3) Action training with reasoning process on trajectories collected on Astribot S1, a bimanual mobile manipulator with human-like dexterity and agility. Finally, we integrate reinforcement learning to further refine reasoning-action consistency and close the loop between semantic inference and motor control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Lumo-1 achieves significant performance improvements in embodied vision-language reasoning, a critical component for generalist robotic control. Real-world evaluations further show that Lumo-1 surpasses strong baselines across a wide range of challenging robotic tasks, with strong generalization to novel objects and environments, excelling particularly in long-horizon tasks and responding to human-natural instructions that require reasoning over strategy, concepts and space. --- ### Disturbance-Free Surgical Video Generation from Multi-Camera Shadowless Lamps for Open Surgery Authors: Yuna Kato, Shohei Mori, Hideo Saito, Yoshifumi Takatsume, Hiroki Kajita, Mariko Isogawa Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08577v1 Video recordings of open surgeries are greatly required for education and research purposes. However, capturing unobstructed videos is challenging since surgeons frequently block the camera field of view. To avoid occlusion, the positions and angles of the camera must be frequently adjusted, which is highly labor-intensive. Prior work has addressed this issue by installing multiple cameras on a shadowless lamp and arranging them to fully surround the surgical area. This setup increases the chances of some cameras capturing an unobstructed view. However, manual image alignment is needed in post-processing since camera configurations change every time surgeons move the lamp for optimal lighting. This paper aims to fully automate this alignment task. The proposed method identifies frames in which the lighting system moves, realigns them, and selects the camera with the least occlusion to generate a video that consistently presents the surgical field from a fixed perspective. A user study involving surgeons demonstrated that videos generated by our method were superior to those produced by conventional methods in terms of the ease of confirming the surgical area and the comfort during video viewing. Additionally, our approach showed improvements in video quality over existing techniques. Furthermore, we implemented several synthesis options for the proposed view-synthesis method and conducted a user study to assess surgeons' preferences for each option. --- ### From Cells to Survival: Hierarchical Analysis of Cell Inter-Relations in Multiplex Microscopy for Lung Cancer Prognosis Authors: Olle Edgren Schüllerqvist, Jens Baumann, Joakim Lindblad, Love Nordling, Artur Mezheyeuski, Patrick Micke, Nataša Sladoje Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08572v1 The tumor microenvironment (TME) has emerged as a promising source of prognostic biomarkers. To fully leverage its potential, analysis methods must capture complex interactions between different cell types. We propose HiGINE -- a hierarchical graph-based approach to predict patient survival (short vs. long) from TME characterization in multiplex immunofluorescence (mIF) images and enhance risk stratification in lung cancer. Our model encodes both local and global inter-relations in cell neighborhoods, incorporating information about cell types and morphology. Multimodal fusion, aggregating cancer stage with mIF-derived features, further boosts performance. We validate HiGINE on two public datasets, demonstrating improved risk stratification, robustness, and generalizability. --- ### Instance-Aware Test-Time Segmentation for Continual Domain Shifts Authors: Seunghwan Lee, Inyoung Jung, Hojoon Lee, Eunil Park, Sungeun Hong Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08569v1 Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) enables pre-trained models to adapt to continuously evolving domains. Existing methods have improved robustness but typically rely on fixed or batch-level thresholds, which cannot account for varying difficulty across classes and instances. This limitation is especially problematic in semantic segmentation, where each image requires dense, multi-class predictions. We propose an approach that adaptively adjusts pseudo labels to reflect the confidence distribution within each image and dynamically balances learning toward classes most affected by domain shifts. This fine-grained, class- and instance-aware adaptation produces more reliable supervision and mitigates error accumulation throughout continual adaptation. Extensive experiments across eight CTTA and TTA scenarios, including synthetic-to-real and long-term shifts, show that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art techniques, setting a new standard for semantic segmentation under evolving conditions. --- ### A Hybrid Model for Stock Market Forecasting: Integrating News Sentiment and Time Series Data with Graph Neural Networks Authors: Nader Sadek, Mirette Moawad, Christina Naguib, Mariam Elzahaby Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08567v1 Stock market prediction is a long-standing challenge in finance, as accurate forecasts support informed investment decisions. Traditional models rely mainly on historical prices, but recent work shows that financial news can provide useful external signals. This paper investigates a multimodal