# Research Papers — 2025-12 · bundle page 38 of 175 > Full-text markdown of papers #1851–1900 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/38 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-12/page/37.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-12/page/39.md) ### Item Region-based Style Classification Network (IRSN): A Fashion Style Classifier Based on Domain Knowledge of Fashion Experts Authors: Jinyoung Choi, Youngchae Kwon, Injung Kim Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20088v1 Fashion style classification is a challenging task because of the large visual variation within the same style and the existence of visually similar styles. Styles are expressed not only by the global appearance, but also by the attributes of individual items and their combinations. In this study, we propose an item region-based fashion style classification network (IRSN) to effectively classify fashion styles by analyzing item-specific features and their combinations in addition to global features. IRSN extracts features of each item region using item region pooling (IRP), analyzes them separately, and combines them using gated feature fusion (GFF). In addition, we improve the feature extractor by applying a dual-backbone architecture that combines a domain-specific feature extractor and a general feature extractor pre-trained with a large-scale image-text dataset. In experiments, applying IRSN to six widely-used backbones, including EfficientNet, ConvNeXt, and Swin Transformer, improved style classification accuracy by an average of 6.9% and a maximum of 14.5% on the FashionStyle14 dataset and by an average of 7.6% and a maximum of 15.1% on the ShowniqV3 dataset. Visualization analysis also supports that the IRSN models are better than the baseline models at capturing differences between similar style classes. --- ### Spatio-Temporal Graphs Beyond Grids: Benchmark for Maritime Anomaly Detection Authors: Jeehong Kim, Youngseok Hwang, Minchan Kim, Sungho Bae, Hyunwoo Park Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20086v1 Spatio-temporal graph neural networks (ST-GNNs) have achieved notable success in structured domains such as road traffic and public transportation, where spatial entities can be naturally represented as fixed nodes. In contrast, many real-world systems including maritime traffic lack such fixed anchors, making the construction of spatio-temporal graphs a fundamental challenge. Anomaly detection in these non-grid environments is particularly difficult due to the absence of canonical reference points, the sparsity and irregularity of trajectories, and the fact that anomalies may manifest at multiple granularities. In this work, we introduce a novel benchmark dataset for anomaly detection in the maritime domain, extending the Open Maritime Traffic Analysis Dataset (OMTAD) into a benchmark tailored for graph-based anomaly detection. Our dataset enables systematic evaluation across three different granularities: node-level, edge-level, and graph-level anomalies. We plan to employ two specialized LLM-based agents: \emph{Trajectory Synthesizer} and \emph{Anomaly Injector} to construct richer interaction contexts and generate semantically meaningful anomalies. We expect this benchmark to promote reproducibility and to foster methodological advances in anomaly detection for non-grid spatio-temporal systems. --- ### QE-Catalytic: A Graph-Language Multimodal Base Model for Relaxed-Energy Prediction in Catalytic Adsorption Authors: Yanjie Li, Jian Xu, Xueqing Chen, Lina Yu, Shiming Xiang, Weijun Li, Cheng-lin Liu Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20084v1 Adsorption energy is a key descriptor of catalytic reactivity. It is fundamentally defined as the difference between the relaxed total energy of the adsorbate-surface system and that of an appropriate reference state; therefore, the accuracy of relaxed-energy prediction directly determines the reliability of machine-learning-driven catalyst screening. E(3)-equivariant graph neural networks (GNNs) can natively operate on three-dimensional atomic coordinates under periodic boundary conditions and have demonstrated strong performance on such tasks. In contrast, language-model-based approaches, while enabling human-readable textual descriptions and reducing reliance on explicit graph -- thereby broadening applicability -- remain insufficient in both adsorption-configuration energy prediction accuracy and in distinguishing ``the same system with different configurations,'' even with graph-assisted pretraining in the style of GAP-CATBERTa. To this end, we propose QE-Catalytic, a multimodal framework that deeply couples a large language model (\textbf{Q}wen) with an E(3)-equivariant graph Transformer (\textbf{E}quiformer-V2), enabling unified support for adsorption-configuration property prediction and inverse design on complex catalytic surfaces. During prediction, QE-Catalytic jointly leverages three-dimensional structures and structured configuration text, and injects ``3D geometric information'' into the language channel via graph-text alignment, allowing it to function as a high-performance text-based predictor when precise coordinates are unavailable, while also autoregressively generating CIF files for target-energy-driven structure design and information completion. On OC20, QE-Catalytic reduces the MAE of relaxed adsorption energy from 0.713~eV to 0.486~eV, and consistently outperforms baseline models such as CatBERTa and GAP-CATBERTa across multiple evaluation protocols. --- ### Adaptive Financial Sentiment Analysis for NIFTY 50 via Instruction-Tuned LLMs , RAG and Reinforcement Learning Approaches Authors: Chaithra, Kamesh Kadimisetty, Biju R Mohan Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20082v2 Financial sentiment analysis plays a crucial role in informing investment decisions, assessing market risk, and predicting stock price trends. Existing works in financial sentiment analysis have not considered the impact of stock prices or market feedback on sentiment analysis. In this paper, we propose an adaptive framework that integrates large language models (LLMs) with real-world stock market feedback to improve sentiment classification in the context of the Indian stock market. The proposed methodology fine-tunes the LLaMA 3.2 3B model using instruction-based learning on the SentiFin dataset. To enhance sentiment predictions, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline is employed that dynamically selects multi-source contextual information based on the cosine similarity of the sentence embeddings. Furthermore, a feedback-driven module is introduced that adjusts the reliability of the source by comparing predicted sentiment with actual next-day stock returns, allowing the system to iteratively adapt to market behavior. To generalize this adaptive mechanism across temporal data, a reinforcement learning agent trained using proximal policy optimization (PPO) is incorporated. The PPO agent learns to optimize source weighting policies based on cumulative reward signals from sentiment-return alignment. Experimental results on NIFTY 50 news headlines collected from 2024 to 2025 demonstrate that the proposed system significantly improves classification accuracy, F1-score, and market alignment over baseline models and static retrieval methods. The results validate the potential of combining instruction-tuned LLMs with dynamic feedback and reinforcement learning for robust, market-aware financial sentiment modeling. --- ### CBA: Communication-Bound-Aware Cross-Domain Resource Assignment for Pipeline-Parallel Distributed LLM Training in Dynamic Multi-DC Optical Networks Authors: Dianxuan Fu, Xiaomin Liu, Yihao Zhang, Shikui Shen, Weisheng Hu, Qunbi Zhuge Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.NI, cs.AI, physics.optics arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20080v1 We propose a communication-bound-aware cross-domain resource assignment framework for pipeline-parallel distributed training over multi-datacenter optical networks, which lowers iteration time by 31.25% and reduces 13.20% blocking requests compared to baselines. --- ### Reason2Decide: Rationale-Driven Multi-Task Learning Authors: H M Quamran Hasan, Housam Khalifa Bashier, Jiayi Dai, Mi-Young Kim, Randy Goebel Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20074v2 Despite the wide adoption of Large Language Models (LLM)s, clinical decision support systems face a critical challenge: achieving high predictive accuracy while generating explanations aligned with the predictions. Current approaches suffer from exposure bias leading to misaligned explanations. We propose Reason2Decide, a two-stage training framework that addresses key challenges in self-rationalization, including exposure bias and task separation. In Stage-1, our model is trained on rationale generation, while in Stage-2, we jointly train on label prediction and rationale generation, applying scheduled sampling to gradually transition from conditioning on gold labels to model predictions. We evaluate Reason2Decide on three medical datasets, including a proprietary triage dataset and public biomedical QA datasets. Across model sizes, Reason2Decide outperforms other fine-tuning baselines and some zero-shot LLMs in prediction (F1) and rationale fidelity (BERTScore, BLEU, LLM-as-a-Judge). In triage, Reason2Decide is rationale source-robust across LLM-generated, nurse-authored, and nurse-post-processed rationales. In our experiments, while using only LLM-generated rationales in Stage-1, Reason2Decide outperforms other fine-tuning variants. This indicates that LLM-generated rationales are suitable for pretraining models, reducing reliance on human annotations. Remarkably, Reason2Decide achieves these gains with models 40x smaller than contemporary foundation models, making clinical reasoning more accessible for resource-constrained deployments while still providing explainable decision support. --- ### Progressive Learned Image Compression for Machine Perception Authors: Jungwoo Kim, Jun-Hyuk Kim, Jong-Seok Lee Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.CV, eess.IV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20070v2 Recent advances in learned image codecs have extended from human perception toward machine perception However, progressive image compression with fine granular scalability (FGS)-which enables decoding a single bitstream at multiple quality levels-remains unexplored for machine-oriented codecs. In this work, we propose PICM-Net, a progressive learned image compression codec for machine perception built on trit-plane coding. Starting from a human-oriented codec, we adapt it for machine perception via a spatial-frequency modulation adapter (SFMA), a hyper-synthesis low-rank adapter (HSLoRA), and progressive decoding-aware training, and analyze how task-driven adaptation alters symbol prioritization for progressive transmission. To further support real-world deployment, we introduce an adaptive decoding controller that dynamically determines the necessary decoding level at inference time, requesting additional bits only when the current suitability is insufficient for the desired confidence level. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PICM-Net achieves efficient and adaptive progressive transmission while maintaining strong downstream classification performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/kjungwoo03/PICM-Net. --- ### PairFlow: Closed-Form Source-Target Coupling for Few-Step Generation in Discrete Flow Models Authors: Mingue Park, Jisung Hwang, Seungwoo Yoo, Kyeongmin Yeo, Minhyuk Sung Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20063v3 We introduce $\texttt{PairFlow}$, a lightweight preprocessing step for training Discrete Flow Models (DFMs) to achieve few-step sampling without requiring a pretrained teacher. DFMs have recently emerged as a new class of generative models for discrete data, offering strong performance. However, they suffer from slow sampling due to their iterative nature. Existing acceleration methods largely depend on finetuning, which introduces substantial additional training overhead. $\texttt{PairFlow}$ addresses this issue with a lightweight preprocessing step. Inspired by ReFlow and its extension to DFMs, we train DFMs from coupled samples of source and target distributions, without requiring any pretrained teacher. At the core of our approach is a closed-form inversion for DFMs, which allows efficient construction of paired source-target samples. Despite its extremely low cost, taking only up to 1.7% of the compute needed for full model training, $\texttt{PairFlow}$ matches or even surpasses the performance of two-stage training involving finetuning. Furthermore, models trained with our framework provide stronger base models for subsequent distillation, yielding further acceleration after finetuning. Experiments on molecular data as well as binary and RGB images demonstrate the broad applicability and effectiveness of our approach. --- ### On the Effectiveness of Instruction-Tuning Local LLMs for Identifying Software Vulnerabilities Authors: Sangryu Park, Gihyuk Ko, Homook Cho Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20062v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) show significant promise in automating software vulnerability analysis, a critical task given the impact of security failure of modern software systems. However, current approaches in using LLMs to automate vulnerability analysis mostly rely on using online API-based LLM services, requiring the user to disclose the source code in development. Moreover, they predominantly frame the task as a binary classification(vulnerable or not vulnerable), limiting potential practical utility. This paper addresses these limitations by reformulating the problem as Software Vulnerability Identification (SVI), where LLMs are asked to output the type of weakness in Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) IDs rather than simply indicating the presence or absence of a vulnerability. We also tackle the reliance on large, API-based LLMs by demonstrating that instruction-tuning smaller, locally deployable LLMs can achieve superior identification performance. In our analysis, instruct-tuning a local LLM showed better overall performance and cost trade-off than online API-based LLMs. Our findings indicate that instruct-tuned local models represent a more effective, secure, and practical approach for leveraging LLMs in real-world vulnerability management workflows. --- ### Scaling Reinforcement Learning for Content Moderation with Large Language Models Authors: Hamed Firooz, Rui Liu, Yuchen Lu, Zhenyu Hou, Fangzhou Xiong, Xiaoyang Zhang, Changshu Jian, Zhicheng Zhu, Jiayuan Ma, Jacob Tao, Chaitali Gupta, Xiaochang Peng et al. Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20061v1 Content moderation at scale remains one of the most pressing challenges in today's digital ecosystem, where billions of user- and AI-generated artifacts must be continuously evaluated for policy violations. Although recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong potential for policy-grounded moderation, the practical challenges of training these systems to achieve expert-level accuracy in real-world settings remain largely unexplored, particularly in regimes characterized by label sparsity, evolving policy definitions, and the need for nuanced reasoning beyond shallow pattern matching. In this work, we present a comprehensive empirical investigation of scaling reinforcement learning (RL) for content classification, systematically evaluating multiple RL training recipes and reward-shaping strategies-including verifiable rewards and LLM-as-judge frameworks-to transform general-purpose language models into specialized, policy-aligned classifiers across three real-world content moderation tasks. Our findings provide actionable insights for industrial-scale moderation systems, demonstrating that RL exhibits sigmoid-like scaling behavior in which performance improves smoothly with increased training data, rollouts, and optimization steps before gradually saturating. Moreover, we show that RL substantially improves performance on tasks requiring complex policy-grounded reasoning while achieving up to 100x higher data efficiency than supervised fine-tuning, making it particularly effective in domains where expert annotations are scarce or costly. --- ### DS-HGCN: A Dual-Stream Hypergraph Convolutional Network for Predicting Student Engagement via Social Contagion Authors: Ziyang Fan, Li Tao, Yi Wang, Jingwei Qu, Ying Wang, Fei Jiang Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.MM, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20059v1 Student engagement is a critical factor influencing academic success and learning outcomes. Accurately predicting student engagement is essential for optimizing teaching strategies and providing personalized interventions. However, most approaches focus on single-dimensional feature analysis and assessing engagement based on individual student factors. In this work, we propose a dual-stream multi-feature fusion model based on hypergraph convolutional networks (DS-HGCN), incorporating social contagion of student engagement. DS-HGCN enables accurate prediction of student engagement states by modeling multi-dimensional features and their propagation mechanisms between students. The framework constructs a hypergraph structure to encode engagement contagion among students and captures the emotional and behavioral differences and commonalities by multi-frequency signals. Furthermore, we introduce a hypergraph attention mechanism to dynamically weigh the influence of each student, accounting for individual differences in the propagation process. Extensive experiments on public benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves superior performance and significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches. --- ### Deep Eigenspace Network for Parametric Non-self-adjoint Eigenvalue Problems Authors: H. Li, J. Sun, Z. Zhang Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: math.NA, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20058v2 We consider operator learning for efficiently solving parametric non-self-adjoint eigenvalue problems. To overcome the spectral instability and mode switching associated with non-self-adjoint operators, we choose to learn the eigenspace rather than individual eigenfunctions. In particular, we propose a Deep Eigenspace Network (DEN) architecture integrating Fourier Neural Operators, geometry-adaptive POD bases, and explicit banded cross-mode mixing mechanism to capture complex spectral dependencies. We apply DEN to the non-self-adjoint Steklov eigenvalue problem and prove the Lipschitz continuity of the eigenspace with respect to the parameter. Furthermore, we derive error bounds for the eigenvalues. Numerical experiments validate that DEN is highly effective and efficient. --- ### Structure-Preserving Nonlinear Sufficient Dimension Reduction for Tensors Authors: Dianjun Lin, Bing Li, Lingzhou Xue Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: math.ST, stat.ME, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20057v1 We introduce two nonlinear sufficient dimension reduction methods for regressions with tensor-valued predictors. Our goal is two-fold: the first is to preserve the tensor structure when performing dimension reduction, particularly the meaning of the tensor modes, for improved interpretation; the second is to substantially reduce the number of parameters in dimension reduction, thereby achieving model parsimony and enhancing estimation accuracy. Our two tensor dimension reduction methods echo the two commonly used tensor decomposition mechanisms: one is the Tucker decomposition, which reduces a larger tensor to a smaller one; the other is the CP-decomposition, which represents an arbitrary tensor as a sequence of rank-one tensors. We developed the Fisher