# Research Papers — 2025-12 · bundle page 20 of 175 > Full-text markdown of papers #951–1000 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/20 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-12/page/19.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-12/page/21.md) ### Investigating Deep Learning Models for Ejection Fraction Estimation from Echocardiography Videos Authors: Shravan Saranyan, Pramit Saha Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22657v1 Left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) is a key indicator of cardiac function and plays a central role in the diagnosis and management of cardiovascular disease. Echocardiography, as a readily accessible and non-invasive imaging modality, is widely used in clinical practice to estimate LVEF. However, manual assessment of cardiac function from echocardiograms is time-consuming and subject to considerable inter-observer variability. Deep learning approaches offer a promising alternative, with the potential to achieve performance comparable to that of experienced human experts. In this study, we investigate the effectiveness of several deep learning architectures for LVEF estimation from echocardiography videos, including 3D Inception, two-stream, and CNN-RNN models. We systematically evaluate architectural modifications and fusion strategies to identify configurations that maximize prediction accuracy. Models were trained and evaluated on the EchoNet-Dynamic dataset, comprising 10,030 echocardiogram videos. Our results demonstrate that modified 3D Inception architectures achieve the best overall performance, with a root mean squared error (RMSE) of 6.79%. Across architectures, we observe a tendency toward overfitting, with smaller and simpler models generally exhibiting improved generalization. Model performance was also found to be highly sensitive to hyperparameter choices, particularly convolutional kernel sizes and normalization strategies. While this study focuses on echocardiography-based LVEF estimation, the insights gained regarding architectural design and training strategies may be applicable to a broader range of medical and non-medical video analysis tasks. --- ### Clinically Calibrated Machine Learning Benchmarks for Large-Scale Multi-Disorder EEG Classification Authors: Argha Kamal Samanta, Deepak Mewada, Monalisa Sarma, Debasis Samanta Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.HC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22656v1 Clinical electroencephalography is routinely used to evaluate patients with diverse and often overlapping neurological conditions, yet interpretation remains manual, time-intensive, and variable across experts. While automated EEG analysis has been widely studied, most existing methods target isolated diagnostic problems, particularly seizure detection, and provide limited support for multi-disorder clinical screening. This study examines automated EEG-based classification across eleven clinically relevant neurological disorder categories, encompassing acute time-critical conditions, chronic neurocognitive and developmental disorders, and disorders with indirect or weak electrophysiological signatures. EEG recordings are processed using a standard longitudinal bipolar montage and represented through a multi-domain feature set capturing temporal statistics, spectral structure, signal complexity, and inter-channel relationships. Disorder-aware machine learning models are trained under severe class imbalance, with decision thresholds explicitly calibrated to prioritize diagnostic sensitivity. Evaluation on a large, heterogeneous clinical EEG dataset demonstrates that sensitivity-oriented modeling achieves recall exceeding 80% for the majority of disorder categories, with several low-prevalence conditions showing absolute recall gains of 15-30% after threshold calibration compared to default operating points. Feature importance analysis reveals physiologically plausible patterns consistent with established clinical EEG markers. These results establish realistic performance baselines for multi-disorder EEG classification and provide quantitative evidence that sensitivity-prioritized automated analysis can support scalable EEG screening and triage in real-world clinical settings. --- ### Visual Autoregressive Modelling for Monocular Depth Estimation Authors: Amir El-Ghoussani, André Kaup, Nassir Navab, Gustavo Carneiro, Vasileios Belagiannis Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22653v1 We propose a monocular depth estimation method based on visual autoregressive (VAR) priors, offering an alternative to diffusion-based approaches. Our method adapts a large-scale text-to-image VAR model and introduces a scale-wise conditional upsampling mechanism with classifier-free guidance. Our approach performs inference in ten fixed autoregressive stages, requiring only 74K synthetic samples for fine-tuning, and achieves competitive results. We report state-of-the-art performance in indoor benchmarks under constrained training conditions, and strong performance when applied to outdoor datasets. This work establishes autoregressive priors as a complementary family of geometry-aware generative models for depth estimation, highlighting advantages in data scalability, and adaptability to 3D vision tasks. Code available at "https://github.com/AmirMaEl/VAR-Depth". --- ### Scaling Unverifiable Rewards: A Case Study on Visual Insights Authors: Shuyu Gan, James Mooney, Pan Hao, Renxiang Wang, Mingyi Hong, Qianwen Wang, Dongyeop Kang Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22650v1 Large Language Model (LLM) agents can increasingly automate complex reasoning through Test-Time Scaling (TTS), iterative refinement guided by reward signals. However, many real-world tasks involve multi-stage pipeline whose final outcomes lack verifiable rewards or sufficient data to train robust reward models, making judge-based refinement prone to accumulate error over stages. We propose Selective TTS, a process-based refinement framework that scales inference across different stages in multi-agent pipeline, instead of repeated refinement over time by prior work. By distributing compute across stages and pruning low-quality branches early using process-specific judges, Selective TTS mitigates the judge drift and stabilizes refinement. Grounded in the data science pipeline, we build an end-to-end multi-agent pipeline for generating visually insightful charts and report of given dataset, and design a reliable LLM-based judge model, aligned with human experts (Kendall's τ=0.55). Our proposed selective TTS then improves insight quality under a fixed compute budget, increasing mean scores from 61.64 to 65.86 while reducing variance. We hope our findings serve as the first step toward to scaling complex, open-ended tasks with unverifiable rewards, such as scientific discovery and story generation. --- ### FinPercep-RM: A Fine-grained Reward Model and Co-evolutionary Curriculum for RL-based Real-world Super-Resolution Authors: Yidi Liu, Zihao Fan, Jie Huang, Jie Xiao, Dong Li, Wenlong Zhang, Lei Bai, Xueyang Fu, Zheng-Jun Zha Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22647v2 Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) has proven effective in image generation field guided by reward models to align human preferences. Motivated by this, adapting RLHF for Image Super-Resolution (ISR) tasks has shown promise in optimizing perceptual quality with Image Quality Assessment (IQA) model as reward models. However, the traditional IQA model usually output a single global score, which are exceptionally insensitive to local and fine-grained distortions. This insensitivity allows ISR models to produce perceptually undesirable artifacts that yield spurious high scores, misaligning optimization objectives with perceptual quality and results in reward hacking. To address this, we propose a Fine-grained Perceptual Reward Model (FinPercep-RM) based on an Encoder-Decoder architecture. While providing a global quality score, it also generates a Perceptual Degradation Map that spatially localizes and quantifies local defects. We specifically introduce the FGR-30k dataset to train this model, consisting of diverse and subtle distortions from real-world super-resolution models. Despite the success of the FinPercep-RM model, its complexity introduces significant challenges in generator policy learning, leading to training instability. To address this, we propose a Co-evolutionary Curriculum Learning (CCL) mechanism, where both the reward model and the ISR model undergo synchronized curricula. The reward model progressively increases in complexity, while the ISR model starts with a simpler global reward for rapid convergence, gradually transitioning to the more complex model outputs. This easy-to-hard strategy enables stable training while suppressing reward hacking. Experiments validates the effectiveness of our method across ISR models in both global quality and local realism on RLHF methods. --- ### Tree Meets Transformer: A Hybrid Architecture for Scalable Power Allocation in Cell-Free Networks Authors: Irched Chafaa, Giacomo Bacci, Luca Sanguinetti Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: eess.SY, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22639v1 Power allocation remains a fundamental challenge in wireless communication networks, particularly under dynamic user loads and large-scale deployments. While Transformerbased models have demonstrated strong performance, their computational cost scales poorly with the number of users. In this work, we propose a novel hybrid Tree-Transformer architecture that achieves scalable per-user power allocation. Our model compresses user features via a binary tree into a global root representation, applies a Transformer encoder solely to this root, and decodes per-user uplink and downlink powers through a shared decoder. This design achieves logarithmic depth and linear total complexity, enabling efficient inference across large and variable user sets without retraining or architectural changes. We evaluate our model on the max-min fairness problem in cellfree massive MIMO systems and demonstrate that it achieves near-optimal performance while significantly reducing inference time compared to full-attention baselines. --- ### Likelihood-Preserving Embeddings for Statistical Inference Authors: Deniz