# Research Papers — 2025-12 · bundle page 18 of 175 > Full-text markdown of papers #851–900 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/18 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-12/page/17.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-12/page/19.md) ### HiSciBench: A Hierarchical Multi-disciplinary Benchmark for Scientific Intelligence from Reading to Discovery Authors: Yaping Zhang, Qixuan Zhang, Xingquan Zhang, Zhiyuan Chen, Wenwen Zhuang, Yupu Liang, Lu Xiang, Yang Zhao, Jiajun Zhang, Yu Zhou, Chengqing Zong Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22899v1 The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) and multimodal foundation models has sparked growing interest in their potential for scientific research. However, scientific intelligence encompasses a broad spectrum of abilities ranging from understanding fundamental knowledge to conducting creative discovery, and existing benchmarks remain fragmented. Most focus on narrow tasks and fail to reflect the hierarchical and multi-disciplinary nature of real scientific inquiry. We introduce \textbf{HiSciBench}, a hierarchical benchmark designed to evaluate foundation models across five levels that mirror the complete scientific workflow: \textit{Scientific Literacy} (L1), \textit{Literature Parsing} (L2), \textit{Literature-based Question Answering} (L3), \textit{Literature Review Generation} (L4), and \textit{Scientific Discovery} (L5). HiSciBench contains 8,735 carefully curated instances spanning six major scientific disciplines, including mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, geography, and astronomy, and supports multimodal inputs including text, equations, figures, and tables, as well as cross-lingual evaluation. Unlike prior benchmarks that assess isolated abilities, HiSciBench provides an integrated, dependency-aware framework that enables detailed diagnosis of model capabilities across different stages of scientific reasoning. Comprehensive evaluations of leading models, including GPT-5, DeepSeek-R1, and several multimodal systems, reveal substantial performance gaps: while models achieve up to 69\% accuracy on basic literacy tasks, performance declines sharply to 25\% on discovery-level challenges. HiSciBench establishes a new standard for evaluating scientific Intelligence and offers actionable insights for developing models that are not only more capable but also more reliable. The benchmark will be publicly released to facilitate future research. --- ### Federated Multi-Task Clustering Authors: Suyan Dai, Gan Sun, Fazeng Li, Xu Tang, Qianqian Wang, Yang Cong Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.LG, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22897v3 Spectral clustering has emerged as one of the most effective clustering algorithms due to its superior performance. However, most existing models are designed for centralized settings, rendering them inapplicable in modern decentralized environments. Moreover, current federated learning approaches often suffer from poor generalization performance due to reliance on unreliable pseudo-labels, and fail to capture the latent correlations amongst heterogeneous clients. To tackle these limitations, this paper proposes a novel framework named Federated Multi-Task Clustering (i.e.,FMTC), which intends to learn personalized clustering models for heterogeneous clients while collaboratively leveraging their shared underlying structure in a privacy-preserving manner. More specifically, the FMTC framework is composed of two main components: client-side personalized clustering module, which learns a parameterized mapping model to support robust out-of-sample inference, bypassing the need for unreliable pseudo-labels; and server-side tensorial correlation module, which explicitly captures the shared knowledge across all clients. This is achieved by organizing all client models into a unified tensor and applying a low-rank regularization to discover their common subspace. To solve this joint optimization problem, we derive an efficient, privacy-preserving distributed algorithm based on the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers, which decomposes the global problem into parallel local updates on clients and an aggregation step on the server. To the end, several extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed FMTC framework significantly outperforms various baseline and state-of-the-art federated clustering algorithms. --- ### SAMP-HDRL: Segmented Allocation with Momentum-Adjusted Utility for Multi-agent Portfolio Management via Hierarchical Deep Reinforcement Learning Authors: Xiaotian Ren, Nuerxiati Abudurexiti, Zhengyong Jiang, Angelos Stefanidis, Hongbin Liu, Jionglong Su Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22895v1 Portfolio optimization in non-stationary markets is challenging due to regime shifts, dynamic correlations, and the limited interpretability of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) policies. We propose a Segmented Allocation with Momentum-Adjusted Utility for Multi-agent Portfolio Management via Hierarchical Deep Reinforcement Learning (SAMP-HDRL). The framework first applies dynamic asset grouping to partition the market into high-quality and ordinary subsets. An upper-level agent extracts global market signals, while lower-level agents perform intra-group allocation under mask constraints. A utility-based capital allocation mechanism integrates risky and risk-free assets, ensuring coherent coordination between global and local decisions. backtests across three market regimes (2019--2021) demonstrate that SAMP-HDRL consistently outperforms nine traditional baselines and nine DRL benchmarks under volatile and oscillating conditions. Compared with the strongest baseline, our method achieves at least 5\% higher Return, 5\% higher Sharpe ratio, 5\% higher Sortino ratio, and 2\% higher Omega ratio, with substantially larger gains observed in turbulent markets. Ablation studies confirm that upper--lower coordination, dynamic clustering, and capital allocation are indispensable to robustness. SHAP-based interpretability further reveals a complementary ``diversified + concentrated'' mechanism across agents, providing transparent insights into decision-making. Overall, SAMP-HDRL embeds structural market constraints directly into the DRL pipeline, offering improved adaptability, robustness, and interpretability in complex financial environments. --- ### DECEPTICON: How Dark Patterns Manipulate Web Agents Authors: Phil Cuvin, Hao Zhu, Diyi Yang Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22894v2 Deceptive UI designs, widely instantiated across the web and commonly known as dark patterns, manipulate users into performing actions misaligned with their goals. In this paper, we show that dark patterns are highly effective in steering agent trajectories, posing a significant risk to agent robustness. To quantify this risk, we introduce DECEPTICON, an environment for testing individual dark patterns in isolation. DECEPTICON includes 700 web navigation tasks with dark patterns -- 600 generated tasks and 100 real-world tasks, designed to measure instruction-following success and dark pattern effectiveness. Across state-of-the-art agents, we find dark patterns successfully steer agent trajectories towards malicious outcomes in over 70% of tested generated and real-world tasks -- compared to a human average of 31%. Moreover, we find that dark pattern effectiveness correlates positively with model size and test-time reasoning, making larger, more capable models more susceptible. Leading countermeasures against adversarial attacks, including in-context prompting and guardrail models, fail to consistently reduce the success rate of dark pattern interventions. Our findings reveal dark patterns as a latent and unmitigated risk to web agents, highlighting the urgent need for robust defenses against manipulative designs. --- ### Theory and Algorithms for Learning with Multi-Class Abstention and Multi-Expert Deferral Authors: Anqi Mao Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22886v1 Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance but face critical challenges: hallucinations and high inference costs. Leveraging multiple experts offers a solution: deferring uncertain inputs to more capable experts improves reliability, while routing simpler queries to smaller, distilled models enhances efficiency. This motivates the problem of learning with multiple-expert deferral. This thesis presents a comprehensive study of this problem and the related problem of learning with abstention, supported by strong consistency guarantees. First, for learning with abstention (a special case of deferral), we analyze score-based and predictor-rejector formulations in multi-class classification. We introduce new families of surrogate losses and prove strong non-asymptotic, hypothesis set-specific consistency guarantees, resolving two existing open questions. We analyze both single-stage and practical two-stage settings, with experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and SVHN demonstrating the superior performance of our algorithms. Second, we address general multi-expert deferral in classification. We design new surrogate losses for both single-stage and two-stage scenarios and prove they benefit from strong $H$-consistency bounds. For the two-stage scenario, we show that our surrogate losses are realizable $H$-consistent for constant cost functions, leading to effective new algorithms. Finally, we introduce a novel framework for regression with deferral to address continuous label spaces. Our versatile framework accommodates multiple experts and various cost structures, supporting both single-stage and two-stage methods. It subsumes recent work on regression with abstention. We propose new surrogate losses with proven $H$-consistency and demonstrate the empirical effectiveness of the resulting algorithms. --- ### Agentic AI for Cyber Resilience: A New Security Paradigm and Its System-Theoretic Foundations Authors: Tao Li, Quanyan Zhu Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22883v1 Cybersecurity is being fundamentally reshaped by foundation-model-based artificial intelligence. Large language models now enable autonomous planning, tool orchestration, and strategic adaptation at scale, challenging security architectures built on static rules, perimeter defenses, and human-centered