consistency of our methods at the population level and established their consistency and convergence rates. Both methods are easy to implement numerically: the Tucker-form can be implemented through a sequence of least-squares steps, and the CP-form can be implemented through a sequence of singular value decompositions. We investigated the finite-sample performance of our methods and showed substantial improvement in accuracy over existing methods in simulations and two data applications. --- ### Towards Generative Location Awareness for Disaster Response: A Probabilistic Cross-view Geolocalization Approach Authors: Hao Li, Fabian Deuser, Wenping Yin, Steffen Knoblauch, Wufan Zhao, Filip Biljecki, Yong Xue, Wei Huang Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20056v2 As Earth's climate changes, it is impacting disasters and extreme weather events across the planet. Record-breaking heat waves, drenching rainfalls, extreme wildfires, and widespread flooding during hurricanes are all becoming more frequent and more intense. Rapid and efficient response to disaster events is essential for climate resilience and sustainability. A key challenge in disaster response is to accurately and quickly identify disaster locations to support decision-making and resources allocation. In this paper, we propose a Probabilistic Cross-view Geolocalization approach, called ProbGLC, exploring new pathways towards generative location awareness for rapid disaster response. Herein, we combine probabilistic and deterministic geolocalization models into a unified framework to simultaneously enhance model explainability (via uncertainty quantification) and achieve state-of-the-art geolocalization performance. Designed for rapid diaster response, the ProbGLC is able to address cross-view geolocalization across multiple disaster events as well as to offer unique features of probabilistic distribution and localizability score. To evaluate the ProbGLC, we conduct extensive experiments on two cross-view disaster datasets (i.e., MultiIAN and SAGAINDisaster), consisting diverse cross-view imagery pairs of multiple disaster types (e.g., hurricanes, wildfires, floods, to tornadoes). Preliminary results confirms the superior geolocalization accuracy (i.e., 0.86 in Acc@1km and 0.97 in Acc@25km) and model explainability (i.e., via probabilistic distributions and localizability scores) of the proposed ProbGLC approach, highlighting the great potential of leveraging generative cross-view approach to facilitate location awareness for better and faster disaster response. The data and code is publicly available at https://github.com/bobleegogogo/ProbGLC --- ### An Optimal Policy for Learning Controllable Dynamics by Exploration Authors: Peter N. Loxley Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20053v1 Controllable Markov chains describe the dynamics of sequential decision making tasks and are the central component in optimal control and reinforcement learning. In this work, we give the general form of an optimal policy for learning controllable dynamics in an unknown environment by exploring over a limited time horizon. This policy is simple to implement and efficient to compute, and allows an agent to ``learn by exploring" as it maximizes its information gain in a greedy fashion by selecting controls from a constraint set that changes over time during exploration. We give a simple parameterization for the set of controls, and present an algorithm for finding an optimal policy. The reason for this policy is due to the existence of certain types of states that restrict control of the dynamics; such as transient states, absorbing states, and non-backtracking states. We show why the occurrence of these states makes a non-stationary policy essential for achieving optimal exploration. Six interesting examples of controllable dynamics are treated in detail. Policy optimality is demonstrated using counting arguments, comparing with suboptimal policies, and by making use of a sequential improvement property from dynamic programming. --- ### Learning Skills from Action-Free Videos Authors: Hung-Chieh Fang, Kuo-Han Hung, Chu-Rong Chen, Po-Jung Chou, Chun-Kai Yang, Po-Chen Ko, Yu-Chiang Wang, Yueh-Hua Wu, Min-Hung Chen, Shao-Hua Sun Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.AI, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20052v1 Learning from videos offers a promising path toward generalist robots by providing rich visual and temporal priors beyond what real robot datasets contain. While existing video generative models produce impressive visual predictions, they are difficult to translate into low-level actions. Conversely, latent-action models better align videos with actions, but they typically operate at the single-step level and lack high-level planning capabilities. We bridge this gap by introducing Skill Abstraction from Optical Flow (SOF), a framework that learns latent skills from large collections of action-free videos. Our key idea is to learn a latent skill space through an intermediate representation based on optical flow that captures motion information aligned with both video dynamics and robot actions. By learning skills in this flow-based latent space, SOF enables high-level planning over video-derived skills and allows for easier translation of these skills into actions. Experiments show that our approach consistently improves performance in both multitask and long-horizon settings, demonstrating the ability to acquire and compose skills directly from raw visual data. --- ### Generative Bayesian Hyperparameter Tuning Authors: Hedibert Lopes, Nick Polson, Vadim Sokolov Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: stat.ML, stat.CO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20051v1 \noindent Hyper-parameter selection is a central practical problem in modern machine learning, governing regularization strength, model capacity, and robustness choices. Cross-validation is often computationally prohibitive at scale, while fully Bayesian hyper-parameter learning can be difficult due to the cost of posterior sampling. We develop a generative perspective on hyper-parameter tuning that combines two ideas: (i) optimization-based approximations to Bayesian posteriors via randomized, weighted objectives (weighted Bayesian bootstrap), and (ii) amortization of repeated optimization across many hyper-parameter settings by learning a transport map from hyper-parameters (including random weights) to the corresponding optimizer. This yields a ``generator look-up table'' for estimators, enabling rapid evaluation over grids or continuous ranges of hyper-parameters and supporting both predictive tuning objectives and approximate Bayesian uncertainty quantification. We connect this viewpoint to weighted $M$-estimation, envelope/auxiliary-variable representations that reduce non-quadratic losses to weighted least squares, and recent generative samplers for weighted $M$-estimators. --- ### Self-motion as a structural prior for coherent and robust formation of cognitive maps Authors: Yingchao Yu, Pengfei Sun, Yaochu Jin, Kuangrong Hao, Hao Zhang, Yifeng Zhang, Wenxuan Pan, Wei Chen, Danyal Akarca, Yuchen Xiao Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: q-bio.NC, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20044v1 Most computational accounts of cognitive maps assume that stability is achieved primarily through sensory anchoring, with self-motion contributing to incremental positional updates only. However, biological spatial representations often remain coherent even when sensory cues degrade or conflict, suggesting that self-motion may play a deeper organizational role. Here, we show that self-motion can act as a structural prior that actively organizes the geometry of learned cognitive maps. We embed a path-integration-based motion prior in a predictive-coding framework, implemented using a capacity-efficient, brain-inspired recurrent mechanism combining spiking dynamics, analog modulation and adaptive thresholds. Across highly aliased, dynamically changing and naturalistic environments, this structural prior consistently stabilizes map formation, improving local topological fidelity, global positional accuracy and next-step prediction under sensory ambiguity. Mechanistic analyses reveal that the motion prior itself encodes geometrically precise trajectories under tight constraints of internal states and generalizes zero-shot to unseen environments, outperforming simpler motion-based constraints. Finally, deployment on a quadrupedal robot demonstrates that motion-derived structural priors enhance online landmark-based navigation under real-world sensory variability. Together, these results reframe self-motion as an organizing scaffold for coherent spatial representations, showing how brain-inspired principles can systematically strengthen spatial intelligence in embodied artificial agents. --- ### Discovering Symmetry Groups with Flow Matching Authors: Yuxuan Chen, Jung Yeon Park, Floor Eijkelboom, Jianke Yang, Jan-Willem van de Meent, Lawson L. S. Wong, Robin Walters Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20043v3 Symmetry is fundamental to understanding physical systems and can improve performance and sample efficiency in machine learning. Both pursuits require knowledge of the underlying symmetries in data, yet discovering these symmetries automatically is challenging. We propose LieFlow, a novel framework that reframes symmetry discovery as a distribution learning problem on Lie groups. Instead of searching for the symmetry generators, our approach operates directly in group space, modeling a symmetry distribution over a large hypothesis group $G$. The support of the learned distribution reveals the underlying symmetry group $H \subseteq G$. Unlike previous works, LieFlow can discover both continuous and discrete symmetries within a unified framework, without assuming a fixed Lie algebra basis or a specific distribution over the group elements. Experiments on synthetic 2D and 