Akdemir Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, math.ST, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22638v1 Modern machine learning embeddings provide powerful compression of high-dimensional data, yet they typically destroy the geometric structure required for classical likelihood-based statistical inference. This paper develops a rigorous theory of likelihood-preserving embeddings: learned representations that can replace raw data in likelihood-based workflows -- hypothesis testing, confidence interval construction, model selection -- without altering inferential conclusions. We introduce the Likelihood-Ratio Distortion metric $Δ_n$, which measures the maximum error in log-likelihood ratios induced by an embedding. Our main theoretical contribution is the Hinge Theorem, which establishes that controlling $Δ_n$ is necessary and sufficient for preserving inference. Specifically, if the distortion satisfies $Δ_n = o_p(1)$, then (i) all likelihood-ratio based tests and Bayes factors are asymptotically preserved, and (ii) surrogate maximum likelihood estimators are asymptotically equivalent to full-data MLEs. We prove an impossibility result showing that universal likelihood preservation requires essentially invertible embeddings, motivating the need for model-class-specific guarantees. We then provide a constructive framework using neural networks as approximate sufficient statistics, deriving explicit bounds connecting training loss to inferential guarantees. Experiments on Gaussian and Cauchy distributions validate the sharp phase transition predicted by exponential family theory, and applications to distributed clinical inference demonstrate practical utility. --- ### Evaluating GRPO and DPO for Faithful Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in LLMs Authors: Hadi Mohammadi, Tamas Kozak, Anastasia Giachanou Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22631v1 Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as a powerful technique for improving the problem-solving capabilities of large language models (LLMs), particularly for tasks requiring multi-step reasoning. However, recent studies show that CoT explanations often fail to reflect the model's actual reasoning process, as models may produce coherent yet misleading justifications or modify answers without acknowledging external cues. Such discrepancies undermine the reliability of CoT-based methods for safety supervision and alignment monitoring, as models can generate plausible but deceptive rationales for incorrect answers. To better understand this limitation, we evaluate two optimization methods, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), in their ability to improve CoT faithfulness. Our experiments show that GRPO achieves higher performance than DPO in larger models, with the Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct model attaining the best results across all evaluation metrics. Both approaches exhibit positive correlations between model size and performance, but GRPO shows greater potential for improving faithfulness metrics, albeit with less stable behavior at smaller scales. These results suggest that GRPO offers a promising direction for developing more transparent and trustworthy reasoning in LLMs. --- ### On the Role of Discreteness in Diffusion LLMs Authors: Ziqi Jin, Bin Wang, Xiang Lin, Lidong Bing, Aixin Sun Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22630v1 Diffusion models offer appealing properties for language generation, such as parallel decoding and iterative refinement, but the discrete and highly structured nature of text challenges the direct application of diffusion principles. In this paper, we revisit diffusion language modeling from the view of diffusion process and language modeling, and outline five properties that separate diffusion mechanics from language-specific requirements. We first categorize existing approaches into continuous diffusion in embedding space and discrete diffusion over tokens. We then show that each satisfies only part of the five essential properties and therefore reflects a structural trade-off. Through analyses of recent large diffusion language models, we identify two central issues: (i) uniform corruption does not respect how information is distributed across positions, and (ii) token-wise marginal training cannot capture multi-token dependencies during parallel decoding. These observations motivate diffusion processes that align more closely with the structure of text, and encourage future work toward more coherent diffusion language models. --- ### DICE: Discrete Interpretable Comparative Evaluation with Probabilistic Scoring for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Authors: Shiyan Liu, Jian Ma, Rui Qu Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.AI, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22629v1 As Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems evolve toward more sophisticated architectures, ensuring their trustworthiness through explainable and robust evaluation becomes critical. Existing scalar metrics suffer from limited interpretability, inadequate uncertainty quantification, and computational inefficiency in multi-system comparisons, hindering responsible deployment of RAG technologies. We introduce DICE (Discrete Interpretable Comparative Evaluation), a two-stage, evidence-coupled framework that advances explainability and robustness in RAG evaluation. DICE combines deep analytical reasoning with probabilistic $\{A, B, Tie\}$ scoring to produce transparent, confidence-aware judgments that support accountable system improvement through interpretable reasoning traces, enabling systematic error diagnosis and actionable insights. To address efficiency challenges at scale, DICE employs a Swiss-system tournament that reduces computational complexity from $O(N^2)$ to $O(N \log N)$, achieving a 42.9% reduction in our eight-system evaluation while preserving ranking fidelity. Validation on a curated Chinese financial QA dataset demonstrates that DICE achieves 85.7% agreement with human experts, substantially outperforming existing LLM-based metrics such as RAGAS. Our results establish DICE as a responsible, explainable, and efficient paradigm for trustworthy RAG system assessment. --- ### M2G-Eval: Enhancing and Evaluating Multi-granularity Multilingual Code Generation Authors: Fanglin Xu, Wei Zhang, Jian Yang, Guo Chen, Aishan Liu, Zhoujun Li, Xianglong Liu, Bryan Dai Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22628v1 The rapid advancement of code large language models (LLMs) has sparked significant research interest in systematically evaluating their code generation capabilities, yet existing benchmarks predominantly assess models at a single structural granularity and focus on limited programming languages, obscuring fine-grained capability variations across different code scopes and multilingual scenarios. We introduce M2G-Eval, a multi-granularity, multilingual framework for evaluating code generation in large language models (LLMs) across four levels: Class, Function, Block, and Line. Spanning 18 programming languages, M2G-Eval includes 17K+ training tasks and 1,286 human-annotated, contamination-controlled test instances. We develop M2G-Eval-Coder models by training Qwen3-8B with supervised fine-tuning and Group Relative Policy Optimization. Evaluating 30 models (28 state-of-the-art LLMs plus our two M2G-Eval-Coder variants) reveals three main findings: (1) an apparent difficulty hierarchy, with Line-level tasks easiest and Class-level most challenging; (2) widening performance gaps between full- and partial-granularity languages as task complexity increases; and (3) strong cross-language correlations, suggesting that models learn transferable programming concepts. M2G-Eval enables fine-grained diagnosis of code generation capabilities and highlights persistent challenges in synthesizing complex, long-form code. --- ### Chain-of-thought Reviewing and Correction for Time Series Question Answering Authors: Chen Su, Yuanhe Tian, Yan Song Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22627v1 With the advancement of large language models (LLMs), diverse time series analysis tasks are reformulated as time series question answering (TSQA) through a unified natural language interface. However, existing LLM-based approaches largely adopt general natural language processing techniques and are prone to reasoning errors when handling complex numerical sequences. Different from purely textual tasks, time series data are inherently verifiable, enabling consistency checking between reasoning steps and the original input. Motivated by this property, we propose T3LLM, which performs multi-step reasoning with an explicit correction mechanism for time series question answering. The T3LLM framework consists of three LLMs, namely, a worker, a reviewer, and a student, that are responsible for generation, review, and reasoning learning, respectively. Within this framework, the worker generates step-wise chains of thought (CoT) under structured prompts, while the reviewer inspects the reasoning, identifies erroneous steps, and provides corrective comments. The collaboratively generated corrected CoT are used to fine-tune the student model, internalizing multi-step reasoning and self-correction into its parameters. Experiments on multiple real-world TSQA benchmarks demonstrate that T3LLM achieves state-of-the-art performance over strong LLM-based baselines. --- ### Envision: Embodied Visual Planning via Goal-Imagery Video Diffusion Authors: Yuming Gu, Yizhi Wang, Yining Hong, Yipeng Gao, Hao Jiang, Angtian Wang, Bo Liu, Nathaniel S. Dennler, Zhengfei Kuang, Hao Li, Gordon Wetzstein, Chongyang Ma Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22626v1 Embodied visual planning aims to enable manipulation tasks by imagining how a scene evolves toward a desired goal and using the imagined trajectories to guide actions. Video diffusion models, through their image-to-video generation capability, provide a promising foundation for such visual imagination. However, existing approaches are largely forward predictive, generating trajectories conditioned on the initial observation without explicit goal modeling, thus often leading to spatial drift and goal misalignment. To address these challenges, we propose Envision, a diffusion-based framework that performs visual planning for embodied agents. By explicitly constraining