approach that integrates companies' news articles with their historical stock data to improve prediction performance. We compare a Graph Neural Network (GNN) model with a baseline LSTM model. Historical data for each company is encoded using an LSTM, while news titles are embedded with a language model. These embeddings form nodes in a heterogeneous graph, and GraphSAGE is used to capture interactions between articles, companies, and industries. We evaluate two targets: a binary direction-of-change label and a significance-based label. Experiments on the US equities and Bloomberg datasets show that the GNN outperforms the LSTM baseline, achieving 53% accuracy on the first target and a 4% precision gain on the second. Results also indicate that companies with more associated news yield higher prediction accuracy. Moreover, headlines contain stronger predictive signals than full articles, suggesting that concise news summaries play an important role in short-term market reactions. --- ### Modular Neural Image Signal Processing Authors: Mahmoud Afifi, Zhongling Wang, Ran Zhang, Michael S. Brown Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08564v3 This paper presents a modular neural image signal processing (ISP) framework that processes raw inputs and renders high-quality display-referred images. Unlike prior neural ISP designs, our method introduces a high degree of modularity, providing full control over multiple intermediate stages of the rendering process.~This modular design not only achieves high rendering accuracy but also improves scalability, debuggability, generalization to unseen cameras, and flexibility to match different user-preference styles. To demonstrate the advantages of this design, we built a user-interactive photo-editing tool that leverages our neural ISP to support diverse editing operations and picture styles. The tool is carefully engineered to take advantage of the high-quality rendering of our neural ISP and to enable unlimited post-editable re-rendering. Our method is a fully learning-based framework with variants of different capacities, all of moderate size (ranging from ~0.5 M to ~3.9 M parameters for the entire pipeline), and consistently delivers competitive qualitative and quantitative results across multiple test sets. Watch the supplemental video at: https://youtu.be/ByhQjQSjxVM --- ### BrainExplore: Large-Scale Discovery of Interpretable Visual Representations in the Human Brain Authors: Navve Wasserman, Matias Cosarinsky, Yuval Golbari, Aude Oliva, Antonio Torralba, Tamar Rott Shaham, Michal Irani Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08560v3 Understanding how the human brain represents visual concepts, and in which brain regions these representations are encoded, remains a long-standing challenge. Decades of work have advanced our understanding of visual representations, yet brain signals remain large and complex, and the space of possible visual concepts is vast. As a result, most studies remain small-scale, rely on manual inspection, focus on specific regions and concepts, and rarely include systematic validation. We present a large-scale, automated framework for discovering and explaining visual representations across the human cortex. Our method comprises two main stages. First, we discover candidate interpretable patterns in fMRI activity through unsupervised, data-driven decomposition methods. Next, we explain each pattern by identifying the set of natural images that most strongly elicit it and generating a natural-language description of their shared visual meaning. To scale this process, we introduce an automated pipeline that tests multiple candidate explanations, assigns reliability scores, and selects the best description for each voxel pattern. Our framework reveals thousands of interpretable patterns spanning many distinct visual concepts, including fine-grained representations previously unreported. --- ### SSCATeR: Sparse Scatter-Based Convolution Algorithm with Temporal Data Recycling for Real-Time 3D Object Detection in LiDAR Point Clouds Authors: Alexander Dow, Manduhu Manduhu, Matheus Santos, Ben Bartlett, Gerard Dooly, James Riordan Published: 2025-12-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08557v3 This work leverages the continuous sweeping motion of LiDAR scanning to concentrate object detection efforts on specific regions that receive a change in point data from one frame to another. We achieve this by using a sliding time window with short strides and consider the temporal dimension by storing convolution results between passes. This allows us to ignore unchanged regions, significantly reducing the number of convolution operations per forward pass without sacrificing accuracy. This data reuse scheme introduces extreme sparsity to detection data. To exploit this sparsity, we extend our previous work on scatter-based convolutions to allow for data reuse, and as such propose Sparse Scatter-Based Convolution Algorithm with Temporal Data Recycling (SSCATeR). This operation treats incoming LiDAR data as a continuous stream and acts only on the changing parts of the point cloud. By doing so, we achieve the same results with as much as a 6.61-fold reduction in processing time. Our test results show that the feature maps output by our method are identical to those produced by traditional sparse convolution techniques, whilst greatly increasing the computational efficiency of the network. ---