3D point clouds, ModelNet10 and a real-world MI-Motion dataset show that LieFlow accurately discovers continuous and discrete subgroups, significantly outperforming a state-of-the-art baseline, LieGAN, in identifying discrete symmetries. --- ### Beyond Vision: Contextually Enriched Image Captioning with Multi-Modal Retrieval Authors: Nguyen Lam Phu Quy, Pham Phu Hoa, Tran Chi Nguyen, Dao Sy Duy Minh, Nguyen Hoang Minh Ngoc, Huynh Trung Kiet Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20042v2 Real-world image captions often lack contextual depth, omitting crucial details such as event background, temporal cues, outcomes, and named entities that are not visually discernible. This gap limits the effectiveness of image understanding in domains like journalism, education, and digital archives, where richer, more informative descriptions are essential. To address this, we propose a multimodal pipeline that augments visual input with external textual knowledge. Our system retrieves semantically similar images using BEIT-3 (Flickr30k-384 and COCO-384) and SigLIP So-384, reranks them using ORB and SIFT for geometric alignment, and extracts contextual information from related articles via semantic search. A fine-tuned Qwen3 model with QLoRA then integrates this context with base captions generated by Instruct BLIP (Vicuna-7B) to produce event-enriched, context-aware descriptions. Evaluated on the OpenEvents v1 dataset, our approach generates significantly more informative captions compared to traditional methods, showing strong potential for real-world applications requiring deeper visual-textual understanding --- ### Optimal Anytime-Valid Tests for Composite Nulls Authors: Shubhanshu Shekhar Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: math.ST, cs.IT, cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20039v1 We consider the problem of designing optimal level-$α$ power-one tests for composite nulls. Given a parameter $α\in (0,1)$ and a stream of $\mathcal{X}$-valued observations $\{X_n: n \geq 1\} \overset{i.i.d.}{\sim} P$, the goal is to design a level-$α$ power-one test $τ_α$ for the null $H_0: P \in \mathcal{P}_0 \subset \mathcal{P}(\mathcal{X})$. Prior works have shown that any such $τ_α$ must satisfy $\mathbb{E}_P(τ_α) \geq \tfrac{\log(1/α)}{γ^*(P, \mathcal{P}_0)}$, where $γ^*(P, \mathcal{P}_0)$ is the so-called $\mathrm{KL}_{\inf}$ or minimum divergence of $P$ to the null class. In this paper, our objective is to develop and analyze constructive schemes that match this lower bound as $α\downarrow 0$. We first consider the finite-alphabet case~($|\mathcal{X}| = m < \infty$), and show that a test based on \emph{universal} $e$-process~(formed by the ratio of a universal predictor and the running null MLE) is optimal in the above sense. The proof relies on a Donsker-Varadhan~(DV) based saddle-point representation of $\mathrm{KL}_{\inf}$, and an application of Sion's minimax theorem. This characterization motivates a general method for arbitrary $\mathcal{X}$: construct an $e$-process based on the empirical solutions to the saddle-point representation over a sufficiently rich class of test functions. We give sufficient conditions for the optimality of this test for compact convex nulls, and verify them for Hölder smooth density models. We end the paper with a discussion on the computational aspects of implementing our proposed tests in some practical settings. --- ### FlashLips: 100-FPS Mask-Free Latent Lip-Sync using Reconstruction Instead of Diffusion or GANs Authors: Andreas Zinonos, Michał Stypułkowski, Antoni Bigata, Stavros Petridis, Maja Pantic, Nikita Drobyshev Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20033v3 We present FlashLips, a two-stage, mask-free lip-sync system that decouples lips control from rendering and achieves real-time performance, with our U-Net variant running at over 100 FPS on a single GPU, while matching the visual quality of larger state-of-the-art models. Stage 1 is a compact, one-step latent-space editor that reconstructs an image using a reference identity, a masked target frame, and a low-dimensional lips-pose vector, trained purely with reconstruction losses - no GANs or diffusion. To remove explicit masks at inference, we use self-supervision via mouth-altered target variants as pseudo ground truth, teaching the network to localize lip edits while preserving the rest. Stage 2 is an audio-to-pose transformer trained with a flow-matching objective to predict lips-pose vectors from speech. Together, these stages form a simple and stable pipeline that combines deterministic reconstruction with robust audio control, delivering high perceptual quality and faster-than-real-time speed. --- ### VALLR-Pin: Uncertainty-Factorized Visual Speech Recognition for Mandarin with Pinyin Guidance Authors: Chang Sun, Dongliang Xie, Wanpeng Xie, Bo Qin, Hong Yang Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20032v2 Visual speech recognition (VSR) aims to transcribe spoken content from silent lip-motion videos and is particularly challenging in Mandarin due to severe viseme ambiguity and pervasive homophones. We propose VALLR-Pin, a two-stage Mandarin VSR framework that extends the VALLR architecture by explicitly incorporating Pinyin as an intermediate representation. In the first stage, a shared visual encoder feeds dual decoders that jointly predict Mandarin characters and their corresponding Pinyin sequences, encouraging more robust visual-linguistic representations. In the second stage, an LLM-based refinement module takes the predicted Pinyin sequence together with an N-best list of character hypotheses to resolve homophone-induced ambiguities. To further adapt the LLM to visual recognition errors, we fine-tune it on synthetic instruction data constructed from model-generated Pinyin-text pairs, enabling error-aware correction. Experiments on public Mandarin VSR benchmarks demonstrate that VALLR-Pin consistently improves transcription accuracy under multi-speaker conditions, highlighting the effectiveness of combining phonetic guidance with lightweight LLM refinement. --- ### $\text{H}^2$em: Learning Hierarchical Hyperbolic Embeddings for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning Authors: Lin Li, Jiahui Li, Jiaming Lei, Jun Xiao, Feifei Shao, Long Chen Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20029v1 Compositional zero-shot learning (CZSL) aims to recognize unseen state-object compositions by generalizing from a training set of their primitives (state and object). Current methods often overlook the rich hierarchical structures, such as the semantic hierarchy of primitives (e.g., apple fruit) and the conceptual hierarchy between primitives and compositions (e.g, sliced apple apple). A few recent efforts have shown effectiveness in modeling these hierarchies through loss regularization within Euclidean space. In this paper, we argue that they fail to scale to the large-scale taxonomies required for real-world CZSL: the space's polynomial volume growth in flat geometry cannot match the exponential structure, impairing generalization capacity. To this end, we propose H2em, a new framework that learns Hierarchical Hyperbolic EMbeddings for CZSL. H2em leverages the unique properties of hyperbolic geometry, a space naturally suited for embedding tree-like structures with low distortion. However, a naive hyperbolic mapping may suffer from hierarchical collapse and poor fine-grained discrimination. We further design two learning objectives to structure this space: a Dual-Hierarchical Entailment Loss that uses hyperbolic entailment cones to enforce the predefined hierarchies, and a Discriminative Alignment Loss with hard negative mining to establish a large geodesic distance between semantically similar compositions. Furthermore, we devise Hyperbolic Cross-Modal Attention to realize instance-aware cross-modal infusion within hyperbolic geometry. Extensive ablations on three benchmarks demonstrate that H2em establishes a new state-of-the-art in both closed-world and open-world scenarios. Our codes will be released. --- ### DecoKAN: Interpretable Decomposition for Forecasting Cryptocurrency Market Dynamics Authors: Yuan Gao, Zhenguo Dong, Xuelong Wang, Zhiqiang Wang, Yong Zhang, Shaofan Wang Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20028v1 Accurate and interpretable forecasting of multivariate time series is crucial for understanding the complex dynamics of cryptocurrency markets in digital asset systems. Advanced deep learning methodologies, particularly Transformer-based and MLP-based architectures, have achieved competitive predictive performance in cryptocurrency forecasting tasks. However, cryptocurrency data is inherently composed of long-term socio-economic trends and local high-frequency speculative oscillations. Existing deep learning-based 'black-box' models fail to effectively decouple these composite dynamics or provide the interpretability needed for trustworthy financial decision-making. To overcome these limitations, we propose DecoKAN, an interpretable forecasting framework that integrates multi-level Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) for decoupling and hierarchical signal decomposition with Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) mixers for transparent and interpretable nonlinear modeling. The DWT component decomposes complex cryptocurrency time series into distinct frequency components, enabling frequency-specific analysis, while KAN mixers provide intrinsically interpretable spline-based mappings within each decomposed subseries. Furthermore, interpretability is enhanced through a symbolic analysis pipeline involving sparsification, pruning, and symbolization, which produces concise analytical expressions offering symbolic representations of the learned patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DecoKAN achieves the lowest average Mean Squared Error on all tested real-world cryptocurrency datasets (BTC, ETH, XMR), consistently outperforming a comprehensive