workflows. This chapter argues for a shift from prevention-centric security toward agentic cyber resilience. Rather than seeking perfect protection, resilient systems must anticipate disruption, maintain critical functions under attack, recover efficiently, and learn continuously. We situate this shift within the historical evolution of cybersecurity paradigms, culminating in an AI-augmented paradigm where autonomous agents participate directly in sensing, reasoning, action, and adaptation across cyber and cyber-physical systems. We then develop a system-level framework for designing agentic AI workflows. A general agentic architecture is introduced, and attacker and defender workflows are analyzed as coupled adaptive processes, and game-theoretic formulations are shown to provide a unifying design language for autonomy allocation, information flow, and temporal composition. Case studies in automated penetration testing, remediation, and cyber deception illustrate how equilibrium-based design enables system-level resiliency design. --- ### Hash Grid Feature Pruning Authors: Yangzhi Ma, Bojun Liu, Jie Li, Li Li, Dong Liu Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.CV, eess.IV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22882v1 Hash grids are widely used to learn an implicit neural field for Gaussian splatting, serving either as part of the entropy model or for inter-frame prediction. However, due to the irregular and non-uniform distribution of Gaussian splats in 3D space, numerous sparse regions exist, rendering many features in the hash grid invalid. This leads to redundant storage and transmission overhead. In this work, we propose a hash grid feature pruning method that identifies and prunes invalid features based on the coordinates of the input Gaussian splats, so that only the valid features are encoded. This approach reduces the storage size of the hash grid without compromising model performance, leading to improved rate-distortion performance. Following the Common Test Conditions (CTC) defined by the standardization committee, our method achieves an average bitrate reduction of 8% compared to the baseline approach. --- ### Guided Path Sampling: Steering Diffusion Models Back on Track with Principled Path Guidance Authors: Haosen Li, Wenshuo Chen, Shaofeng Liang, Lei Wang, Haozhe Jia, Yutao Yue Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22881v1 Iterative refinement methods based on a denoising-inversion cycle are powerful tools for enhancing the quality and control of diffusion models. However, their effectiveness is critically limited when combined with standard Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG). We identify a fundamental limitation: CFG's extrapolative nature systematically pushes the sampling path off the data manifold, causing the approximation error to diverge and undermining the refinement process. To address this, we propose Guided Path Sampling (GPS), a new paradigm for iterative refinement. GPS replaces unstable extrapolation with a principled, manifold-constrained interpolation, ensuring the sampling path remains on the data manifold. We theoretically prove that this correction transforms the error series from unbounded amplification to strictly bounded, guaranteeing stability. Furthermore, we devise an optimal scheduling strategy that dynamically adjusts guidance strength, aligning semantic injection with the model's natural coarse-to-fine generation process. Extensive experiments on modern backbones like SDXL and Hunyuan-DiT show that GPS outperforms existing methods in both perceptual quality and complex prompt adherence. For instance, GPS achieves a superior ImageReward of 0.79 and HPS v2 of 0.2995 on SDXL, while improving overall semantic alignment accuracy on GenEval to 57.45%. Our work establishes that path stability is a prerequisite for effective iterative refinement, and GPS provides a robust framework to achieve it. --- ### Fundamental Novel Consistency Theory: $H$-Consistency Bounds Authors: Yutao Zhong Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22880v1 In machine learning, the loss functions optimized during training often differ from the target loss that defines task performance due to computational intractability or lack of differentiability. We present an in-depth study of the target loss estimation error relative to the surrogate loss estimation error. Our analysis leads to $H$-consistency bounds, which are guarantees accounting for the hypothesis set $H$. These bounds offer stronger guarantees than Bayes-consistency or $H$-calibration and are more informative than excess error bounds. We begin with binary classification, establishing tight distribution-dependent and -independent bounds. We provide explicit bounds for convex surrogates (including linear models and neural networks) and analyze the adversarial setting for surrogates like $ρ$-margin and sigmoid loss. Extending to multi-class classification, we present the first $H$-consistency bounds for max, sum, and constrained losses, covering both non-adversarial and adversarial scenarios. We demonstrate that in some cases, non-trivial $H$-consistency bounds are unattainable. We also investigate comp-sum losses (e.g., cross-entropy, MAE), deriving their first $H$-consistency bounds and introducing smooth adversarial variants that yield robust learning algorithms. We develop a comprehensive framework for deriving these bounds across various surrogates, introducing new characterizations for constrained and comp-sum losses. Finally, we examine the growth rates of $H$-consistency bounds, establishing a universal square-root growth rate for smooth surrogates in binary and multi-class tasks, and analyze minimizability gaps to guide surrogate selection. --- ### SwinTF3D: A Lightweight Multimodal Fusion Approach for Text-Guided 3D Medical Image Segmentation Authors: Hasan Faraz Khan, Noor Fatima, Muzammil Behzad Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22878v1 The recent integration of artificial intelligence into medical imaging has driven remarkable advances in automated organ segmentation. However, most existing 3D segmentation frameworks rely exclusively on visual learning from large annotated datasets restricting their adaptability to new domains and clinical tasks. The lack of semantic understanding in these models makes them ineffective in addressing flexible, user-defined segmentation objectives. To overcome these limitations, we propose SwinTF3D, a lightweight multimodal fusion approach that unifies visual and linguistic representations for text-guided 3D medical image segmentation. The model employs a transformer-based visual encoder to extract volumetric features and integrates them with a compact text encoder via an efficient fusion mechanism. This design allows the system to understand natural-language prompts and correctly align semantic cues with their corresponding spatial structures in medical volumes, while producing accurate, context-aware segmentation results with low computational overhead. Extensive experiments on the BTCV dataset demonstrate that SwinTF3D achieves competitive Dice and IoU scores across multiple organs, despite its compact architecture. The model generalizes well to unseen data and offers significant efficiency gains compared to conventional transformer-based segmentation networks. Bridging visual perception with linguistic understanding, SwinTF3D establishes a practical and interpretable paradigm for interactive, text-driven 3D medical image segmentation, opening perspectives for more adaptive and resource-efficient solutions in clinical imaging. --- ### M-ErasureBench: A Comprehensive Multimodal Evaluation Benchmark for Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models Authors: Ju-Hsuan Weng, Jia-Wei Liao, Cheng-Fu Chou, Jun-Cheng Chen Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22877v1 Text-to-image diffusion models may generate harmful or copyrighted content, motivating research on concept erasure. However, existing approaches primarily focus on erasing concepts from text prompts, overlooking other input modalities that are increasingly critical in real-world applications such as image editing and personalized generation. These modalities can become attack surfaces, where erased concepts re-emerge despite defenses. To bridge this gap, we introduce M-ErasureBench, a novel multimodal evaluation framework that systematically benchmarks concept erasure methods across three input modalities: text prompts, learned embeddings, and inverted latents. For the latter two, we evaluate both white-box and black-box access, yielding five evaluation scenarios. Our analysis shows that existing methods achieve strong erasure performance against text prompts but largely fail under learned embeddings and inverted latents, with Concept Reproduction Rate (CRR) exceeding 90% in the white-box setting. To address these vulnerabilities, we propose IRECE (Inference-time Robustness Enhancement for Concept Erasure), a plug-and-play module that localizes target concepts via cross-attention and perturbs the associated latents during denoising. Experiments demonstrate that IRECE consistently restores robustness, reducing CRR by up to 40% under the most challenging white-box latent inversion scenario, while preserving visual quality. To the best of our knowledge, M-ErasureBench provides the first comprehensive benchmark of concept erasure beyond text prompts. Together with IRECE, our benchmark offers practical safeguards for building more reliable protective generative models. --- ### Reinforcement Networks: novel framework for collaborative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning tasks Authors: Maksim Kryzhanovskiy, Svetlana Glazyrina, Roman Ischenko, Konstantin Vorontsov Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.MA, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22876v1 Modern AI systems often comprise multiple learnable components that can be naturally organized as graphs. A central challenge is the end-to-end training of such systems without restrictive architectural or training assumptions. Such tasks fit the theory and approaches of the collaborative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) field. We introduce Reinforcement Networks, a general framework for MARL that organizes agents as vertices in a directed acyclic graph (DAG). This structure extends hierarchical RL to arbitrary DAGs, enabling flexible credit assignment and