the generation with a goal image, our method enforces physical plausibility and goal consistency throughout the generated trajectory. Specifically, Envision operates in two stages. First, a Goal Imagery Model identifies task-relevant regions, performs region-aware cross attention between the scene and the instruction, and synthesizes a coherent goal image that captures the desired outcome. Then, an Env-Goal Video Model, built upon a first-and-last-frame-conditioned video diffusion model (FL2V), interpolates between the initial observation and the goal image, producing smooth and physically plausible video trajectories that connect the start and goal states. Experiments on object manipulation and image editing benchmarks demonstrate that Envision achieves superior goal alignment, spatial consistency, and object preservation compared to baselines. The resulting visual plans can directly support downstream robotic planning and control, providing reliable guidance for embodied agents. --- ### The Wisdom of Deliberating AI Crowds: Does Deliberation Improve LLM-Based Forecasting? Authors: Paul Schneider, Amalie Schramm Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22625v1 Structured deliberation has been found to improve the performance of human forecasters. This study investigates whether a similar intervention, i.e. allowing LLMs to review each other's forecasts before updating, can improve accuracy in large language models (GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Gemini Pro 2.5). Using 202 resolved binary questions from the Metaculus Q2 2025 AI Forecasting Tournament, accuracy was assessed across four scenarios: (1) diverse models with distributed information, (2) diverse models with shared information, (3) homogeneous models with distributed information, and (4) homogeneous models with shared information. Results show that the intervention significantly improves accuracy in scenario (2), reducing Log Loss by 0.020 or about 4 percent in relative terms (p = 0.017). However, when homogeneous groups (three instances of the same model) engaged in the same process, no benefit was observed. Unexpectedly, providing LLMs with additional contextual information did not improve forecast accuracy, limiting our ability to study information pooling as a mechanism. Our findings suggest that deliberation may be a viable strategy for improving LLM forecasting. --- ### Rethinking Memory Design in SAM-Based Visual Object Tracking Authors: Mohamad Alansari, Muzammal Naseer, Hasan Al Marzouqi, Naoufel Werghi, Sajid Javed Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22624v1 \noindent Memory has become the central mechanism enabling robust visual object tracking in modern segmentation-based frameworks. Recent methods built upon Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) have demonstrated strong performance by refining how past observations are stored and reused. However, existing approaches address memory limitations in a method-specific manner, leaving the broader design principles of memory in SAM-based tracking poorly understood. Moreover, it remains unclear how these memory mechanisms transfer to stronger, next-generation foundation models such as Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3). In this work, we present a systematic memory-centric study of SAM-based visual object tracking. We first analyze representative SAM2-based trackers and show that most methods primarily differ in how short-term memory frames are selected, while sharing a common object-centric representation. Building on this insight, we faithfully reimplement these memory mechanisms within the SAM3 framework and conduct large-scale evaluations across ten diverse benchmarks, enabling a controlled analysis of memory design independent of backbone strength. Guided by our empirical findings, we propose a unified hybrid memory framework that explicitly decomposes memory into short-term appearance memory and long-term distractor-resolving memory. This decomposition enables the integration of existing memory policies in a modular and principled manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently improves robustness under long-term occlusion, complex motion, and distractor-heavy scenarios on both SAM2 and SAM3 backbones. Code is available at: https://github.com/HamadYA/SAM3_Tracking_Zoo. \textbf{This is a preprint. Some results are being finalized and may be updated in a future revision.} --- ### Communication Compression for Distributed Learning with Aggregate and Server-Guided Feedback Authors: Tomas Ortega, Chun-Yin Huang, Xiaoxiao Li, Hamid Jafarkhani Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.LG, eess.SP, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22623v2 Distributed learning, particularly Federated Learning (FL), faces a significant bottleneck in the communication cost, particularly the uplink transmission of client-to-server updates, which is often constrained by asymmetric bandwidth limits at the edge. Biased compression techniques are effective in practice, but require error feedback mechanisms to provide theoretical guarantees and to ensure convergence when compression is aggressive. Standard error feedback, however, relies on client-specific control variates, which violates user privacy and is incompatible with stateless clients common in large-scale FL. This paper proposes two novel frameworks that enable biased compression without client-side state or control variates. The first, Compressed Aggregate Feedback (CAFe), uses the globally aggregated update from the previous round as a shared control variate for all clients. The second, Server-Guided Compressed Aggregate Feedback (CAFe-S), extends this idea to scenarios where the server possesses a small private dataset; it generates a server-guided candidate update to be used as a more accurate predictor. We consider Distributed Gradient Descent (DGD) as a representative algorithm and analytically prove CAFe's superiority to Distributed Compressed Gradient Descent (DCGD) with biased compression in the non-convex regime with bounded gradient dissimilarity. We further prove that CAFe-S converges to a stationary point, with a rate that improves as the server's data become more representative. Experimental results in FL scenarios validate the superiority of our approaches over existing compression schemes. --- ### Chord Recognition with Deep Learning Authors: Pierre Mackenzie Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22621v1 Progress in automatic chord recognition has been slow since the advent of deep learning in the field. To understand why, I conduct experiments on existing methods and test hypotheses enabled by recent developments in generative models. Findings show that chord classifiers perform poorly on rare chords and that pitch augmentation boosts accuracy. Features extracted from generative models do not help and synthetic data presents an exciting avenue for future work. I conclude by improving the interpretability of model outputs with beat detection, reporting some of the best results in the field and providing qualitative analysis. Much work remains to solve automatic chord recognition, but I hope this thesis will chart a path for others to try. --- ### Dream-VL & Dream-VLA: Open Vision-Language and Vision-Language-Action Models with Diffusion Language Model Backbone Authors: Jiacheng Ye, Shansan Gong, Jiahui Gao, Junming Fan, Shuang Wu, Wei Bi, Haoli Bai, Lifeng Shang, Lingpeng Kong Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22615v2 While autoregressive Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success, their sequential generation often limits their efficacy in complex visual planning and dynamic robotic control. In this work, we investigate the potential of constructing Vision-Language Models upon diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) to overcome these limitations. We introduce Dream-VL, an open diffusion-based VLM (dVLM) that achieves state-of-the-art performance among previous dVLMs. Dream-VL is comparable to top-tier AR-based VLMs trained on open data on various benchmarks but exhibits superior potential when applied to visual planning tasks. Building upon Dream-VL, we introduce Dream-VLA, a dLLM-based Vision-Language-Action model (dVLA) developed through continuous pre-training on open robotic datasets. We demonstrate that the natively bidirectional nature of this diffusion backbone serves as a superior foundation for VLA tasks, inherently suited for action chunking and parallel generation, leading to significantly faster convergence in downstream fine-tuning. Dream-VLA achieves top-tier performance of 97.2% average success rate on LIBERO, 71.4% overall average on SimplerEnv-Bridge, and 60.5% overall average on SimplerEnv-Fractal, surpassing leading models such as $π_0$ and GR00T-N1. We also validate that dVLMs surpass AR baselines on downstream tasks across different training objectives. We release both Dream-VL and Dream-VLA to facilitate further research in the community. --- ### Enhancing Noise Resilience in Face Clustering via Sparse Differential Transformer Authors: Dafeng Zhang, Yongqi Song, Shizhuo Liu Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22612v1 The method used to measure relationships between face embeddings plays a crucial role in determining the performance of face clustering. Existing methods employ the Jaccard similarity coefficient instead of the cosine distance to enhance the measurement accuracy. However, these methods introduce too many irrelevant nodes, producing Jaccard coefficients with limited discriminative power and adversely affecting clustering performance. To address this issue, we propose a prediction-driven Top-K Jaccard similarity coefficient that enhances the purity of neighboring nodes, thereby improving the reliability of similarity measurements. Nevertheless, accurately predicting the optimal number of neighbors (Top-K) remains challenging, leading to suboptimal clustering results. To overcome this limitation, we develop a Transformer-based prediction model that examines the relationships between the central node and its neighboring nodes near the Top-K to further enhance the reliability of similarity estimation. However, vanilla Transformer, when applied to predict relationships between nodes, often introduces noise due to their overemphasis on irrelevant feature relationships. To address these challenges, we propose a Sparse Differential Transformer (SDT), instead of the vanilla Transformer, to eliminate noise and enhance the model's anti-noise capabilities. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets, such as MS-Celeb-1M, demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, outperforming existing methods and providing a more robust solution for face clustering. --- ### Beyond Isolated Investor: Predicting Startup Success via Roleplay-Based Collective Agents Authors: Zhongyang Liu, Haoyu Pei, Xiangyi Xiao, Xiaocong Du, Yihui Li, Suting Hong, Kunpeng Zhang, Haipeng Zhang Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22608v3 Due to the high value and high failure rates of startups, predicting their success is a critical challenge. Existing approaches typically model startup success from a single decision-maker's perspective, overlooking the collective dynamics that dominate real-world venture capital (VC) decision-making. We propose SimVC-CAS, a collective agent system that simulates VC decisions as a multi-agent interaction process. By designing role-playing agents and a GNN-based supervised interaction module, we reformulate startup financing prediction as a group decision-making task, capturing both enterprise fundamentals and investor network dynamics. Each agent represents an investor with distinct traits and preferences, enabling heterogeneous evaluations and realistic information exchange over a graph-structured co-investment network. Using both proprietary and public VC data with strict anti-leakage controls, we show that SimVC-CAS significantly improves predictive performance, achieving approximately 25% relative improvement in average precision@10, while exhibiting consistency with real investor decisions. The interaction mechanism is particularly effective for network-central startups, confirming the importance of network in VC decision-making. Analysis of agents' reasoning for decision changes further reveals how network environment influence decision quality, demonstrating the system's interpretability. Our approach may generalize to broader group decision-making scenarios. --- ### Gold Price Prediction Using Long Short-Term Memory and Multi-Layer Perceptron with Gray Wolf Optimizer Authors: Hesam Taghipour, Alireza Rezaee, Farshid Hajati Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22606v1 The global gold market, by its fundamentals, has long been home to many financial institutions, banks, governments, funds, and micro-investors. Due to the inherent complexity and relationship between important economic and political components, accurate forecasting of financial markets has always been challenging. Therefore, providing a model that can accurately predict the future of the markets is very important and will be of great benefit to their developers. In this paper, an artificial intelligence-based algorithm for daily and monthly gold forecasting is presented. Two Long short-term memory (LSTM) networks are responsible for daily and monthly forecasting, the results of which are integrated into a Multilayer perceptrons (MLP) network and provide the final forecast of the next day prices. The algorithm forecasts the highest, lowest, and closing prices on the daily and monthly time frame. Based on these forecasts, a trading strategy for live market trading was developed, according to which the proposed model had a return of 171% in three months. Also, the number of internal neurons in each network is optimized by the Gray Wolf optimization (GWO) algorithm based on the least RMSE error. The dataset was collected between 2010 and 2021 and includes data on macroeconomic, energy markets, stocks, and currency status of developed countries. Our proposed LSTM-MLP model predicted the daily closing price of gold with the Mean absolute error (MAE) of $ 0.21 and the next month's price with $ 22.23. --- ### Learning Multi-Modal Mobility Dynamics for Generalized Next Location Recommendation Authors: Junshu Dai, Yu Wang, Tongya Zheng, Wei Ji, Qinghong Guo, Ji Cao, Jie Song, Canghong Jin, Mingli Song Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22605v1 The precise prediction of human mobility has produced significant socioeconomic impacts, such as location recommendations and evacuation suggestions. However, existing methods suffer from limited generalization capability: unimodal approaches are constrained by data sparsity and inherent biases, while multi-modal methods struggle to effectively capture mobility dynamics caused by the semantic gap between static multi-modal representation and spatial-temporal dynamics. Therefore, we leverage multi-modal spatial-temporal knowledge to characterize mobility dynamics for the location recommendation task, dubbed as \textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{M}odal \textbf{Mob}ility (\textbf{M}$^3$\textbf{ob}). First, we construct a unified spatial-temporal relational graph (STRG) for multi-modal representation, by leveraging the functional semantics and spatial-temporal knowledge captured by the large language models (LLMs)-enhanced spatial-temporal knowledge graph (STKG). Second, we design a gating mechanism to fuse spatial-temporal graph representations of different modalities, and propose an STKG-guided cross-modal alignment to inject spatial-temporal dynamic knowledge into the static image modality. Extensive experiments on six public datasets show that our proposed method not only achieves consistent improvements in normal scenarios but also exhibits significant generalization ability in abnormal scenarios. --- ### Structured Prompting and LLM Ensembling for Multimodal Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis Authors: Zhiqiang Gao, Shihao Gao, Zixing Zhang, Yihao Guo, Hongyu Chen, Jing Han Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22603v1 Understanding sentiment in multimodal conversations is a complex yet crucial challenge toward building emotionally intelligent AI systems. The Multimodal Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (MCABSA) Challenge invited participants to tackle two demanding subtasks: (1) extracting a comprehensive sentiment sextuple, including holder, target, aspect, opinion, sentiment, and rationale from multi-speaker dialogues, and (2) detecting sentiment flipping, which detects dynamic sentiment shifts and their underlying triggers. For Subtask-I, in the present paper, we designed a structured prompting pipeline that guided large language models (LLMs) to sequentially extract sentiment components with refined contextual understanding. For Subtask-II, we further leveraged the complementary strengths of three LLMs through ensembling to robustly identify sentiment transitions and their triggers. Our system achieved a 47.38% average score on Subtask-I and a 74.12% exact match F1 on Subtask-II, showing the effectiveness of step-wise refinement and ensemble strategies in rich, multimodal sentiment analysis tasks. --- ### PTalker: Personalized Speech-Driven 3D Talking Head Animation via Style Disentanglement and Modality Alignment Authors: Bin Wang, Yang Xu, Huan Zhao, Hao Zhang, Zixing Zhang Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22602v1 Speech-driven 3D talking head generation aims to produce lifelike facial animations precisely synchronized with speech. While considerable progress has been made in achieving high lip-synchronization accuracy, existing methods largely overlook the intricate nuances of individual speaking styles, which limits personalization and realism. In this work, we present a novel framework for personalized 3D talking head animation, namely "PTalker". This framework preserves speaking style through style disentanglement from audio and facial motion sequences and enhances lip-synchronization accuracy through a three-level alignment mechanism between audio and mesh modalities. Specifically, to effectively disentangle style and content, we design disentanglement constraints that encode driven audio and motion sequences into distinct style and content spaces to enhance speaking style representation. To improve lip-synchronization accuracy, we adopt a modality alignment mechanism incorporating three aspects: spatial alignment using Graph Attention Networks to capture vertex connectivity in the 3D mesh structure, temporal alignment using cross-attention to capture and synchronize temporal dependencies, and feature alignment by top-k bidirectional contrastive losses and KL divergence constraints to ensure consistency between speech and mesh modalities. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on public datasets demonstrate that PTalker effectively generates realistic, stylized 3D talking heads that accurately match identity-specific speaking styles, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. The source code and supplementary videos are available at: PTalker. --- ### Tyee: A Unified, Modular, and Fully-Integrated Configurable Toolkit for Intelligent Physiological Health Care Authors: Tao Zhou, Lingyu Shu, Zixing Zhang, Jing Han Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22601v1 Deep learning has shown great promise in physiological signal analysis, yet its progress is hindered by heterogeneous data formats, inconsistent preprocessing strategies, fragmented model pipelines, and non-reproducible experimental setups. To address these limitations, we present Tyee, a unified, modular, and fully-integrated configurable toolkit designed for intelligent physiological healthcare. Tyee introduces three key innovations: (1) a unified data interface and configurable preprocessing pipeline for 12 kinds of signal modalities; (2) a modular and extensible architecture enabling flexible integration and rapid prototyping across tasks; and (3) end-to-end workflow configuration, promoting reproducible and scalable experimentation. Tyee demonstrates consistent practical effectiveness and generalizability, outperforming or matching baselines across all evaluated tasks (with state-of-the-art results on 12 of 13 datasets). The Tyee toolkit is released at https://github.com/SmileHnu/Tyee and actively maintained. --- ### Cryptocurrency Price Prediction Using Parallel Gated Recurrent Units Authors: Milad Asadpour, Alireza Rezaee, Farshid Hajati Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22599v1 According to the advent of cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin, many investments and businesses are now conducted online through