suite of competitive state-of-the-art baselines. These results validate DecoKAN's potential to bridge the gap between predictive accuracy and model transparency, advancing trustworthy decision support within complex cryptocurrency markets. --- ### MAPI-GNN: Multi-Activation Plane Interaction Graph Neural Network for Multimodal Medical Diagnosis Authors: Ziwei Qin, Xuhui Song, Deqing Huang, Na Qin, Jun Li Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20026v1 Graph neural networks are increasingly applied to multimodal medical diagnosis for their inherent relational modeling capabilities. However, their efficacy is often compromised by the prevailing reliance on a single, static graph built from indiscriminate features, hindering the ability to model patient-specific pathological relationships. To this end, the proposed Multi-Activation Plane Interaction Graph Neural Network (MAPI-GNN) reconstructs this single-graph paradigm by learning a multifaceted graph profile from semantically disentangled feature subspaces. The framework first uncovers latent graph-aware patterns via a multi-dimensional discriminator; these patterns then guide the dynamic construction of a stack of activation graphs; and this multifaceted profile is finally aggregated and contextualized by a relational fusion engine for a robust diagnosis. Extensive experiments on two diverse tasks, comprising over 1300 patient samples, demonstrate that MAPI-GNN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. --- ### A Contextual Analysis of Driver-Facing and Dual-View Video Inputs for Distraction Detection in Naturalistic Driving Environments Authors: Anthony Dontoh, Stephanie Ivey, Armstrong Aboah Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20025v1 Despite increasing interest in computer vision-based distracted driving detection, most existing models rely exclusively on driver-facing views and overlook crucial environmental context that influences driving behavior. This study investigates whether incorporating road-facing views alongside driver-facing footage improves distraction detection accuracy in naturalistic driving conditions. Using synchronized dual-camera recordings from real-world driving, we benchmark three leading spatiotemporal action recognition architectures: SlowFast-R50, X3D-M, and SlowOnly-R50. Each model is evaluated under two input configurations: driver-only and stacked dual-view. Results show that while contextual inputs can improve detection in certain models, performance gains depend strongly on the underlying architecture. The single-pathway SlowOnly model achieved a 9.8 percent improvement with dual-view inputs, while the dual-pathway SlowFast model experienced a 7.2 percent drop in accuracy due to representational conflicts. These findings suggest that simply adding visual context is not sufficient and may lead to interference unless the architecture is specifically designed to support multi-view integration. This study presents one of the first systematic comparisons of single- and dual-view distraction detection models using naturalistic driving data and underscores the importance of fusion-aware design for future multimodal driver monitoring systems. --- ### Gaussian Process Assisted Meta-learning for Image Classification and Object Detection Models Authors: Anna R. Flowers, Christopher T. Franck, Robert B. Gramacy, Justin A. Krometis Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20021v1 Collecting operationally realistic data to inform machine learning models can be costly. Before collecting new data, it is helpful to understand where a model is deficient. For example, object detectors trained on images of rare objects may not be good at identification in poorly represented conditions. We offer a way of informing subsequent data acquisition to maximize model performance by leveraging the toolkit of computer experiments and metadata describing the circumstances under which the training data was collected (e.g., season, time of day, location). We do this by evaluating the learner as the training data is varied according to its metadata. A Gaussian process (GP) surrogate fit to that response surface can inform new data acquisitions. This meta-learning approach offers improvements to learner performance as compared to data with randomly selected metadata, which we illustrate on both classic learning examples, and on a motivating application involving the collection of aerial images in search of airplanes. --- ### Bring My Cup! Personalizing Vision-Language-Action Models with Visual Attentive Prompting Authors: Sangoh Lee, Sangwoo Mo, Wook-Shin Han Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20014v3 While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models generalize well to generic instructions, they struggle with personalized commands such as "bring my cup," where the robot must act on one specific instance among visually similar objects. We study this setting of manipulating personal objects, in which a VLA must identify and control a user-specific object unseen during training using only a few reference images. To address this challenge, we propose Visual Attentive Prompting (VAP), a simple-yet-effective training-free perceptual adapter that equips frozen VLAs with top-down selective attention. VAP treats the reference images as a non-parametric visual memory, grounds the personal object in the scene through open-vocabulary detection and embedding-based matching, and then injects this grounding as a visual prompt by highlighting the object and rewriting the instruction. We construct two simulation benchmarks, Personalized-SIMPLER and Personalized-VLABench, and a real-world tabletop benchmark to evaluate personalized manipulation across multiple robots and tasks. Experiments show that VAP consistently outperforms generic policies and token-learning baselines in both success rate and correct-object manipulation, helping to bridge the gap between semantic understanding and instance-level control. --- ### SegEarth-R2: Towards Comprehensive Language-guided Segmentation for Remote Sensing Images Authors: Zepeng Xin, Kaiyu Li, Luodi Chen, Wanchen Li, Yuchen Xiao, Hui Qiao, Weizhan Zhang, Deyu Meng, Xiangyong Cao Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20013v1 Effectively grounding complex language to pixels in remote sensing (RS) images is a critical challenge for applications like disaster response and environmental monitoring. Current models can parse simple, single-target commands but fail when presented with complex geospatial scenarios, e.g., segmenting objects at various granularities, executing multi-target instructions, and interpreting implicit user intent. To drive progress against these failures, we present LaSeRS, the first large-scale dataset built for comprehensive training and evaluation across four critical dimensions of language-guided segmentation: hierarchical granularity, target multiplicity, reasoning requirements, and linguistic variability. By capturing these dimensions, LaSeRS moves beyond simple commands, providing a benchmark for complex geospatial reasoning. This addresses a critical gap: existing datasets oversimplify, leading to sensitivity-prone real-world models. We also propose SegEarth-R2, an MLLM architecture designed for comprehensive language-guided segmentation in RS, which directly confronts these challenges. The model's effectiveness stems from two key improvements: (1) a spatial attention supervision mechanism specifically handles the localization of small objects and their components, and (2) a flexible and efficient segmentation query mechanism that handles both single-target and multi-target scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that our SegEarth-R2 achieves outstanding performance on LaSeRS and other benchmarks, establishing a powerful baseline for the next generation of geospatial segmentation. All data and code will be released at https://github.com/earth-insights/SegEarth-R2. --- ### Reliable LLM-Based Edge-Cloud-Expert Cascades for Telecom Knowledge Systems Authors: Qiushuo Hou, Sangwoo Park, Matteo Zecchin, Yunlong Cai, Guanding Yu, Osvaldo Simeone, Tommaso Melodia Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: eess.SP, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20012v2 Large language models (LLMs) are emerging as key enablers of automation in domains such as telecommunications, assisting with tasks including troubleshooting, standards interpretation, and network optimization. However, their deployment in practice must balance inference cost, latency, and reliability. In this work, we study an edge-cloud-expert cascaded LLM-based knowledge system that supports decision-making through a question-and-answer pipeline. In it, an efficient edge model handles routine queries, a more capable cloud model addresses complex cases, and human experts are involved only when necessary. We define a misalignment-cost constrained optimization problem, aiming to minimize average processing cost, while guaranteeing alignment of automated answers with expert judgments. We propose a statistically rigorous threshold selection method based on multiple hypothesis testing (MHT) for a query processing mechanism based on knowledge and confidence tests. The approach provides finite-sample guarantees on misalignment risk. Experiments on the TeleQnA dataset -- a telecom-specific benchmark -- demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior cost-efficiency compared to conventional cascaded baselines, while ensuring reliability at prescribed confidence levels. --- ### PaveSync: A Unified and Comprehensive Dataset for Pavement Distress Analysis and Classification Authors: Blessing Agyei Kyem, Joshua Kofi Asamoah, Anthony Dontoh, Andrews Danyo, Eugene Denteh, Armstrong Aboah Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20011v1 Automated pavement defect detection often struggles to generalize across diverse real-world conditions due to the lack of standardized datasets. Existing datasets differ in