scalable coordination while avoiding strict topologies, fully centralized training, and other limitations of current approaches. We formalize training and inference methods for the Reinforcement Networks framework and connect it to the LevelEnv concept to support reproducible construction, training, and evaluation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on several collaborative MARL setups by developing several Reinforcement Networks models that achieve improved performance over standard MARL baselines. Beyond empirical gains, Reinforcement Networks unify hierarchical, modular, and graph-structured views of MARL, opening a principled path toward designing and training complex multi-agent systems. We conclude with theoretical and practical directions - richer graph morphologies, compositional curricula, and graph-aware exploration. That positions Reinforcement Networks as a foundation for a new line of research in scalable, structured MARL. --- ### Let Samples Speak: Mitigating Spurious Correlation by Exploiting the Clusterness of Samples Authors: Weiwei Li, Junzhuo Liu, Yuanyuan Ren, Yuchen Zheng, Yahao Liu, Wen Li Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22874v1 Deep learning models are known to often learn features that spuriously correlate with the class label during training but are irrelevant to the prediction task. Existing methods typically address this issue by annotating potential spurious attributes, or filtering spurious features based on some empirical assumptions (e.g., simplicity of bias). However, these methods may yield unsatisfactory performance due to the intricate and elusive nature of spurious correlations in real-world data. In this paper, we propose a data-oriented approach to mitigate the spurious correlation in deep learning models. We observe that samples that are influenced by spurious features tend to exhibit a dispersed distribution in the learned feature space. This allows us to identify the presence of spurious features. Subsequently, we obtain a bias-invariant representation by neutralizing the spurious features based on a simple grouping strategy. Then, we learn a feature transformation to eliminate the spurious features by aligning with this bias-invariant representation. Finally, we update the classifier by incorporating the learned feature transformation and obtain an unbiased model. By integrating the aforementioned identifying, neutralizing, eliminating and updating procedures, we build an effective pipeline for mitigating spurious correlation. Experiments on image and NLP debiasing benchmarks show an improvement in worst group accuracy of more than 20% compared to standard empirical risk minimization (ERM). Codes and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/davelee-uestc/nsf_debiasing . --- ### Lamps: Learning Anatomy from Multiple Perspectives via Self-supervision in Chest Radiographs Authors: Ziyu Zhou, Haozhe Luo, Mohammad Reza Hosseinzadeh Taher, Jiaxuan Pang, Xiaowei Ding, Michael B. Gotway, Jianming Liang Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22872v2 Foundation models have been successful in natural language processing and computer vision because they are capable of capturing the underlying structures (foundation) of natural languages. However, in medical imaging, the key foundation lies in human anatomy, as these images directly represent the internal structures of the body, reflecting the consistency, coherence, and hierarchy of human anatomy. Yet, existing self-supervised learning (SSL) methods often overlook these perspectives, limiting their ability to effectively learn anatomical features. To overcome the limitation, we built Lamps (learning anatomy from multiple perspectives via self-supervision) pre-trained on large-scale chest radiographs by harmoniously utilizing the consistency, coherence, and hierarchy of human anatomy as the supervision signal. Extensive experiments across 10 datasets evaluated through fine-tuning and emergent property analysis demonstrate Lamps' superior robustness, transferability, and clinical potential when compared to 10 baseline models. By learning from multiple perspectives, Lamps presents a unique opportunity for foundation models to develop meaningful, robust representations that are aligned with the structure of human anatomy. --- ### The body is not there to compute: Comment on "Informational embodiment: Computational role of information structure in codes and robots" by Pitti et al Authors: Matej Hoffmann Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, q-bio.NC, q-bio.QM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22868v1 Applying the lens of computation and information has been instrumental in driving the technological progress of our civilization as well as in empowering our understanding of the world around us. The digital computer was and for many still is the leading metaphor for how our mind operates. Information theory (IT) has also been important in our understanding of how nervous systems encode and process information. The target article deploys information and computation to bodies: to understand why they have evolved in particular ways (animal bodies) and to design optimal bodies (robots). In this commentary, I argue that the main role of bodies is not to compute. --- ### MUSON: A Reasoning-oriented Multimodal Dataset for Socially Compliant Navigation in Urban Environments Authors: Zhuonan Liu, Xinyu Zhang, Zishuo Wang, Runji Cai, Tomohito Kawabata, Qianyi Li, Xuance Peng, Tianze Yu, Zhen Xiong, Xuesu Xiao, Ling Xiao Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22867v2 Socially compliant navigation requires structured reasoning about dynamic pedestrians and physical constraints to ensure safe and interpretable decisions. Vision-language models (VLMs) provide a promising foundation for this task because they can integrate visual observations with language-based social knowledge. However, existing untuned VLMs still struggle to reliably understand fine-grained social norms, making task-specific fine-tuning essential. At the same time, no large-scale egocentric dataset is available this task. To address these challenges, we introduce MUSON, a multimodal dataset for short-horizon social navigation containing 10,110 egocentric samples collected across diverse indoor and outdoor social scenes. MUSON adopts a structured five-step chain-of-thought annotation framework comprising perception, prediction, reasoning, action, and explanation. It explicitly models static physical constraints and employs a standardized six-action decision space. Compared with existing social-navigation datasets, MUSON provides consistent annotations for reasoning, actions, and explanations. We evaluate ten representative small-to-medium VLMs on MUSON. Qwen3-VL-8B achieves the strongest decision-level performance, attaining the highest action accuracy of 0.7765 and Macro-F1 score of 0.7490, as well as the lowest collision rate of 0.0609. These results demonstrate that MUSON is an effective and reusable benchmark for advancing socially compliant navigation. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/MUSON-dataset/MUSON/releases/tag/v1.0. --- ### Adaptive Trust Consensus for Blockchain IoT: Comparing RL, DRL, and MARL Against Naive, Collusive, Adaptive, Byzantine, and Sleeper Attacks Authors: Soham Padia, Dhananjay Vaidya, Ramchandra Mangrulkar Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22860v1 Securing blockchain-enabled IoT networks against sophisticated adversarial attacks remains a critical challenge. This paper presents a trust-based delegated consensus framework integrating Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) with Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) for privacy-preserving policy evaluation, combined with learning-based defense mechanisms. We systematically compare three reinforcement learning approaches -- tabular Q-learning (RL), Deep RL with Dueling Double DQN (DRL), and Multi-Agent RL (MARL) -- against five distinct attack families: Naive Malicious Attack (NMA), Collusive Rumor Attack (CRA), Adaptive Adversarial Attack (AAA), Byzantine Fault Injection (BFI), and Time-Delayed Poisoning (TDP). Experimental results on a 16-node simulated IoT network reveal significant performance variations: MARL achieves superior detection under collusive attacks (F1=0.85 vs. DRL's 0.68 and RL's 0.50), while DRL and MARL both attain perfect detection (F1=1.00) against adaptive attacks where RL fails (F1=0.50). All agents successfully defend against Byzantine attacks (F1=1.00). Most critically, the Time-Delayed Poisoning attack proves catastrophic for all agents, with F1 scores dropping to 0.11-0.16 after sleeper activation, demonstrating the severe threat posed by trust-building adversaries. Our findings indicate that coordinated multi-agent learning provides measurable advantages for defending against sophisticated trust manipulation attacks in blockchain IoT environments. --- ### AutoForge: Automated Environment Synthesis for Agentic Reinforcement Learning Authors: Shihao Cai, Runnan Fang, Jialong Wu, Baixuan Li, Xinyu Wang, Yong Jiang, Liangcai Su, Liwen Zhang, Wenbiao Yin, Zhen Zhang, Fuli Feng, Pengjun Xie et al. Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22857v1 Conducting reinforcement learning (RL) in simulated environments offers a cost-effective and highly scalable way to enhance language-based agents. However, previous work has been limited to semi-automated environment synthesis or tasks lacking sufficient difficulty, offering little breadth or depth. In addition, the instability of simulated users integrated into these environments, along with the heterogeneity across simulated environments, poses further challenges for agentic RL. In this work, we propose: (1) a unified pipeline for automated and scalable synthesis of simulated environments associated with high-difficulty but easily verifiable tasks; and (2) an environment level RL algorithm that not only effectively mitigates user instability but also performs advantage estimation at the environment level, thereby improving training efficiency and stability. Comprehensive evaluations on agentic benchmarks, including tau-bench, tau2-Bench, and VitaBench, validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Further in-depth analyses underscore its out-of-domain generalization. --- ### A Rapid GeoSAM-Based Workflow for Multi-Temporal Glacier Delineation: Case Study from Svalbard Authors: Alexandru Hegyi Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: physics.geo-ph, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22855v1 Consistent glacier boundary delineation is essential for monitoring glacier change, yet many existing approaches are difficult to scale across long time series and heterogeneous environments. In this report, we present a GeoSAM-based, semi-automatic workflow for rapid glacier delineation from Sentinel-2 surface reflectance imagery. The method combines late-summer image compositing, spectral-index-based identification of candidate ice areas, prompt-guided segmentation using GeoSAM, and physically based post-processing to derive annual glacier outlines. The workflow is demonstrated in the Ny-Alesund and Kongsfjorden region of western Svalbard across multiple years of the Sentinel-2 era. Results show that the approach produces spatially coherent and temporally consistent outlines for major glacier bodies, while most errors are associated with small features affected by water bodies, terrain shadows, or high surface variability. The reliance on derived RGB imagery makes the method flexible and transferable to other optical datasets, with improved performance expected at higher spatial resolution. Although user inspection remains necessary to filter incorrect polygons and adjust thresholds for local conditions, the workflow provides a fast and practical alternative for multi-temporal glacier mapping and ice-loss assessment. --- ### ByteLoom: Weaving Geometry-Consistent Human-Object Interactions through Progressive Curriculum Learning Authors: Bangya Liu, Xinyu Gong, Zelin Zhao, Ziyang Song, Yulei Lu, Suhui Wu, Jun Zhang, Suman Banerjee, Hao Zhang Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.CV, cs.GR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22854v2 Human-object interaction (HOI) video generation has garnered increasing attention due to its promising applications in digital humans, e-commerce, advertising, and robotics imitation learning. However, existing methods face two critical limitations: (1) a lack of effective mechanisms to inject multi-view information of the object into the model, leading to poor cross-view consistency, and (2) heavy reliance on fine-grained hand mesh annotations for modeling interaction occlusions. To address these challenges, we introduce ByteLoom, a Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based framework that generates realistic HOI videos with geometrically consistent object illustration, using simplified human conditioning and 3D object inputs. We first propose an RCM-cache mechanism that leverages Relative Coordinate Maps (RCM) as a universal representation to maintain object's geometry consistency and precisely control 6-DoF object transformations in the meantime. To compensate HOI dataset scarcity and leverage existing datasets, we further design a training curriculum that enhances model capabilities in a progressive style and relaxes the demand of hand mesh. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method faithfully preserves human identity and the object's multi-view geometry, while maintaining smooth motion and object manipulation. --- ### Causal-Policy Forest for End-to-End Policy Learning Authors: Masahiro Kato Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: econ.EM, cs.LG, math.ST, stat.ME, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22846v1 This study proposes an end-to-end algorithm for policy learning in causal inference. We observe data consisting of covariates, treatment assignments, and outcomes, where only the outcome corresponding to the assigned treatment is observed. The goal of policy learning is to train a policy from the observed data, where a policy is a function that recommends an optimal treatment for each individual, to maximize the policy value. In this study, we first show that maximizing the policy value is equivalent to minimizing the mean squared error for the conditional average treatment effect (CATE) under $\{-1, 1\}$ restricted regression models. Based on this finding, we modify the causal forest, an end-to-end CATE estimation algorithm, for policy learning. We refer to our algorithm as the causal-policy forest. Our algorithm has three advantages. First, it is a simple modification of an existing, widely used CATE estimation method, therefore, it helps bridge the gap between policy learning and CATE estimation in practice. Second, while existing studies typically estimate nuisance parameters for policy learning as a separate task, our algorithm trains the policy in a more end-to-end manner. Third, as in standard decision trees and random forests, we train the models efficiently, avoiding computational intractability. --- ### A Minimal Solver for Relative Pose Estimation with Unknown Focal Length from Two Affine Correspondences Authors: Zhenbao Yu, Shirong Ye, Ronghe Jin, Shunkun Liang, Zibin Liu, Huiyun Zhang, Banglei Guan Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22833v1 In this paper, we aim to estimate the relative pose and focal length between two views with known intrinsic parameters except for an unknown focal length from two affine correspondences (ACs). Cameras are commonly used in combination with inertial measurement units (IMUs) in applications such as self-driving cars, smartphones, and unmanned aerial vehicles. The vertical direction of camera views can be obtained by IMU measurements. The relative pose between two cameras is reduced from 5DOF to 3DOF. We propose a new solver to estimate the 3DOF relative pose and focal length. First, we establish constraint equations from two affine correspondences when the vertical direction is known. Then, based on the properties of the equation system with nontrivial solutions, four equations can be derived. These four equations only involve two parameters: the focal length and the relative rotation angle. Finally, the polynomial eigenvalue method is utilized to solve the problem of focal length and relative rotation angle. The proposed solver is evaluated using synthetic and real-world datasets. The results show that our solver performs better than the existing state-of-the-art solvers. --- ### 3D Scene Change Modeling With Consistent Multi-View Aggregation Authors: Zirui Zhou, Junfeng Ni, Shujie Zhang, Yixin Chen, Siyuan Huang Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22830v1 Change detection plays a vital role in scene monitoring, exploration, and continual reconstruction. Existing 3D change detection methods often exhibit spatial inconsistency in the detected changes and fail to explicitly separate pre- and post-change states. To address these limitations, we propose SCaR-3D, a novel 3D scene change detection framework that identifies object-level changes from a dense-view pre-change image sequence and sparse-view post-change images. Our approach consists of a signed-distance-based 2D differencing module followed by multi-view aggregation with voting and pruning, leveraging the consistent nature of 3DGS to robustly separate pre- and post-change states. We further develop a continual scene reconstruction strategy that selectively updates dynamic regions while preserving the unchanged areas. We also contribute CCS3D, a challenging synthetic dataset that allows flexible combinations of 3D change types to support controlled evaluations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves both high accuracy and efficiency, outperforming existing methods. --- ### FasterPy: An LLM-based Code Execution Efficiency Optimization Framework Authors: Yue Wu, Minghao Han, Ruiyin Li, Peng Liang, Amjed Tahir, Zengyang Li, Qiong Feng, Mojtaba Shahin Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22827v3 Code often suffers from performance bugs. These bugs necessitate the research and practice of code optimization. Traditional rule-based methods rely on manually designing and maintaining rules for specific performance bugs (e.g., redundant loops, repeated computations), making them laborintensive and limited in applicability. In recent years, machine learning and deep learning-based methods have emerged as promising alternatives by learning optimization heuristics from annotated code corpora and performance measurements. However, these approaches usually depend on specific program representations and meticulously crafted training datasets, making them costly to develop and difficult to scale. With the booming of Large Language Models (LLMs), their remarkable capabilities in code generation have opened new avenues for automated code optimization. In this work, we proposed FasterPy, a low-cost and efficient framework that adapts LLMs to optimize the execution efficiency of Python code. FasterPy combines Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), supported by a knowledge base constructed from existing performance-improving code pairs and corresponding performance measurements, with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to enhance code optimization performance. Our experimental results on the Performance-Improving Code Edits (PIE) benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our method across multiple metrics. The FasterPy tool and the experimental results are available at https://github.com/WuYue22/fasterpy. --- ### TEACH: Temporal Variance-Driven Curriculum for Reinforcement Learning Authors: Gaurav Chaudhary, Laxmidhar Behera Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22824v1 Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved significant success in solving single-goal tasks. However, uniform goal selection often results in sample inefficiency in multi-goal settings where agents must learn a universal goal-conditioned policy. Inspired by the adaptive and structured learning processes observed in biological systems, we propose a novel Student-Teacher learning paradigm with a Temporal Variance-Driven Curriculum to accelerate Goal-Conditioned RL. In this framework, the teacher module dynamically prioritizes goals with the highest temporal variance in the policy's confidence score, parameterized by the state-action value (Q) function. The teacher provides an adaptive and focused learning signal by targeting these high-uncertainty goals, fostering continual and efficient progress. We establish a theoretical connection between the temporal variance of Q-values and the evolution of the policy, providing insights into the method's underlying principles. Our approach is algorithm-agnostic