cryptocurrencies. Among them, Bitcoin uses blockchain technology to make transactions secure, transparent, traceable, and immutable. It also exhibits significant price fluctuations and performance, which has attracted substantial attention, especially in financial sectors. Consequently, a wide range of investors and individuals have turned to investing in the cryptocurrency market. One of the most important challenges in economics is price forecasting for future trades. Cryptocurrencies are no exception, and investors are looking for methods to predict prices; various theories and methods have been proposed in this field. This paper presents a new deep model, called \emph{Parallel Gated Recurrent Units} (PGRU), for cryptocurrency price prediction. In this model, recurrent neural networks forecast prices in a parallel and independent way. The parallel networks utilize different inputs, each representing distinct price-related features. Finally, the outputs of the parallel networks are combined by a neural network to forecast the future price of cryptocurrencies. The experimental results indicate that the proposed model achieves mean absolute percentage errors (MAPE) of 3.243% and 2.641% for window lengths 20 and 15, respectively. Our method therefore attains higher accuracy and efficiency with fewer input data and lower computational cost compared to existing methods. --- ### Energy-Guided Generative Modeling for Low-Energy Molecular Structure Discovery Authors: Guikun Xu, Xiaohan Yi, Ziqiao Meng, Peilin Zhao, Yatao Bian Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.LG, physics.chem-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22597v2 Exploring molecular energy landscapes and identifying ground-state conformations are central challenges in computational chemistry. However, generating diverse low-energy conformers from molecular graphs remains expensive with traditional physics-based pipelines. Existing learning-based approaches remain fragmented: generative models capture conformational diversity but often lack reliable energy calibration, whereas deterministic predictors focus on a single structure and fail to represent ensemble variability. Here we introduce EnFlow, to our knowledge, the first energy-guided generative framework that couples flow-based conformer generation with explicit energy landscape modeling for joint conformational ensemble generation and ground-state identification. By integrating generative dynamics with a learned energy model, EnFlow guides sampling toward low-energy regions of the conformational landscape, improving structural fidelity under extremely few sampling steps while enabling energy-based ranking of generated conformations. Experiments on GEOM-QM9 and GEOM-Drugs show that EnFlow achieves strong performance in conformer generation and ground-state identification while requiring only 1--2 ODE sampling steps. Single-point GFN2-xTB evaluations further show that the learned energy scores preserve physically meaningful energetic rankings of generated conformations. These results support explicit energy landscape modeling as an effective strategy for low-energy molecular structure discovery through joint modeling of conformational ensembles and their associated energies. --- ### Data-Driven Analysis of Crash Patterns in SAE Level 2 and Level 4 Automated Vehicles Using K-means Clustering and Association Rule Mining Authors: Jewel Rana Palit, Vijayalakshmi K Kumarasamy, Osama A. Osman Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22589v2 Automated Vehicles (AV) hold potential to reduce or eliminate human driving errors, enhance traffic safety, and support sustainable mobility. Recently, crash data has increasingly revealed that AV behavior can deviate from expected safety outcomes, raising concerns about the technology's safety and operational reliability in mixed traffic environments. While past research has investigated AV crash, most studies rely on small-size California-centered datasets, with a limited focus on understanding crash trends across various SAE Levels of automation. This study analyzes over 2,500 AV crash records from the United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), covering SAE Levels 2 and 4, to uncover underlying crash dynamics. A two-stage data mining framework is developed. K-means clustering is first applied to segment crash records into 4 distinct behavioral clusters based on temporal, spatial, and environmental factors. Then, Association Rule Mining (ARM) is used to extract interpretable multivariate relationships between crash patterns and crash contributors including lighting conditions, surface condition, vehicle dynamics, and environmental conditions within each cluster. These insights provide actionable guidance for AV developers, safety regulators, and policymakers in formulating AV deployment strategies and minimizing crash risks. --- ### Structural Incompatibility of Differentiable Sorting and Within-Vector Rank Normalization Authors: Taeyun Kim Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22587v2 We show that differentiable sorting and ranking operators are structurally incompatible with within-vector rank normalization. We formalize admissibility through monotone invariance (C1), batch independence (C2), and a rank-space stability condition (C3). Gap-sensitive relaxations such as SoftSort violate (C1) by a quantitative margin that depends on the temperature and input scale. Batchwise rank relaxations such as SinkhornSort violate (C2): the same sample can be assigned outputs arbitrarily close to 0 or 1 depending solely on batch context. Condition (C3) implies (C1) under the rank representation used here and should not be read as a third independent failure mode. We also characterize the admissible class: any admissible operator must factor through the rank representation via a Lipschitz function. --- ### KV-Tracker: Real-Time Pose Tracking with Transformers Authors: Marwan Taher, Ignacio Alzugaray, Kirill Mazur, Xin Kong, Andrew J. Davison Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22581v1 Multi-view 3D geometry networks offer a powerful prior but are prohibitively slow for real-time applications. We propose a novel way to adapt them for online use, enabling real-time 6-DoF pose tracking and online reconstruction of objects and scenes from monocular RGB videos. Our method rapidly selects and manages a set of images as keyframes to map a scene or object via $π^3$ with full bidirectional attention. We then cache the global self-attention block's key-value (KV) pairs and use them as the sole scene representation for online tracking. This allows for up to $15\times$ speedup during inference without the fear of drift or catastrophic forgetting. Our caching strategy is model-agnostic and can be applied to other off-the-shelf multi-view networks without retraining. We demonstrate KV-Tracker on both scene-level tracking and the more challenging task of on-the-fly object tracking and reconstruction without depth measurements or object priors. Experiments on the TUM RGB-D, 7-Scenes, Arctic and OnePose datasets show the strong performance of our system while maintaining high frame-rates up to ${\sim}27$ FPS. --- ### SANet: A Semantic-aware Agentic AI Networking Framework for Cross-layer Optimization in 6G Authors: Yong Xiao, Xubo Li, Haoran Zhou, Yingyu Li, Yayu Gao, Guangming Shi, Ping Zhang, Marwan Krunz Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.AI, cs.NI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22579v2 Agentic AI networking (AgentNet) is a novel AI-native networking paradigm in which a large number of specialized AI agents collaborate to perform autonomous decision-making, dynamic environmental adaptation, and complex missions. It has the potential to facilitate real-time network management and optimization functions, including self-configuration, self-optimization, and self-adaptation across diverse and complex environments. This paper proposes SANet, a novel semantic-aware AgentNet architecture for wireless networks that can infer the semantic goal of the user and automatically assign agents associated with different layers of the network to fulfill the inferred goal. Motivated by the fact that AgentNet is a decentralized framework in which collaborating agents may generally have different and even conflicting objectives, we formulate the decentralized optimization of SANet as a multi-agent multi-objective problem, and focus on finding the Pareto-optimal solution for agents with distinct and potentially conflicting objectives. We propose three novel metrics for evaluating SANet. Furthermore, we develop a model partition and sharing (MoPS) framework in which large models, e.g., deep learning models, of different agents can be partitioned into shared and agent-specific parts that are jointly constructed and deployed according to agents' local computational resources. Two decentralized optimization algorithms are proposed. We derive theoretical bounds and prove that there exists a three-way tradeoff among optimization, generalization, and conflicting errors. We develop an open-source RAN and core network-based hardware prototype that implements agents to interact with three different layers of the network. Experimental results show that the proposed framework achieved performance gains of up to 14.61% while requiring only 44.37% of FLOPs required by state-of-the-art algorithms. --- ### ReFRM3D: A Radiomics-enhanced Fused Residual Multiparametric 3D Network with Multi-Scale Feature Fusion for Glioma Characterization Authors: Md. Abdur Rahman, Md Noman Hossain, Arefin Ittesafun Abian, Mohaimenul Azam Khan Raiaan, Yan Zhang, Mirjam Jonkman, Sami Azam Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22570v2 Gliomas are among the most aggressive cancers, with complex diagnostic processes. Existing glioma segmentation methods often struggle with high variability in imaging data and inadequate optimization. Furthermore, radiomic analysis is typically applied only after segmentation is finished, limiting its ability to inform the segmentation process itself. To address these challenges, we propose a novel radiomics-enhanced fused residual multiparametric 3D network (ReFRM3D) for brain tumor characterization. The framework is based on a 3D U-Net architecture and features multi-scale feature fusion, hybrid upsampling, and an extended residual skip mechanism. Additionally, we introduce a