annotation styles, distress type definitions, and formats, limiting their integration for unified training. To address this gap, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark dataset that consolidates multiple publicly available sources into a standardized collection of 52747 images from seven countries, with 135277 bounding box annotations covering 13 distinct distress types. The dataset captures broad real-world variation in image quality, resolution, viewing angles, and weather conditions, offering a unique resource for consistent training and evaluation. Its effectiveness was demonstrated through benchmarking with state-of-the-art object detection models including YOLOv8-YOLOv12, Faster R-CNN, and DETR, which achieved competitive performance across diverse scenarios. By standardizing class definitions and annotation formats, this dataset provides the first globally representative benchmark for pavement defect detection and enables fair comparison of models, including zero-shot transfer to new environments. --- ### Computationally efficient goodness-of-fit tests through kernelized Stein discrepancy Authors: Zhihan Huang, Ziang Niu Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20007v3 Models with intractable normalizing constants are widely used in statistics and machine learning. Assessing the adequacy of such models poses significant challenges: obtaining samples from the fitted model often requires sophisticated sampling algorithms. Moreover, model fitting sometimes requires iterative numerical optimization, making bootstrap procedures that require repeated refitting computationally expensive. In this paper, we leverage the kernel-based testing framework to develop a general semiparametric goodness-of-fit test based on the kernelized Stein discrepancy. We establish the consistency and the asymptotic null distribution of the test statistic under general nuisance estimation. To produce a level-$α$ test, we propose a novel influence-adjusted wild bootstrap that requires neither refitting the model nor sampling from it. We prove the consistency of the proposed bootstrap test procedure under the null and the alternative, and characterize its limiting power under contiguous local alternatives. Across simulations ranging from classical normality testing to models with intractable likelihoods, the proposed test delivers competitive or superior power at a computational cost orders of magnitude lower than that of existing approaches. We illustrate the method by assessing the adequacy of a protein signaling network model for reverse-phase protein array data from lung adenocarcinoma tumors. As a complementary insight, we show that the SKSD test can be regarded as a nonparametric score test under exponentially tilted models, connecting score-based and distance-based goodness-of-fit testing. --- ### Orthogonal Activation with Implicit Group-Aware Bias Learning for Class Imbalance Authors: Sukumar Kishanthan, Asela Hevapathige Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20006v1 Class imbalance is a common challenge in machine learning and data mining, often leading to suboptimal performance in classifiers. While deep learning excels in feature extraction, its performance still deteriorates under imbalanced data. In this work, we propose a novel activation function, named OGAB, designed to alleviate class imbalance in deep learning classifiers. OGAB incorporates orthogonality and group-aware bias learning to enhance feature distinguishability in imbalanced scenarios without explicitly requiring label information. Our key insight is that activation functions can be used to introduce strong inductive biases that can address complex data challenges beyond traditional non-linearity. Our work demonstrates that orthogonal transformations can preserve information about minority classes by maintaining feature independence, thereby preventing the dominance of majority classes in the embedding space. Further, the proposed group-aware bias mechanism automatically identifies data clusters and adjusts embeddings to enhance class separability without the need for explicit supervision. Unlike existing approaches that address class imbalance through preprocessing data modifications or post-processing corrections, our proposed approach tackles class imbalance during the training phase at the embedding learning level, enabling direct integration with the learning process. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution on both real-world and synthetic imbalanced datasets, showing consistent performance improvements over both traditional and learnable activation functions. --- ### IoT-based Android Malware Detection Using Graph Neural Network With Adversarial Defense Authors: Rahul Yumlembam, Biju Issac, Seibu Mary Jacob, Longzhi Yang Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20004v1 Since the Internet of Things (IoT) is widely adopted using Android applications, detecting malicious Android apps is essential. In recent years, Android graph-based deep learning research has proposed many approaches to extract relationships from applications as graphs to generate graph embeddings. First, we demonstrate the effectiveness of graph-based classification using a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based classifier to generate API graph embeddings. The graph embeddings are combined with Permission and Intent features to train multiple machine learning and deep learning models for Android malware detection. The proposed classification approach achieves an accuracy of 98.33 percent on the CICMaldroid dataset and 98.68 percent on the Drebin dataset. However, graph-based deep learning models are vulnerable, as attackers can add fake relationships to evade detection by the classifier. Second, we propose a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based attack algorithm named VGAE-MalGAN targeting graph-based GNN Android malware classifiers. The VGAE-MalGAN generator produces adversarial malware API graphs, while the VGAE-MalGAN substitute detector attempts to mimic the target detector. Experimental results show that VGAE-MalGAN can significantly reduce the detection rate of GNN-based malware classifiers. Although the model initially fails to detect adversarial malware, retraining with generated adversarial samples improves robustness and helps mitigate adversarial attacks. --- ### Control Variate Score Matching for Diffusion Models Authors: Khaled Kahouli, Romuald Elie, Klaus-Robert Müller, Quentin Berthet, Oliver T. Unke, Arnaud Doucet Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20003v2 Sampling from unnormalized probability densities is a pervasive challenge across the computational and physical sciences. Diffusion models provide a powerful generative framework for this task, but their success relies on accurately estimating the score of the perturbed target distribution. Current approaches face a dichotomy between two standard estimation methods: the Denoising Score Identity (DSI) requires data samples and exhibits high variance at low noise levels, whereas the Target Score Identity (TSI) relies on the energy function and suffers from diverging variance at high noise levels. In this work, we reconcile both approaches by introducing the Control Variate Score Identity (CVSI), an unbiased estimator with an analytically optimal, state- and time-dependent control coefficient that theoretically minimizes variance over the entire diffusion process. CVSI serves as a robust plug-in estimator that significantly enhances performance and efficiency in data-free sampler learning and training-free diffusion sampling. These gains scale to complex, high-dimensional energy-based models. --- ### LoFT-LLM: Low-Frequency Time-Series Forecasting with Large Language Models Authors: Jiacheng You, Jingcheng Yang, Yuhang Xie, Zhongxuan Wu, Xiucheng Li, Feng Li, Pengjie Wang, Jian Xu, Bo Zheng, Xinyang Chen Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20002v3 Time-series forecasting in real-world applications such as finance and energy often faces challenges due to limited training data and complex, noisy temporal dynamics. Existing deep forecasting models typically supervise predictions using full-length temporal windows, which include substantial high-frequency noise and obscure long-term trends. Moreover, auxiliary variables containing rich domain-specific information are often underutilized, especially in few-shot settings. To address these challenges, we propose LoFT-LLM, a frequency-aware forecasting pipeline that integrates low-frequency learning with semantic calibration via a large language model (LLM). Firstly, a Patch Low-Frequency forecasting Module (PLFM) extracts stable low-frequency trends from localized spectral patches. Secondly, a residual learner then models high-frequency variations. Finally, a fine-tuned LLM refines the predictions by incorporating auxiliary context and domain knowledge through structured natural language prompts. Extensive experiments on financial and energy datasets demonstrate that LoFT-LLM significantly outperforms strong baselines under both full-data and few-shot regimes, delivering superior accuracy, robustness, and interpretability. --- ### Few-Shot-Based Modular Image-to-Video Adapter for Diffusion Models Authors: Zhenhao Li, Shaohan Yi, Zheng Liu, Leonartinus Gao, Minh Ngoc Le, Ambrose Ling, Zhuoran Wang, Md Amirul Islam, Zhixiang Chi, Yuanhao Yu Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20000v2 Diffusion models (DMs) have recently achieved impressive photorealism in image and video generation. However, their application to image animation remains limited, even when trained on large-scale datasets. Two primary challenges contribute to this: the high dimensionality of video signals leads to a scarcity of training data, causing DMs to favor memorization over prompt compliance when generating motion; moreover, DMs struggle to generalize to novel motion patterns not present in the training set, and fine-tuning them to learn such patterns, especially using limited training data, is still under-explored. To address these limitations, we propose Modular Image-to-Video Adapter (MIVA), a lightweight sub-network attachable to a pre-trained DM, each designed to capture a single motion pattern and scalable via parallelization. MIVAs can be efficiently trained on approximately ten samples using a single consumer-grade GPU. At inference time, users can specify motion by selecting one or multiple MIVAs, eliminating the need for prompt engineering. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MIVA enables more precise motion control while maintaining, or even surpassing, the generation quality of models trained on significantly larger datasets. --- ### Schoenfeld's Anatomy of Mathematical Reasoning by Language Models Authors: Ming Li, Chenrui Fan, Yize Cheng, Soheil Feizi, Tianyi Zhou Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19995v3 Large language models increasingly expose reasoning traces, yet their underlying cognitive structure and steps remain difficult to identify and analyze beyond surface-level statistics. We adopt Schoenfeld's Episode Theory as an inductive, intermediate-scale lens and introduce ThinkARM (Anatomy of Reasoning in Models), a scalable framework that explicitly abstracts reasoning traces into functional reasoning steps such as Analysis, Explore, Implement, Verify, etc. When applied to mathematical problem solving by diverse models, this abstraction reveals reproducible thinking dynamics and structural differences between reasoning and non-reasoning models, which are not apparent from token-level views. We further present two diagnostic case studies showing that exploration functions as a critical branching step associated with correctness, and that efficiency-oriented methods selectively suppress evaluative feedback steps rather than uniformly shortening responses. Together, our results demonstrate that episode-level representations make reasoning steps explicit, enabling systematic analysis of how reasoning is structured, stabilized, and altered in modern language models. --- ### S$^3$IT: A Benchmark for Spatially Situated Social Intelligence Test Authors: Zhe Sun, Xueyuan Yang, Yujie Lu, Zhenliang Zhang Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19992v1 The integration of embodied agents into human environments demands embodied social intelligence: reasoning over both social norms and physical constraints. However, existing evaluations fail to address this integration, as they are limited to either disembodied social reasoning (e.g., in text) or socially-agnostic physical tasks. Both approaches fail to assess an agent's ability to integrate and trade off both physical and social constraints within a realistic, embodied context. To address this challenge, we introduce Spatially Situated Social Intelligence Test (S$^{3}$IT), a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate embodied social intelligence. It is centered on a novel and challenging seat-ordering task, requiring an agent to arrange seating in a 3D environment for a group of large language model-driven (LLM-driven) NPCs with diverse identities, preferences, and intricate interpersonal relationships. Our procedurally extensible framework generates a vast and diverse scenario space with controllable difficulty, compelling the agent to acquire preferences through active dialogue, perceive the environment via autonomous exploration, and perform multi-objective optimization within a complex constraint network. We evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs on S$^{3}$IT and found that they still struggle with this problem, showing an obvious gap compared with the human baseline. Results imply that LLMs have deficiencies in spatial intelligence, yet simultaneously demonstrate their ability to achieve near human-level competence in resolving conflicts that possess explicit textual cues. --- ### Bloom Filter Encoding for Machine Learning Authors: John Cartmell, Mihaela Cardei, Ionut Cardei Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19991v2 We present a method that uses a Bloom filter transform to preprocess data for machine learning. Each sample is encoded into a compact bit-array representation using hash-based encoding, producing a fixed-length feature space that reduces memory usage and obfuscates original feature values. The encoding does not rely on keyed hashing; however, a key can optionally be used to control the mapping and would be required to reproduce the representation. We evaluate the approach on six datasets spanning text, time-series, tabular, and image domains: SMS Spam Collection, ECG200, Adult 50K, CDC Diabetes, MNIST, and Fashion MNIST. Four classifiers are considered: Extreme Gradient Boosting, Deep Neural Networks, Convolutional Neural Networks, and Logistic Regression. Results show that models trained on Bloom filter encodings achieve performance comparable to models trained on raw data or standard dimensionality reduction techniques across several datasets, while providing consistent memory savings. These findings suggest that Bloom filter encodings can serve as an efficient, general-purpose pre-processing representation that preserves useful similarity structure for learning tasks while providing a degree of data obfuscation. --- ### A Dual-Branch Local-Global Framework for Cross-Resolution Land Cover Mapping Authors: Peng Gao, Ke Li, Di Wang, Yongshan Zhu, Yiming Zhang, Xuemei Luo, Yifeng Wang Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19990v1 Cross-resolution land cover mapping aims to produce high-resolution semantic predictions from coarse or low-resolution supervision, yet the severe resolution mismatch makes effective learning highly challenging. Existing weakly supervised approaches often struggle to align fine-grained spatial structures with coarse labels, leading to noisy supervision and degraded mapping accuracy. To tackle this problem, we propose DDTM, a dual-branch weakly supervised framework that explicitly decouples local semantic refinement from global contextual reasoning. Specifically, DDTM introduces a diffusion-based branch to progressively refine fine-scale local semantics under coarse supervision, while a transformer-based branch enforces long-range contextual consistency across large spatial extents. In addition, we design a pseudo-label confidence evaluation module to mitigate noise induced by cross-resolution inconsistencies and to selectively exploit reliable supervisory signals. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DDTM establishes a new state-of-the-art on the Chesapeake Bay benchmark, achieving 66.52\% mIoU and substantially outperforming prior weakly supervised methods. The code is available at https://github.com/gpgpgp123/DDTM. --- ### A Novel CNN Gradient Boosting Ensemble for Guava Disease Detection Authors: Tamim Ahasan Rijon, Yeasin Arafath Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19989v1 As a significant agricultural country, Bangladesh utilizes its fertile land for guava cultivation and dedicated labor to boost its economic development. In a nation like Bangladesh, enhancing guava production and agricultural practices plays a crucial role in its economy. Anthracnose and fruit fly infection can lower the quality and productivity of guava, a crucial tropical fruit. Expert systems that detect diseases early can reduce losses and safeguard the harvest. Images of guava fruits classified into the Healthy, Fruit Flies, and Anthracnose classes are included in the Guava Fruit Disease Dataset 2024 (GFDD24), which comes from plantations in Rajshahi and Pabna, Bangladesh. This study aims to create models using CNN alongside traditional machine learning techniques that can effectively identify guava diseases in locally cultivated varieties in Bangladesh. In order to achieve the highest classification accuracy of approximately 99.99% for the guava dataset, we propose utilizing ensemble models that combine CNNML with Gradient Boosting Machine. In general, the CNN-ML cascade framework exhibits strong, high-accuracy guava disease detection that is appropriate for real-time agricultural monitoring systems. --- ### Covariance-Aware Simplex Projection for Cardinality-Constrained Portfolio Optimization Authors: Nikolaos Iliopoulos Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: q-fin.PM, cs.LG, cs.NE, q-fin.CP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19986v1 Metaheuristic algorithms for cardinality-constrained portfolio optimization require repair operators to map infeasible candidates onto the feasible region. Standard Euclidean projection treats assets as independent and can ignore the covariance structure that governs portfolio risk, potentially producing less diversified portfolios. This paper introduces Covariance-Aware Simplex Projection (CASP), a two-stage repair operator that (i) selects a target number of assets using volatility-normalized scores and (ii) projects the candidate weights using a covariance-aware geometry aligned with tracking-error risk. This provides a portfolio-theoretic foundation for using a covariance-induced distance in repair operators. On S&P 500 data (2020-2024), CASP-Basic delivers materially lower portfolio variance than standard Euclidean repair without relying on return estimates, with improvements that are robust across assets and statistically significant. Ablation results indicate that volatility-normalized selection drives most of the variance reduction, while the covariance-aware projection provides an additional, consistent improvement. We further show that optional return-aware extensions can improve Sharpe ratios, and out-of-sample tests confirm that gains transfer to realized performance. CASP integrates as a drop-in replacement for Euclidean projection in metaheuristic portfolio optimizers. --- ### WSD-MIL: Window Scale Decay Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classification Authors: Le Feng, Li Xiao Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19982v1 