and integrates seamlessly with existing RL frameworks. We demonstrate this through evaluation across 11 diverse robotic manipulation and maze navigation tasks. The results show consistent and notable improvements over state-of-the-art curriculum learning and goal-selection methods. --- ### NepEMO: A Multi-Label Emotion and Sentiment Analysis on Nepali Reddit with Linguistic Insights and Temporal Trends Authors: Sameer Sitoula, Tej Bahadur Shahi, Laxmi Prasad Bhatt, Anisha Pokhrel, Arjun Neupane Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22823v1 Social media (SM) platforms (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit) are increasingly leveraged to share opinions and emotions, specifically during challenging events, such as natural disasters, pandemics, and political elections, and joyful occasions like festivals and celebrations. Among the SM platforms, Reddit provides a unique space for its users to anonymously express their experiences and thoughts on sensitive issues such as health and daily life. In this work, we present a novel dataset, called NepEMO, for multi-label emotion (MLE) and sentiment classification (SC) on the Nepali subreddit post. We curate and build a manually annotated dataset of 4,462 posts (January 2019- June 2025) written in English, Romanised Nepali and Devanagari script for five emotions (fear, anger, sadness, joy, and depression) and three sentiment classes (positive, negative, and neutral). We perform a detailed analysis of posts to capture linguistic insights, including emotion trends, co-occurrence of emotions, sentiment-specific n-grams, and topic modelling using Latent Dirichlet Allocation and TF-IDF keyword extraction. Finally, we compare various traditional machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and transformer models for MLE and SC tasks. The result shows that transformer models consistently outperform the ML and DL models for both tasks. --- ### KANO: Kolmogorov-Arnold Neural Operator for Image Super-Resolution Authors: Chenyu Li, Danfeng Hong, Bing Zhang, Zhaojie Pan, Jocelyn Chanussot Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22822v1 The highly nonlinear degradation process, complex physical interactions, and various sources of uncertainty render single-image Super-resolution (SR) a particularly challenging task. Existing interpretable SR approaches, whether based on prior learning or deep unfolding optimization frameworks, typically rely on black-box deep networks to model latent variables, which leaves the degradation process largely unknown and uncontrollable. Inspired by the Kolmogorov-Arnold theorem (KAT), we for the first time propose a novel interpretable operator, termed Kolmogorov-Arnold Neural Operator (KANO), with the application to image SR. KANO provides a transparent and structured representation of the latent degradation fitting process. Specifically, we employ an additive structure composed of a finite number of B-spline functions to approximate continuous spectral curves in a piecewise fashion. By learning and optimizing the shape parameters of these spline functions within defined intervals, our KANO accurately captures key spectral characteristics, such as local linear trends and the peak-valley structures at nonlinear inflection points, thereby endowing SR results with physical interpretability. Furthermore, through theoretical modeling and experimental evaluations across natural images, aerial photographs, and satellite remote sensing data, we systematically compare multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) and Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs) in handling complex sequence fitting tasks. This comparative study elucidates the respective advantages and limitations of these models in characterizing intricate degradation mechanisms, offering valuable insights for the development of interpretable SR techniques. --- ### Depth Anything in $360^\circ$: Towards Scale Invariance in the Wild Authors: Hualie Jiang, Ziyang Song, Zhiqiang Lou, Rui Xu, Minglang Tan Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22819v2 Panoramic depth estimation captures the complete 360$^\circ$ scene geometry, being essential for robotics and AR/VR applications. While perspective depth models have achieved remarkable zero-shot generalization via large-scale training, panoramic methods lag behind, especially for open-world scenes, due to data scarcity. To bridge this gap, we introduce DA360, a panoramic-adapted version of Depth Anything V2. Our key insight is that the base DAV2 model, trained on perspective images to predict affine-invariant disparity, already exhibits good zero-shot performance on panoramas. Building on this, we design a lightweight adaptation framework that (i) learns a per-image shift from the ViT class token with scale-invariant supervision, transforming affine-invariant disparity into scale-invariant disparity that directly yields well-formed 3D point clouds, and (ii) integrates circular padding into the DPT decoder to eliminate seam artifacts, ensuring spatial coherence. Fine-tuned on a combination of synthetic indoor and outdoor panoramic data, DA360 is evaluated on standard real-world indoor benchmarks and our newly curated outdoor dataset, Metropolis. Results show that DA360 not only outperforms the original DAV2 by over 50\% and 12\% relative error reduction indoors and outdoors, but also surpasses prior specialized methods like PanDA by about 25--35\% across all tests, establishing state-of-the-art zero-shot panoramic depth estimation. --- ### Long-Range Distillation: Distilling 10,000 Years of Simulated Climate into Long Timestep AI Weather Models Authors: Scott A. Martin, Noah Brenowitz, Dale Durran, Michael Pritchard Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.LG, physics.ao-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22814v2 Accurate long-range weather forecasting remains a major challenge for AI models, both because errors accumulate over autoregressive rollouts and because reanalysis training datasets provide limited sampling of the slow modes of variability underpinning predictability. Most AI and all numerical weather prediction models are autoregressive, repeatedly applying short-lead forecasts to reach subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) or seasonal lead times, often causing instability and miscalibration. Long-timestep probabilistic models that generate long-range forecasts in a single step offer an alternative, but training on the 40-year reanalysis record leads to overfitting, suggesting orders of magnitude more data are required. We introduce long-range distillation, whereby a long-timestep probabilistic ``student'' model is trained to forecast directly at long-range using a huge synthetic dataset generated by an autoregressive ``teacher'' model. Using the Deep Learning Earth System Model (DLESyM) as teacher, we generate over 10,000 years of simulated climate to train student models across a range of timescales. In perfect-model experiments, the distilled models outperform climatology and approach their teacher's skill while replacing hundreds of autoregressive steps with a single timestep. In the real world, both a diffusion model student fine-tuned on ERA5 and a linear inverse model student with mixed DLESyM-ERA5 training achieve S2S forecast skill competitive with the ECMWF IFS ensemble, with synthetic pre-training providing improvements beyond ERA5-only training. This demonstrates the benefit of synthetic pre-training for both deep learning and classical data-driven methods, and represents the first demonstration that real-world skill can be improved by training on AI-generated synthetic data in volumes far exceeding the observational record. --- ### EgoReAct: Egocentric Video-Driven 3D Human Reaction Generation Authors: Libo Zhang, Zekun Li, Tianyu Li, Zeyu Cao, Rui Xu, Xiaoxiao Long, Wenjia Wang, Jingbo Wang, Yuan Liu, Wenping Wang, Daquan Zhou, Taku Komura et al. Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22808v2 Humans exhibit adaptive, context-sensitive responses to egocentric visual input. However, faithfully modeling such reactions from egocentric video remains challenging due to the dual requirements of strictly causal generation and precise 3D spatial alignment. To tackle this problem, we first construct the Human Reaction Dataset (HRD) to address data scarcity and misalignment by building a spatially aligned egocentric video-reaction dataset, as existing datasets (e.g., ViMo) suffer from significant spatial inconsistency between the egocentric video and reaction motion, e.g., dynamically moving motions are always paired with fixed-camera videos. Leveraging HRD, we present EgoReAct, the first autoregressive framework that generates 3D-aligned human reaction motions from egocentric video streams in real-time. We first compress the reaction motion into a compact yet expressive latent space via a Vector Quantised-Variational AutoEncoder and then train a Generative Pre-trained Transformer for reaction generation from the visual input. EgoReAct incorporates 3D dynamic features, i.e., metric depth, and head dynamics during the generation, which effectively enhance spatial grounding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EgoReAct achieves remarkably higher realism, spatial consistency, and generation efficiency compared with prior methods, while maintaining strict causality during generation. We will release code, models, and data upon acceptance. --- ### MoR: Mixture Of Representations For Mixed-Precision Training Authors: Bor-Yiing Su, Peter Dykas, Mike Chrzanowski, Jatin Chhugani Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22804v1 Mixed-precision training is a crucial technique for scaling deep learning models, but successful mixedprecision training requires identifying and applying the right combination of training methods. This paper presents our preliminary study on Mixture-of-Representations (MoR), a novel, per-tensor and sub-tensor level quantization framework that dynamically analyzes a tensor's numerical properties to select between a variety of different representations. Based on the framework, we have proposed and experimented concrete algorithms that choose dynamically between FP8 and BF16 representations for both per-tensor and sub-tensor level granularities. Our universal approach is designed to preserve model quality across various quantization partition strategies and datasets. Our initial findings