radiomic conditioning mechanism that extracts texture and intensity descriptors from an intermediate coarse segmentation and re-injects them into the decoder to refine the final output. Experimental results on BraTS2019, BraTS2020, and BraTS2021 show strong performance, with mean DSC values of 93.45%, 93.61%, and 92.06%, respectively, across whole tumor, enhancing tumor, and tumor core regions. Compared with recent models, ReFRM3D improves average DSC by 5.79%, 7.25%, and 0.96% on these datasets. Our model also generalized well on the BraTS-Africa dataset with an average DSC of 87.8%, despite differences in scanner field strength and patient demographics. --- ### Lessons from Neuroscience for AI: How integrating Actions, Compositional Structure and Episodic Memory could enable Safe, Interpretable and Human-Like AI Authors: Rajesh P. N. Rao, Vishwas Sathish, Linxing Preston Jiang, Matthew Bryan, Prashant Rangarajan Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.AI, physics.bio-ph, q-bio.NC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22568v1 The phenomenal advances in large language models (LLMs) and other foundation models over the past few years have been based on optimizing large-scale transformer models on the surprisingly simple objective of minimizing next-token prediction loss, a form of predictive coding that is also the backbone of an increasingly popular model of brain function in neuroscience and cognitive science. However, current foundation models ignore three other important components of state-of-the-art predictive coding models: tight integration of actions with generative models, hierarchical compositional structure, and episodic memory. We propose that to achieve safe, interpretable, energy-efficient, and human-like AI, foundation models should integrate actions, at multiple scales of abstraction, with a compositional generative architecture and episodic memory. We present recent evidence from neuroscience and cognitive science on the importance of each of these components. We describe how the addition of these missing components to foundation models could help address some of their current deficiencies: hallucinations and superficial understanding of concepts due to lack of grounding, a missing sense of agency/responsibility due to lack of control, threats to safety and trustworthiness due to lack of interpretability, and energy inefficiency. We compare our proposal to current trends, such as adding chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to foundation models, and discuss new ways of augmenting these models with brain-inspired components. We conclude by arguing that a rekindling of the historically fruitful exchange of ideas between brain science and AI will help pave the way towards safe and interpretable human-centered AI. --- ### Geometry-Aware Optimization for Respiratory Sound Classification: Enhancing Sensitivity with SAM-Optimized Audio Spectrogram Transformers Authors: Atakan Işık, Selin Vulga Işık, Ahmet Feridun Işık, Mahşuk Taylan Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: eess.AS, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22564v1 Respiratory sound classification is hindered by the limited size, high noise levels, and severe class imbalance of benchmark datasets like ICBHI 2017. While Transformer-based models offer powerful feature extraction capabilities, they are prone to overfitting and often converge to sharp minima in the loss landscape when trained on such constrained medical data. To address this, we introduce a framework that enhances the Audio Spectrogram Transformer (AST) using Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM). Instead of merely minimizing the training loss, our approach optimizes the geometry of the loss surface, guiding the model toward flatter minima that generalize better to unseen patients. We also implement a weighted sampling strategy to handle class imbalance effectively. Our method achieves a state-of-the-art score of 68.10% on the ICBHI 2017 dataset, outperforming existing CNN and hybrid baselines. More importantly, it reaches a sensitivity of 68.31%, a crucial improvement for reliable clinical screening. Further analysis using t-SNE and attention maps confirms that the model learns robust, discriminative features rather than memorizing background noise. --- ### Learning When Not to Attend Globally Authors: Xuan Luo, Kailai Zhang, Xifeng Yan Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22562v1 When reading books, humans focus primarily on the current page, flipping back to recap prior context only when necessary. Similarly, we demonstrate that Large Language Models (LLMs) can learn to dynamically determine when to attend to global context. We propose All-or-Here Attention (AHA), which utilizes a binary router per attention head to dynamically toggle between full attention and local sliding window attention for each token. Our results indicate that with a window size of 256 tokens, up to 93\% of the original full attention operations can be replaced by sliding window attention without performance loss. Furthermore, by evaluating AHA across various window sizes, we identify a long-tail distribution in context dependency, where the necessity for full attention decays rapidly as the local window expands. By decoupling local processing from global access, AHA reveals that full attention is largely redundant, and that efficient inference requires only on-demand access to the global context. --- ### RollArt: Disaggregated Multi-Task Agentic RL Training at Scale Authors: Wei Gao, Yuheng Zhao, Tianyuan Wu, Shaopan Xiong, Weixun Wang, Dakai An, Lunxi Cao, Dilxat Muhtar, Zichen Liu, Haizhou Zhao, Ju Huang, Siran Yang et al. Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.DC, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22560v2 Agentic Reinforcement Learning (RL) trains LLMs through multi-turn interactions with environments, producing workloads that mix compute-bound prefill, bandwidth-bound decoding, CPU-heavy environment execution, and bursty reward evaluation. Existing systems either colocate all stages on a single GPU cluster or decouple them only at a coarse granularity, overlooking hardware heterogeneity and incurring substantial synchronization overhead across stages. We present ROLLART, a system for multi-task agentic RL on disaggregated infrastructure. ROLLART maps each pipeline stage to best-fit hardware, routing prefill-heavy tasks to compute-optimized GPUs, decode-heavy tasks to bandwidth-optimized GPUs, and environments to CPU clusters. It decouples rollout at the trajectory level, allowing generation, environment interaction, and reward scoring to proceed independently, so that slow or failed environments never block the others. ROLLART offloads stateless reward computation to serverless infrastructure and overlaps rollout with training via staleness-bounded asynchronous weight synchronization. Our results demonstrate that ROLLART effectively improves training throughput and achieves 1.31--2.05 \(\times\) training time reduction compared to various RL systems. We also evaluated ROLLART by training a hundreds-of-billions-parameter MoE model for Qoder product on an Alibaba cluster with above 3,000 GPUs, demonstrating its stability and scalability. --- ### Computing Pure-Strategy Nash Equilibria in a Two-Party Policy Competition: Existence and Algorithmic Approaches Authors: Chuang-Chieh Lin, Chi-Jen Lu, Po-An Chen, Chih-Chieh Hung Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.GT, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22552v4 We formulate two-party policy competition as a two-player non-cooperative game, generalizing Lin et al.'s work (2021). Each party selects a real-valued policy vector as its strategy from a compact subset of Euclidean space, and a voter's utility for a policy is given by the inner product with their preference vector. To capture the uncertainty in the competition, we assume that a policy's winning probability increases monotonically with its total utility across all voters, and we formalize this via an affine isotonic function. A player's payoff is defined as the expected utility received by its supporters. In this work, we first test and validate the isotonicity hypothesis through voting simulations. Next, we prove the existence of a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium (PSNE) in both one- and multi-dimensional settings. Although we construct a counterexample demonstrating the game's non-monotonicity, our experiments show that a decentralized gradient-based algorithm typically converges rapidly to an approximate PSNE. Finally, we present a grid-based search algorithm that finds an $ε$-approximate PSNE of the game in time polynomial in the input size and $1/ε$. --- ### TimePerceiver: An Encoder-Decoder Framework for Generalized Time-Series Forecasting Authors: Jaebin Lee, Hankook Lee Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22550v1 In machine learning, effective modeling requires a holistic consideration of how to encode inputs, make predictions (i.e., decoding), and train the model. However, in time-series forecasting, prior work has predominantly focused on encoder design, often treating prediction and training as separate or secondary concerns. In this paper, we propose TimePerceiver, a unified encoder-decoder forecasting framework that is tightly aligned with an effective training strategy. To be specific, we first generalize the forecasting task to include diverse temporal prediction objectives such as extrapolation, interpolation, and imputation. Since this generalization requires handling input and target segments that are arbitrarily positioned along the temporal axis, we design a novel encoder-decoder architecture that can flexibly perceive and adapt to these varying positions. For encoding, we introduce a set of latent bottleneck representations that can interact with all input segments to jointly capture temporal and cross-channel dependencies. For decoding, we leverage learnable queries corresponding to target timestamps to effectively retrieve relevant information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework consistently and significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art baselines across a wide range of benchmark datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/efficient-learning-lab/TimePerceiver. --- ### Self-Rewarded Multimodal Coherent Reasoning