In recent years, the integration of pre-trained foundational models with multiple instance learning (MIL) has improved diagnostic accuracy in computational pathology. However, existing MIL methods focus on optimizing feature extractors and aggregation strategies while overlooking the complex semantic relationships among instances within whole slide image (WSI). Although Transformer-based MIL approaches aiming to model instance dependencies, the quadratic computational complexity limits their scalability to large-scale WSIs. Moreover, due to the pronounced variations in tumor region scales across different WSIs, existing Transformer-based methods employing fixed-scale attention mechanisms face significant challenges in precisely capturing local instance correlations and fail to account for the distance-based decay effect of patch relevance. To address these challenges, we propose window scale decay MIL (WSD-MIL), designed to enhance the capacity to model tumor regions of varying scales while improving computational efficiency. WSD-MIL comprises: 1) a window scale decay based attention module, which employs a cluster-based sampling strategy to reduce computational costs while progressively decaying attention window-scale to capture local instance relationships at varying scales; and 2) a squeeze-and-excitation based region gate module, which dynamically adjusts window weights to enhance global information modeling. Experimental results demonstrate that WSD-MIL achieves state-of-the-art performance on the CAMELYON16 and TCGA-BRCA datasets while reducing 62% of the computational memory. The code will be publicly available. --- ### Neuron-Guided Interpretation of Code LLMs: Where, Why, and How? Authors: Zhe Yin, Xiaodong Gu, Beijun Shen Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19980v2 Code language models excel on code intelligence tasks, yet their internal interpretability is underexplored. Existing neuron interpretability techniques from NLP are suboptimal for source code due to programming languages formal, hierarchical, and executable nature. We empirically investigate code LLMs at the neuron level, localizing language-specific neurons (selectively responsive to one language) and concept layers (feed-forward layers encoding language-agnostic code representations). We analyze Llama-3.1-8B and Qwen2.5-Coder-32B on multilingual inputs in C++, Java, Python, Go, and JavaScript, measuring neuron selectivity and layerwise contributions during generation. We find (1) neurons specialized for individual languages alongside a universal subset supporting general-purpose generation; and (2) lower layers mainly encode language-specific syntax, while middle layers capture semantic abstractions shared across languages, emerging as concept layers. We demonstrate utility on three tasks: neuron-guided fine-tuning for code generation, clone detection via concept-layer embeddings, and concept-layer-guided transfer for code summarization, each yielding consistent gains in multilingual settings. --- ### Regression of Functions by Quantum Neural Networks Circuits Authors: Fernando M. de Paula Neto, Lucas dos Reis Silva, Paulo S. G. de Mattos Neto, Felipe F. Fanchini Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: quant-ph, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19978v1 The performance of quantum neural network models depends strongly on architectural decisions, including circuit depth, placement of parametrized operations, and data-encoding strategies. Selecting an effective architecture is challenging and closely related to the classical difficulty of choosing suitable neural-network topologies, which is computationally hard. This work investigates automated quantum-circuit construction for regression tasks and introduces a genetic-algorithm framework that discovers Reduced Regressor QNN architectures. The approach explores depth, parametrized gate configurations, and flexible data re-uploading patterns, formulating the construction of quantum regressors as an optimization process. The discovered circuits are evaluated against seventeen classical regression models on twenty-two nonlinear benchmark functions and four analytical functions. Although classical methods often achieve comparable results, they typically require far more parameters, whereas the evolved quantum models remain compact while providing competitive performance. We further analyze dataset complexity using twelve structural descriptors and show, across five increasingly challenging meta-learning scenarios, that these measures can reliably predict which quantum architecture will perform best. The results demonstrate perfect or near-perfect predictive accuracy in several scenarios, indicating that complexity metrics offer powerful and compact representations of dataset structure and can effectively guide automated model selection. Overall, this study provides a principled basis for meta-learning-driven quantum architecture design and advances the understanding of how quantum models behave in regression settings--a topic that has received limited exploration in prior work. These findings pave the way for more systematic and theoretically grounded approaches to quantum regression. --- ### Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks for Dairy Farm Sustainability Forecasting and Counterfactual Policy Analysis Authors: Surya Jayakumar, Kieran Sullivan, John McLaughlin, Christine O'Meara, Indrakshi Dey Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.LG, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19970v1 This study introduces a novel data-driven framework and the first-ever county-scale application of Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks (STGNN) to forecast composite sustainability indices from herd-level operational records. The methodology employs a novel, end-to-end pipeline utilizing a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to augment Irish Cattle Breeding Federation (ICBF) datasets, preserving joint distributions while mitigating sparsity. A first-ever pillar-based scoring formulation is derived via Principal Component Analysis, identifying Reproductive Efficiency, Genetic Management, Herd Health, and Herd Management, to construct weighted composite indices. These indices are modelled using a novel STGNN architecture that explicitly encodes geographic dependencies and non-linear temporal dynamics to generate multi-year forecasts for 2026-2030. --- ### FGDCC: Fine-Grained Deep Cluster Categorization -- A Framework for Intra-Class Variability Problems in Plant Classification Authors: Luciano Araujo Dourado Filho, Rodrigo Tripodi Calumby Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19960v1 Intra-class variability is given according to the significance in the degree of dissimilarity between images within a class. In that sense, depending on its intensity, intra-class variability can hinder the learning process for DL models, specially when such classes are also underrepresented, which is a very common scenario in Fine-Grained Visual Categorization (FGVC) tasks. This paper proposes a novel method that aims at leveraging classification performance in FGVC tasks by learning fine-grained features via classification of class-wise cluster assignments. Our goal is to apply clustering over each class individually, which can allow to discover pseudo-labels that encodes a latent degree of similarity between images. In turn, those labels can be employed in a hierarchical classification process that allows to learn more fine-grained visual features and thereby mitigating intra-class variability issues. Initial experiments over the PlantNet300k enabled to shed light upon several key points in which future work will have to be developed in order to find more conclusive evidence regarding the effectiveness of our method. Our method still achieves state-of-the-art performance on the PlantNet300k dataset even though some of its components haven't been shown to be fully optimized. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/ADAM-UEFS/FGDCC}{https://github.com/ADAM-UEFS/FGDCC}. --- ### Zero-Shot Segmentation through Prototype-Guidance for Multi-Label Plant Species Identification Authors: Luciano Araujo Dourado Filho, Almir Moreira da Silva Neto, Rodrigo Pereira David, Rodrigo Tripodi Calumby Published: 2025-12-23 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19957v1 This paper presents an approach developed to address the PlantClef 2025 challenge, which consists of a fine-grained multi-label species identification, over high-resolution images. Our solution focused on employing class prototypes obtained from the training dataset as a proxy guidance for training a segmentation Vision Transformer (ViT) on the test set images. To obtain these representations, the proposed method extracts features from training dataset images and create clusters, by applying K-Means, with $K$ equals to the number of classes in the dataset. The segmentation model is a customized narrow ViT, built by replacing the patch embedding layer with a frozen DinoV2, pre-trained on the training dataset for individual species classification. This model is trained to reconstruct the class prototypes of the training dataset from the test dataset images. We then use this model to obtain attention scores that enable to identify and localize areas of interest and consequently guide the classification process. The proposed approach enabled a domain-adaptation from multi-class identification with individual species, into multi-label classification from high-resolution vegetation plots. Our method achieved fifth place in the PlantCLEF 2025 challenge on the private leaderboard, with an F1 score of 0.33331. Besides that, in absolute terms our method scored 0.03 lower than the top-performing submission, suggesting that it may achieved competitive performance in the benchmark task. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/ADAM-UEFS/PlantCLEF2025}{https://github.com/ADAM-UEFS/PlantCLEF2025}. ---