show that this approach can achieve state-of-the-art results with 98.38% of tensors quantized to the FP8 format. This work highlights the potential of dynamic, property-aware quantization while preserving model quality. We believe this approach can generally improve the robustness of low precision training, as demonstrated by achieving FP8 accuracies that are on par with existing approaches without the need for fine-grain partitioning, or can be used in combination with other training methods to improve the leverage of even lower precision number formats such as NVFP4. --- ### ReDiF: Resource-Efficient Few-Step Diffusion Distillation via Reinforcement Learning Authors: Amirhossein Tighkhorshid, Zahra Dehghanian, Hamid R. Rabiee Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22802v2 Step distillation accelerates diffusion sampling by training a few-step student to imitate a many-step teacher, but distillation itself remains expensive. Typically, this requires thousands of GPU-hours and a large pre-generated trajectory dataset. We introduce ReDiF, which casts step distillation as terminal-reward policy optimization rather than step-wise regression. The student is optimized against a reward computed on the terminal sample, measuring alignment with the teacher's output, instead of matching the teacher's intermediate trajectory under a reconstruction or consistency loss. Because the reward need not be differentiable or trajectory-aligned, ReDiF admits non-differentiable objectives, multi-objective combinations, and preferences the teacher does not express, while exploration lets the student find sampling paths matched to its own step schedule. ReDiF converges in 400 policy updates with 3200 rollouts on a single A100 GPU with 1,000 noise-class pairs and no paired dataset: about 4 GPU-hours, against roughly 336 A100-hours reported for DMD2 on the same EDM teacher. At 8 steps on ImageNet-64, it achieves an FID 3.64 points better than the strongest retrained distillation baseline in the low-training regime under the same single-GPU budget. The formulation is also orthogonal to existing distillation objectives: added to the DMD2 loss, it further improves DMD2's FID by 4.4. --- ### Evaluating the Performance of Open-Vocabulary Object Detection in Low-quality Image Authors: Po-Chih Wu Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22801v2 Open-vocabulary object detection enables models to localize and recognize objects beyond a predefined set of categories and is expected to achieve recognition capabilities comparable to human performance. In this study, we aim to evaluate the performance of existing models on open-vocabulary object detection tasks under low-quality image conditions. For this purpose, we introduce a new dataset that simulates low-quality images in the real world. In our evaluation experiment, we find that although open-vocabulary object detection models exhibited no significant decrease in mAP scores under low-level image degradation, the performance of all models dropped sharply under high-level image degradation. OWLv2 models consistently performed better across different types of degradation, while OWL-ViT, GroundingDINO, and Detic showed significant performance declines. We will release our dataset and codes to facilitate future studies. --- ### Medical Scene Reconstruction and Segmentation based on 3D Gaussian Representation Authors: Bin Liu, Wenyan Tian, Huangxin Fu, Zizheng Li, Zhifen He, Bo Li Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22800v1 3D reconstruction of medical images is a key technology in medical image analysis and clinical diagnosis, providing structural visualization support for disease assessment and surgical planning. Traditional methods are computationally expensive and prone to structural discontinuities and loss of detail in sparse slices, making it difficult to meet clinical accuracy requirements.To address these challenges, we propose an efficient 3D reconstruction method based on 3D Gaussian and tri-plane representations. This method not only maintains the advantages of Gaussian representation in efficient rendering and geometric representation but also significantly enhances structural continuity and semantic consistency under sparse slicing conditions. Experimental results on multimodal medical datasets such as US and MRI show that our proposed method can generate high-quality, anatomically coherent, and semantically stable medical images under sparse data conditions, while significantly improving reconstruction efficiency. This provides an efficient and reliable new approach for 3D visualization and clinical analysis of medical images. --- ### VPTracker: Global Vision-Language Tracking via Visual Prompt Authors: Jingchao Wang, Kaiwen Zhou, Zhijian Wu, Kunhua Ji, Dingjiang Huang, Yefeng Zheng Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22799v2 Vision-Language Tracking aims to continuously localize objects described by a visual template and a language description. Existing methods, however, are typically limited to local search, making them prone to failures under viewpoint changes, occlusions, and rapid target movements. In this work, we introduce the first global tracking framework based on Multimodal Large Language Models (VPTracker), exploiting their powerful semantic reasoning to locate targets across the entire image space. While global search improves robustness and reduces drift, it also introduces distractions from visually or semantically similar objects. To address this, we propose a location-aware visual prompting mechanism that incorporates spatial priors into the MLLM. Specifically, we construct a region-level prompt based on the target's previous location, enabling the model to prioritize region-level recognition and resort to global inference only when necessary. This design retains the advantages of global tracking while effectively suppressing interference from distracting visual content. Extensive experiments show that our approach significantly enhances tracking stability and target disambiguation under challenging scenarios, opening a new avenue for integrating MLLMs into visual tracking. Code is available at https://github.com/jcwang0602/VPTracker. --- ### Parallel Diffusion Solver via Residual Dirichlet Policy Optimization Authors: Ruoyu Wang, Ziyu Li, Beier Zhu, Liangyu Yuan, Hanwang Zhang, Xun Yang, Xiaojun Chang, Chi Zhang Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22796v2 Diffusion models (DMs) have achieved state-of-the-art generative performance but suffer from high sampling latency due to their sequential denoising nature. Existing solver-based acceleration methods often face significant image quality degradation under a low-latency budget, primarily due to accumulated truncation errors arising from the inability to capture high-curvature trajectory segments. In this paper, we propose the Ensemble Parallel Direction solver (dubbed as EPD-Solver), a novel ODE solver that mitigates these errors by incorporating multiple parallel gradient evaluations in each step. Motivated by the geometric insight that sampling trajectories are largely confined to a low-dimensional manifold, EPD-Solver leverages the Mean Value Theorem for vector-valued functions to approximate the integral solution more accurately. Importantly, since the additional gradient computations are independent, they can be fully parallelized, preserving low-latency sampling nature. We introduce a two-stage optimization framework. Initially, EPD-Solver optimizes a small set of learnable parameters via a distillation-based approach. We further propose a parameter-efficient Reinforcement Learning (RL) fine-tuning scheme that reformulates the solver as a stochastic Dirichlet policy. Unlike traditional methods that fine-tune the massive backbone, our RL approach operates strictly within the low-dimensional solver space, effectively mitigating reward hacking while enhancing performance in complex text-to-image (T2I) generation tasks. In addition, our method is flexible and can serve as a plugin (EPD-Plugin) to improve existing ODE samplers. --- ### CNSight: Evaluation of Clinical Note Segmentation Tools Authors: Risha Surana, Adrian Law, Sunwoo Kim, Rishab Sridhar, Angxiao Han, Peiyu Hong Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22795v1 Clinical notes are often stored in unstructured or semi-structured formats after extraction from electronic medical record (EMR) systems, which complicates their use for secondary analysis and downstream clinical applications. Reliable identification of section boundaries is a key step toward structuring these notes, as sections such as history of present illness, medications, and discharge instructions each provide distinct clinical contexts. In this work, we evaluate rule-based baselines, domain-specific transformer models, and large language models for clinical note segmentation using a curated dataset of 1,000 notes from MIMIC-IV. Our experiments show that large API-based models achieve the best overall performance, with GPT-5-mini reaching a best average F1 of 72.4 across sentence-level and freetext segmentation. Lightweight baselines remain competitive on structured sentence-level tasks but falter on unstructured freetext. Our results provide guidance for method selection and lay the groundwork for downstream tasks such as information extraction, cohort identification, and automated summarization. --- ### Reach-Avoid Differential game with Reachability Analysis for UAVs: A decomposition approach Authors: Minh Bui, Simon Monckton, Mo Chen Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: eess.SY, cs.AI, cs.GT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22793v1 Reach-avoid (RA) games have significant applications in security and defense, particularly for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). These problems are inherently challenging due to the need to consider obstacles, consider the adversarial nature of opponents, ensure optimality, and account for nonlinear dynamics. Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability analysis has emerged as a powerful tool for tackling these challenges; however, while it has been applied to games involving two spatial dimensions, directly extending this approach to three spatial dimensions is impossible due to high dimensionality. On the other hand, alternative approaches for solving RA games lack the generality to consider games with three spatial dimensions involving agents with non-trivial system dynamics. In this work, we propose a novel framework for dimensionality reduction by decomposing the problem into a horizontal RA sub-game and a vertical RA sub-game. We then solve each sub-game using HJ reachability analysis and consider second-order dynamics that account for the defender's acceleration. To reconstruct the solution to the original RA game from the sub-games, we introduce a HJ-based tracking control algorithm in each sub-game that not only guarantees capture of the attacker but also tracking of the attacker thereafter. We prove the conditions under which the capture guarantees are maintained. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated via numerical simulations, showing that the decomposition maintains optimality and guarantees in the original problem. Our methods are also validated in a Gazebo physics simulator, achieving successful capture of quadrotors in three spatial dimensions space for the first time to the best of our knowledge. --- ### A Universal and Robust Framework for Multiple Gas Recognition Based-on Spherical Normalization-Coupled Mahalanobis Algorithm Authors: Shuai Chen, Yang Song, Chen Wang, Ziran Wang Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, eess.SP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22792v2 Electronic nose (E-nose) systems face two interconnected challenges in open-set gas recognition: feature distribution shift caused by signal drift and decision boundary failure induced by unknown gas interference. Existing methods predominantly rely on Euclidean distance or conventional classifiers, failing to account for anisotropic feature distributions and dynamic signal intensity variations. To address these issues, this study proposes the Spherical Normalization coupled Mahalanobis (SNM) module, a universal post-processing module for open-set gas recognition. First, it achieves geometric decoupling through cascaded batch and L2 normalization, projecting features onto a unit hypersphere to eliminate signal intensity fluctuations. Second, it utilizes Mahalanobis distance to construct adaptive ellipsoidal decision boundaries that conform to the anisotropic feature geometry. The architecture-agnostic SNM-Module seamlessly integrates with mainstream backbones including Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), and Transformer. Experiments on the public Vergara dataset demonstrate that the Transformer+SNM configuration achieves near-theoretical-limit performance in discriminating among multiple target gases, with an AUROC of 0.9977 and an unknown gas detection rate of 99.57% at 5% false positive rate, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods with a 3.0% AUROC improvement and 91.0% standard deviation reduction compared to Class Anchor Clustering (CAC). The module maintains exceptional robustness across five sensor positions, with standard deviations below 0.0028. This work effectively addresses the critical challenge of simultaneously achieving high accuracy and high stability in open-set gas recognition, providing solid support for industrial E-nose deployment. --- ### Discovering Transmission Dynamics of COVID-19 in China Authors: Zhou Yang, Edward Dougherty, Chen Zhang, Zhenhe Pan, Fang Jin Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22787v1 A comprehensive retrospective analysis of public health interventions, such as large scale testing, quarantining, and contact tracing, can help identify mechanisms most effective in mitigating COVID-19. We investigate China based SARS-CoV-2 transmission patterns (e.g., infection type and likely transmission source) using publicly released tracking data. We collect case reports from local health commissions, the Chinese CDC, and official local government social media, then apply NLP and manual curation to construct transmission/tracking chains. We further analyze tracking data together with Wuhan population mobility data to quantify and visualize temporal and spatial spread dynamics. Results indicate substantial regional differences, with larger cities showing more infections, likely driven by social activities. Most symptomatic individuals (79\%) were hospitalized within 5 days of symptom onset, and those with confirmed-case contact sought admission in under 5 days. Infection sources also shifted over time: early cases were largely linked to travel to (or contact with travelers from) Hubei Province, while later transmission was increasingly associated with social activities. --- ### Nonlinear Dynamical Modeling of Human Intracranial Brain Activity with Flexible Inference Authors: Kiarash Vaziri, Lucine L. Oganesian, HyeongChan Jo, Roberto M. C. Vera, Charles Y. Liu, Brian Lee, Maryam M. Shanechi Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: q-bio.NC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22785v1 Dynamical modeling of multisite human intracranial neural recordings is essential for developing neurotechnologies such as brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Linear dynamical models are widely used for this purpose due to their interpretability and their suitability for BCIs. In particular, these models enable flexible real-time inference, even in the presence of missing neural samples, which often occur in wireless BCIs. However, neural activity can exhibit nonlinear structure that is not captured by linear models. Furthermore, while recurrent neural network models can capture nonlinearity, their inference does not directly address handling missing observations. To address this gap, recent work introduced DFINE, a deep learning framework that integrates neural networks with linear state-space models to capture nonlinearities while enabling flexible inference. However, DFINE was developed for intracortical recordings that measure localized neuronal populations. Here we extend DFINE to modeling of multisite human intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) recordings. We find that DFINE significantly outperforms linear state-space models (LSSMs) in forecasting future neural activity. Furthermore, DFINE matches or exceeds the accuracy of a gated recurrent unit (GRU) model in neural forecasting, indicating that a linear dynamical backbone, when paired and jointly trained with nonlinear neural networks, can effectively describe the dynamics of iEEG signals while also enabling flexible inference. Additionally, DFINE handles missing observations more robustly than the baselines, demonstrating its flexible inference and utility for BCIs. Finally, DFINE's advantage over LSSM is more pronounced in high gamma spectral bands. Taken together, these findings highlight DFINE as a strong and flexible framework for modeling human iEEG dynamics, with potential applications in next-generation BCIs. --- ### Plug In, Grade Right: Psychology-Inspired AGIQA Authors: Zhicheng Liao, Baoliang Chen, Hanwei Zhu, Lingyu Zhu, Shiqi Wang, Weisi Lin Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.CV, eess.IV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22780v1 Existing AGIQA models typically estimate image quality by measuring and aggregating the similarities between image embeddings and text embeddings derived from multi-grade quality descriptions. Although effective, we observe that such similarity distributions across grades usually exhibit multimodal patterns. For instance, an image embedding may show high similarity to both "excellent" and "poor" grade descriptions while deviating from the "good" one. We refer to this phenomenon as "semantic drift", where semantic inconsistencies between text embeddings and their intended descriptions undermine the reliability of text-image shared-space learning. To mitigate this issue, we draw inspiration from psychometrics and propose an improved Graded Response Model (GRM) for AGIQA. The GRM is a classical assessment model that categorizes a subject's ability across grades using test items with various difficulty levels. This paradigm aligns remarkably well with human quality rating, where image quality can be interpreted as an image's ability to meet various quality grades. Building on this philosophy, we design a two-branch quality grading module: one branch estimates image ability while the other constructs multiple difficulty levels. To ensure monotonicity in difficulty levels, we further model difficulty generation in an arithmetic manner, which inherently enforces a unimodal and interpretable quality distribution. Our Arithmetic GRM based Quality Grading (AGQG) module enjoys a plug-and-play advantage, consistently improving performance when integrated into various state-of-the-art AGIQA frameworks. Moreover, it also generalizes effectively to both natural and screen content image quality assessment, revealing its potential as a key component in future IQA models. --- ### Fake News Classification in Urdu: A Domain Adaptation Approach for a Low-Resource Language Authors: Muhammad Zain Ali, Bernhard Pfahringer, Tony Smith Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22778v1 Misinformation on social media is a widely acknowledged issue, and researchers worldwide are actively engaged in its detection. However, low-resource languages such as Urdu have received limited attention in this domain. An obvious approach is to utilize a multilingual pretrained language model and fine-tune it for a downstream classification task, such as misinformation detection. However, these models struggle with domain-specific terms, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this, we investigate the effectiveness of domain adaptation before fine-tuning for fake news classification in Urdu, employing a staged training approach to optimize model generalization. We evaluate two widely used multilingual models, XLM-RoBERTa and mBERT, and apply domain-adaptive pretraining using a publicly available Urdu news corpus. Experiments on four publicly available Urdu fake news datasets show that domain-adapted XLM-R consistently outperforms its vanilla counterpart, while domain-adapted mBERT exhibits mixed results. --- ### Adapting, Fast and Slow: On Few-Shot Transportability of Compositions Authors: Kasra Jalaldoust, Elias Bareinboim Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22777v2 Generalization across domains requires stable structure that links the source and target distributions. Building on causal transportability theory, we study a sequential prediction setting in which the target predictor can be represented