Across Diverse Visual Domains Authors: Jesen Zhang, Ningyuan Liu, Kaitong Cai, Sidi Liu, Jing Yang, Ziliang Chen, Xiaofei Sun, Keze Wang Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22545v1 Multimodal LLMs often produce fluent yet unreliable reasoning, exhibiting weak step-to-step coherence and insufficient visual grounding, largely because existing alignment approaches supervise only the final answer while ignoring the reliability of the intermediate reasoning process. We introduce SR-MCR, a lightweight and label-free framework that aligns reasoning by exploiting intrinsic process signals derived directly from model outputs. Five self-referential cues -- semantic alignment, lexical fidelity, non-redundancy, visual grounding, and step consistency -- are integrated into a normalized, reliability-weighted reward that provides fine-grained process-level guidance. A critic-free GRPO objective, enhanced with a confidence-aware cooling mechanism, further stabilizes training and suppresses trivial or overly confident generations. Built on Qwen2.5-VL, SR-MCR improves both answer accuracy and reasoning coherence across a broad set of visual benchmarks; among open-source models of comparable size, SR-MCR-7B achieves state-of-the-art performance with an average accuracy of 81.4%. Ablation studies confirm the independent contributions of each reward term and the cooling module. --- ### VLA-Arena: An Open-Source Framework for Benchmarking Vision-Language-Action Models Authors: Borong Zhang, Jiahao Li, Jiachen Shen, Yuhao Zhang, Yishuai Cai, Lu Liu, Hailu Ji, Yuanpei Chen, Juntao Dai, Jiaming Ji, Yaodong Yang Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22539v4 While Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) are rapidly advancing toward generalist robot policies, quantitatively characterizing their capability boundaries and failure modes remains challenging. To address this, we introduce VLA-Arena, a comprehensive benchmark. It features a novel structured task design framework to quantify difficulty across three orthogonal axes: (1) Task Structure, (2) Language Command, and (3) Visual Observation. This allows us to systematically design tasks with fine-grained difficulty levels, enabling a precise measurement of model capability frontiers. For task structure, VLA-Arena comprises 11 task suites organized into four dimensions: Safety, Distractor, Extrapolation, and Long Horizon, totaling 170 tasks. Each suite spans three difficulty levels (L0-L2), with fine-tuning restricted to L0 to rigorously assess generalization. Orthogonal to this, language (W0-W4) and visual (V0-V4) perturbations can be applied to any task as diagnostic probes to distinguish robust grounding from superficial pattern matching. Our extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art VLAs reveals critical limitations: memorization over generalization, superficial visual perception, and a neglect of safety constraints. Additionally, model rank reversals across L0-L2 validate that each level provides non-redundant insights. To foster research addressing these model limitations and ensure reproducibility, we provide the complete VLA-Arena framework, including an end-to-end toolchain from task definition to automated evaluation and the VLA-Arena-S/M/L datasets for fine-tuning. Our benchmark, datasets, models, and leaderboard are publicly available at https://vla-arena.github.io. --- ### CoAgent: Collaborative Planning and Consistency Agent for Coherent Video Generation Authors: Qinglin Zeng, Kaitong Cai, Ruiqi Chen, Qinhan Lv, Keze Wang Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22536v1 Maintaining narrative coherence and visual consistency remains a central challenge in open-domain video generation. Existing text-to-video models often treat each shot independently, resulting in identity drift, scene inconsistency, and unstable temporal structure. We propose CoAgent, a collaborative and closed-loop framework for coherent video generation that formulates the process as a plan-synthesize-verify pipeline. Given a user prompt, style reference, and pacing constraints, a Storyboard Planner decomposes the input into structured shot-level plans with explicit entities, spatial relations, and temporal cues. A Global Context Manager maintains entity-level memory to preserve appearance and identity consistency across shots. Each shot is then generated by a Synthesis Module under the guidance of a Visual Consistency Controller, while a Verifier Agent evaluates intermediate results using vision-language reasoning and triggers selective regeneration when inconsistencies are detected. Finally, a pacing-aware editor refines temporal rhythm and transitions to match the desired narrative flow. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoAgent significantly improves coherence, visual consistency, and narrative quality in long-form video generation. --- ### Multi-AI Agent Framework Reveals the "Oxide Gatekeeper" in Aluminum Nanoparticle Oxidation Authors: Yiming Lu, Tingyu Lu, Di Zhang, Lili Ye, Hao Li Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.AI, cond-mat.mtrl-sci arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22529v1 Aluminum nanoparticles (ANPs) are among the most energy-dense solid fuels, yet the atomic mechanisms governing their transition from passivated particles to explosive reactants remain elusive. This stems from a fundamental computational bottleneck: ab initio methods offer quantum accuracy but are restricted to small spatiotemporal scales (< 500 atoms, picoseconds), while empirical force fields lack the reactive fidelity required for complex combustion environments. Herein, we bridge this gap by employing a "human-in-the-loop" closed-loop framework where self-auditing AI Agents validate the evolution of a machine learning potential (MLP). By acting as scientific sentinels that visualize hidden model artifacts for human decision-making, this collaborative cycle ensures quantum mechanical accuracy while exhibiting near-linear scalability to million-atom systems and accessing nanosecond timescales (energy RMSE: 1.2 meV/atom, force RMSE: 0.126 eV/Angstrom). Strikingly, our simulations reveal a temperature-regulated dual-mode oxidation mechanism: at moderate temperatures, the oxide shell acts as a dynamic "gatekeeper," regulating oxidation through a "breathing mode" of transient nanochannels; above a critical threshold, a "rupture mode" unleashes catastrophic shell failure and explosive combustion. Importantly, we resolve a decades-old controversy by demonstrating that aluminum cation outward diffusion, rather than oxygen transport, dominates mass transfer across all temperature regimes, with diffusion coefficients consistently exceeding those of oxygen by 2-3 orders of magnitude. These discoveries establish a unified atomic-scale framework for energetic nanomaterial design, enabling the precision engineering of ignition sensitivity and energy release rates through intelligent computational design. --- ### DreamOmni3: Scribble-based Editing and Generation Authors: Bin Xia, Bohao Peng, Jiyang Liu, Sitong Wu, Jingyao Li, Junjia Huang, Xu Zhao, Yitong Wang, Ruihang Chu, Bei Yu, Jiaya Jia Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22525v2 Recently unified generation and editing models have achieved remarkable success with their impressive performance. These models rely mainly on text prompts for instruction-based editing and generation, but language often fails to capture users intended edit locations and fine-grained visual details. To this end, we propose two tasks: scribble-based editing and generation, that enables more flexible creation on graphical user interface (GUI) combining user textual, images, and freehand sketches. We introduce DreamOmni3, tackling two challenges: data creation and framework design. Our data synthesis pipeline includes two parts: scribble-based editing and generation. For scribble-based editing, we define four tasks: scribble and instruction-based editing, scribble and multimodal instruction-based editing, image fusion, and doodle editing. Based on DreamOmni2 dataset, we extract editable regions and overlay hand-drawn boxes, circles, doodles or cropped image to construct training data. For scribble-based generation, we define three tasks: scribble and instruction-based generation, scribble and multimodal instruction-based generation, and doodle generation, following similar data creation pipelines. For the framework, instead of using binary masks, which struggle with complex edits involving multiple scribbles, images, and instructions, we propose a joint input scheme that feeds both the original and scribbled source images into the model, using different colors to distinguish regions and simplify processing. By applying the same index and position encodings to both images, the model can precisely localize scribbled regions while maintaining accurate editing. Finally, we establish comprehensive benchmarks for these tasks to promote further research. Experimental results demonstrate that DreamOmni3 achieves outstanding performance, and models and code will be publicly released. --- ### Towards Reliable Evaluation of Adversarial Robustness for Spiking Neural Networks Authors: Jihang Wang, Dongcheng Zhao, Ruolin Chen, Qian Zhang, Yi Zeng Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22522v3 Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) utilize spike-based activations to mimic the brain's energy-efficient information processing. However, the binary and discontinuous nature of spike activations causes vanishing gradients, making adversarial robustness evaluation via gradient descent unreliable. While improved surrogate gradient methods have been proposed, their effectiveness under strong adversarial attacks remains unclear. We propose a more reliable framework for evaluating SNN adversarial robustness. We theoretically analyze the degree of gradient vanishing in surrogate gradients and introduce the Adaptive Sharpness Surrogate Gradient (ASSG), which adaptively evolves the shape of the surrogate function according to the input distribution during attack iterations, thereby enhancing gradient accuracy while mitigating gradient vanishing. In addition, we design an adversarial attack with adaptive step size under the $L_\infty$ constraint-Stable Adaptive Projected Gradient Descent (SA-PGD), achieving faster and more stable convergence under imprecise gradients. Extensive experiments show that our approach substantially increases attack success rates across diverse adversarial training schemes, SNN architectures and neuron models, providing a more generalized and reliable evaluation of SNN adversarial robustness. The experimental results further reveal that the robustness of current SNNs has been significantly overestimated and highlighting the need for more dependable adversarial training methods. The code is released at https://github.com/craree/ASSG-SNNs-Robustness-Evaluation --- ### Decomposing Task Vectors for Refined Model Editing Authors: Hamed Damirchi, Ehsan Abbasnejad, Zhen Zhang, Javen Shi Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22511v1 Large pre-trained models have transformed machine learning, yet adapting these models effectively to exhibit precise, concept-specific behaviors remains a significant challenge. Task vectors, defined as the difference between fine-tuned and pre-trained model parameters, provide a mechanism for steering neural networks toward desired behaviors. This has given rise to large repositories dedicated to task vectors tailored for specific behaviors. The arithmetic operation of these task vectors allows for the seamless combination of desired behaviors without the need for large datasets. However, these vectors often contain overlapping concepts that can interfere with each other during arithmetic operations, leading to unpredictable outcomes. We propose a principled decomposition method that separates each task vector into two components: one capturing shared knowledge across multiple task vectors, and another isolating information unique to each specific task. By identifying invariant subspaces across projections, our approach enables more precise control over concept manipulation without unintended amplification or diminution of other behaviors. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our decomposition method across three domains: improving multi-task merging in image classification by 5% using shared components as additional task vectors, enabling clean style mixing in diffusion models without generation degradation by mixing only the unique components, and achieving 47% toxicity reduction in language models while preserving performance on general knowledge tasks by negating the toxic information isolated to the unique component. Our approach provides a new framework for understanding and controlling task vector arithmetic, addressing fundamental limitations in model editing operations. --- ### Predicting LLM Correctness in Prosthodontics Using Metadata and Hallucination Signals Authors: Lucky Susanto, Anasta Pranawijayana, Cortino Sukotjo, Soni Prasad, Derry Wijaya Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22508v1 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in high-stakes domains such as healthcare and medical education, where the risk of generating factually incorrect (i.e., hallucinated) information is a major concern. While significant efforts have been made to detect and mitigate such hallucinations, predicting whether an LLM's response is correct remains a critical yet underexplored problem. This study investigates the feasibility of predicting correctness by analyzing a general-purpose model (GPT-4o) and a reasoning-centric model (OSS-120B) on a multiple-choice prosthodontics exam. We utilize metadata and hallucination signals across three distinct prompting strategies to build a correctness predictor for each (model, prompting) pair. Our findings demonstrate that this metadata-based approach can improve accuracy by up to +7.14% and achieve a precision of 83.12% over a baseline that assumes all answers are correct. We further show that while actual hallucination is a strong indicator of incorrectness, metadata signals alone are not reliable predictors of hallucination. Finally, we reveal that prompting strategies, despite not affecting overall accuracy, significantly alter the models' internal behaviors and the predictive utility of their metadata. These results present a promising direction for developing reliability signals in LLMs but also highlight that the methods explored in this paper are not yet robust enough for critical, high-stakes deployment. --- ### SCAFusion: A Multimodal 3D Detection Framework for Small Object Detection in Lunar Surface Exploration Authors: Xin Chen, Kang Luo, Yangyi Xiao, Hesheng Wang Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22503v1 Reliable and precise detection of small and irregular objects, such as meteor fragments and rocks, is critical for autonomous navigation and operation in lunar surface exploration. Existing multimodal 3D perception methods designed for terrestrial autonomous driving often underperform in off world environments due to poor feature alignment, limited multimodal synergy, and weak small object detection. This paper presents SCAFusion, a multimodal 3D object detection model tailored for lunar robotic missions. Built upon the BEVFusion framework, SCAFusion integrates a Cognitive Adapter for efficient camera backbone tuning, a Contrastive Alignment Module to enhance camera LiDAR feature consistency, a Camera Auxiliary Training Branch to strengthen visual representation, and most importantly, a Section aware Coordinate Attention mechanism explicitly designed to boost the detection performance of small, irregular targets. With negligible increase in parameters and computation, our model achieves 69.7% mAP and 72.1% NDS on the nuScenes validation set, improving the baseline by 5.0% and 2.7%, respectively. In simulated lunar environments built on Isaac Sim, SCAFusion achieves 90.93% mAP, outperforming the baseline by 11.5%, with notable gains in detecting small meteor like obstacles. --- ### Bidirectional Neural Networks for Global Nucleon-Nucleus Optical Model Calculations Authors: Jin Lei Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: nucl-th, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22500v4 Modern nuclear data evaluation increasingly requires not only accurate scattering calculations, but also efficient methods for uncertainty quantification and parameter optimization, tasks that benefit from differentiable solvers amenable to gradient-based algorithms. I present a neural network emulator based on Bidirectional Liquid Neural Networks (BiLNN) that provides a fully differentiable mapping from optical potential parameters to scattering wave functions. The key innovation enabling generalization across the parameter space is the use of phase-space coordinates $ρ= kr$ that normalize the oscillation wavelength regardless of projectile energy, allowing a single network to span 1 to 200~MeV. Trained on Numerov solutions for twelve target nuclei (\nuc{12}{C} to \nuc{208}{Pb}), both protons and neutrons, and partial waves up to $l=30$, the network achieves an overall relative error of 1.2\%. The predicted wave functions yield accurate $S$-matrix elements and elastic scattering cross sections, reproducing diffraction patterns spanning four orders of magnitude. Importantly, the model extrapolates successfully to nuclei not included in training (\nuc{24}{Mg}, \nuc{63}{Cu}, \nuc{184}{W}) with comparable accuracy, demonstrating that it has learned the physics of the optical model rather than memorizing specific targets. The differentiable nature of the trained model opens the door to gradient-based optimization of optical model parameters and efficient uncertainty quantification. --- ### Hierarchical Pedagogical Oversight: A Multi-Agent Adversarial Framework for Reliable AI Tutoring Authors: Saisab Sadhu, Ashim Dhor Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.MA, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22496v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as automated tutors to address educator shortages; however, they often fail at pedagogical reasoning, frequently validating incorrect student solutions (sycophancy) or providing overly direct answers that hinder learning. We introduce Hierarchical Pedagogical Oversight (HPO), a framework that adapts structured adversarial synthesis to educational assessment. Unlike cooperative multi-agent systems that often drift toward superficial consensus, HPO enforces a dialectical separation of concerns: specialist agents first distill dialogue context, which then grounds a moderated, five-act debate between opposing pedagogical critics. We evaluate this framework on the MRBench dataset of 1,214 middle-school mathematics dialogues. Our 8B-parameter model achieves a Macro F1 of 0.845, outperforming GPT-4o (0.812) by 3.3% while using 20 times fewer parameters. These results establish adversarial reasoning as a critical mechanism for deploying reliable, low-compute pedagogical oversight in resource-constrained environments. --- ### The Quest for Winning Tickets in Low-Rank Adapters Authors: Hamed Damirchi, Cristian Rodriguez-Opazo, Ehsan Abbasnejad, Zhen Zhang, Javen Shi Published: 2025-12-27 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22495v1 The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) suggests that over-parameterized neural networks contain sparse subnetworks ("winning tickets") capable of matching full model performance when trained from scratch. With the growing reliance on fine-tuning large pretrained models, we investigate whether LTH extends to parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), specifically focusing on Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) methods. Our key finding is that LTH holds within LoRAs, revealing sparse subnetworks that can match the performance of dense adapters. In particular, we find that the effectiveness of sparse subnetworks depends more on how much sparsity is applied in each layer than on the exact weights included in the subnetwork. Building on this insight, we propose Partial-LoRA, a method that systematically identifies said subnetworks and trains sparse low-rank adapters aligned with task-relevant subspaces of the pre-trained model. Experiments across 8 vision and 12 language tasks in both single-task and multi-task settings show that Partial-LoRA reduces the number of trainable parameters by up to 87\%, while maintaining or improving accuracy. Our results not only deepen our theoretical understanding of transfer learning and the interplay between pretraining and fine-tuning but also open new avenues for developing more efficient adaptation strategies. ---