as a circuit composed of causal mechanisms that are learnable from source data. We introduce two classes of transportability. Module transportability captures the atomic case, where the target predictor is given by a mechanism learnable from a single source domain. Circuit transportability generalizes this idea to target predictors obtained by composing several modules learned from source data, enabling zero-shot prediction even when no source mechanism directly predicts the target label. We study these classes of circuits under increasingly relaxed assumptions. First, we provide conditions under which the relevant circuits can be learned from source data alone, given causal knowledge about the source and target domains. We then relax these structural assumptions by allowing limited data from the target domain. In particular, we develop a supervised domain adaptation scheme that learns circuits without requiring explicit causal structure. The resulting few-shot guarantees tie the achievable error to the size of the smallest target circuit composable from modules learned from source data. Finally, we propose a gradient-based relaxation of the symbolic circuit search and evaluate it empirically, showing that it qualitatively tracks the predicted regimes of fast adaptation -- with and without process supervision over intermediate positions -- and slow adaptation when no source mechanism matches. --- ### Schrodinger AI: A Unified Spectral-Dynamical Framework for Classification, Reasoning, and Operator-Based Generalization Authors: Truong Son Nguyen Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22774v1 We introduce \textbf{Schrödinger AI}, a unified machine learning framework inspired by quantum mechanics. The system is defined by three tightly coupled components: (1) a {time-independent wave-energy solver} that treats perception and classification as spectral decomposition under a learned Hamiltonian; (2) a {time-dependent dynamical solver} governing the evolution of semantic wavefunctions over time, enabling context-aware decision revision, re-routing, and reasoning under environmental changes; and (3) a {low-rank operator calculus} that learns symbolic transformations such as modular arithmetic through learned quantum-like transition operators. Together, these components form a coherent physics-driven alternative to conventional cross-entropy training and transformer attention, providing robust generalization, interpretable semantics, and emergent topology. Empirically, Schrödinger AI demonstrates: (a) emergent semantic manifolds that reflect human-conceived class relations without explicit supervision; (b) dynamic reasoning that adapts to changing environments, including maze navigation with real-time potential-field perturbations; and (c) exact operator generalization on modular arithmetic tasks, where the system learns group actions and composes them across sequences far beyond training length. These results suggest a new foundational direction for machine learning, where learning is cast as discovering and navigating an underlying semantic energy landscape. --- ### GRExplainer: A Universal Explanation Method for Temporal Graph Neural Networks Authors: Xuyan Li, Jie Wang, Zheng Yan Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22772v1 Dynamic graphs are widely used to represent evolving real-world networks. Temporal Graph Neural Networks (TGNNs) have emerged as a powerful tool for processing such graphs, but the lack of transparency and explainability limits their practical adoption. Research on TGNN explainability is still in its early stages and faces several key issues: (i) Current methods are tailored to specific TGNN types, restricting generality. (ii) They suffer from high computational costs, making them unsuitable for large-scale networks. (iii) They often overlook the structural connectivity of explanations and require prior knowledge, reducing user-friendliness. To address these issues, we propose GRExplainer, the first universal, efficient, and user-friendly explanation method for TGNNs. GRExplainer extracts node sequences as a unified feature representation, making it independent of specific input formats and thus applicable to both snapshot-based and event-based TGNNs (the major types of TGNNs). By utilizing breadth-first search and temporal information to construct input node sequences, GRExplainer reduces redundant computation and improves efficiency. To enhance user-friendliness, we design a generative model based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), enabling automated and continuous explanation generation. Experiments on six real-world datasets with three target TGNNs show that GRExplainer outperforms existing baseline methods in generality, efficiency, and user-friendliness. --- ### Next Best View Selections for Semantic and Dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting Authors: Yiqian Li, Wen Jiang, Kostas Daniilidis Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22771v1 Understanding semantics and dynamics has been crucial for embodied agents in various tasks. Both tasks have much more data redundancy than the static scene understanding task. We formulate the view selection problem as an active learning problem, where the goal is to prioritize frames that provide the greatest information gain for model training. To this end, we propose an active learning algorithm with Fisher Information that quantifies the informativeness of candidate views with respect to both semantic Gaussian parameters and deformation networks. This formulation allows our method to jointly handle semantic reasoning and dynamic scene modeling, providing a principled alternative to heuristic or random strategies. We evaluate our method on large-scale static images and dynamic video datasets by selecting informative frames from multi-camera setups. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach consistently improves rendering quality and semantic segmentation performance, outperforming baseline methods based on random selection and uncertainty-based heuristics. --- ### Understanding the Mechanisms of Fast Hyperparameter Transfer Authors: Nikhil Ghosh, Denny Wu, Alberto Bietti Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22768v1 The growing scale of deep learning models has rendered standard hyperparameter (HP) optimization prohibitively expensive. A promising solution is the use of scale-aware hyperparameters, which can enable direct transfer of optimal HPs from small-scale grid searches to large models with minimal performance loss. To understand the principles governing such transfer strategy, we develop a general conceptual framework for reasoning about HP transfer across scale, characterizing transfer as fast when the suboptimality it induces vanishes asymptotically faster than the finite-scale performance gap. We show formally that fast transfer is equivalent to useful transfer for compute-optimal grid search, meaning that transfer is asymptotically more compute-efficient than direct tuning. While empirical work has found that the Maximal Update Parameterization ($μ$P) exhibits fast transfer when scaling model width, the mechanisms remain poorly understood. We show that this property depends critically on problem structure by presenting synthetic settings where transfer either offers provable computational advantage or fails to outperform direct tuning even under $μ$P. To explain the fast transfer observed in practice, we conjecture that decomposing the optimization trajectory reveals two contributions to loss reduction: (1) a width-stable component that determines the optimal HPs, and (2) a width-sensitive component that improves with width but weakly perturbs the HP optimum. We present empirical evidence for this hypothesis across various settings, including large language model pretraining. --- ### SwinCCIR: An end-to-end deep network for Compton camera imaging reconstruction Authors: Minghao Dong, Xinyang Luo, Xujian Ouyang, Yongshun Xiao Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV, nucl-ex arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22766v1 Compton cameras (CCs) are a kind of gamma cameras which are designed to determine the directions of incident gammas based on the Compton scatter. However, the reconstruction of CCs face problems of severe artifacts and deformation due to the fundamental reconstruction principle of back-projection of Compton cones. Besides, a part of systematic errors originated from the performance of devices are hard to remove through calibration, leading to deterioration of imaging quality. Iterative algorithms and deep-learning based methods have been widely used to improve reconstruction. But most of them are optimization based on the results of back-projection. Therefore, we proposed an end-to-end deep learning framework, SwinCCIR, for CC imaging. Through adopting swin-transformer blocks and a transposed convolution-based image generation module, we established the relationship between the list-mode events and the radioactive source distribution. SwinCCIR was trained and validated on both simulated and practical dataset. The experimental results indicate that SwinCCIR effectively overcomes problems of conventional CC imaging, which are expected to be implemented in practical applications. --- ### Neighbor-Aware Token Reduction via Hilbert Curve for Vision Transformers Authors: Yunge Li, Lanyu Xu Published: 2025-12-28 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22760v2 Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved remarkable success in visual recognition tasks, but redundant token representations limit their computational efficiency. Existing token merging and pruning strategies often overlook spatial continuity and neighbor relationships, resulting in the loss of local context. This paper proposes novel neighbor-aware token reduction methods based on Hilbert curve reordering, which explicitly preserves the neighbor structure in a 2D space using 1D sequential representations. Our method introduces two key strategies: Neighbor-Aware Pruning (NAP) for selective token retention and Merging by Adjacent Token similarity (MAT) for local token aggregation. Experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art accuracy-efficiency trade-offs compared to existing methods. This work highlights the importance of spatial continuity and neighbor structure, offering new insights for the architectural optimization of ViTs. ---