# Research Papers — 2025-12 · bundle page 50 of 175

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### Trustworthy and Explainable Deep Reinforcement Learning for Safe and Energy-Efficient Process Control: A Use Case in Industrial Compressed Air Systems

Authors: Vincent Bezold, Patrick Wagner, Jakob Hofmann, Marco Huber, Alexander Sauer
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, eess.SY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18317v1

This paper presents a trustworthy reinforcement learning approach for the control of industrial compressed air systems. We develop a framework that enables safe and energy-efficient operation under realistic boundary conditions and introduce a multi-level explainability pipeline combining input perturbation tests, gradient-based sensitivity analysis, and SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) feature attribution. An empirical evaluation across multiple compressor configurations shows that the learned policy is physically plausible, anticipates future demand, and consistently respects system boundaries. Compared to the installed industrial controller, the proposed approach reduces unnecessary overpressure and achieves energy savings of approximately 4\,\% without relying on explicit physics models. The results further indicate that system pressure and forecast information dominate policy decisions, while compressor-level inputs play a secondary role. Overall, the combination of efficiency gains, predictive behavior, and transparent validation supports the trustworthy deployment of reinforcement learning in industrial energy systems.

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### On Efficient Adjustment for Micro Causal Effects in Summary Causal Graphs

Authors: Isabela Belciug, Simon Ferreira, Charles K. Assaad
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: stat.ME, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18315v2

Observational studies in fields such as epidemiology often rely on covariate adjustment to estimate causal effects. Classical graphical criteria, like the back-door criterion and the generalized adjustment criterion, are powerful tools for identifying valid adjustment sets in directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). However, these criteria are not directly applicable to summary causal graphs (SCGs), which are abstractions of DAGs commonly used in dynamic systems. In SCGs, each node typically represents an entire time series and may involve cycles, making classical criteria inapplicable for identifying causal effects. Recent work established complete conditions for determining whether the micro causal effect of a treatment or an exposure $X_{t-γ}$ on an outcome $Y_t$ is identifiable via covariate adjustment in SCGs, under the assumption of no hidden confounding. However, these identifiability conditions have two main limitations. First, they are complex, relying on cumbersome definitions and requiring the enumeration of multiple paths in the SCG, which can be computationally expensive. Second, when these conditions are satisfied, they only provide two valid adjustment sets, limiting flexibility in practical applications. In this paper, we propose an equivalent but simpler formulation of those identifiability conditions and introduce a new criterion that identifies a broader class of valid adjustment sets in SCGs. Additionally, we characterize the quasi-optimal adjustment set among these, i.e., the one that minimizes the asymptotic variance of the causal effect estimator. Our contributions offer both theoretical advancement and practical tools for more flexible and efficient causal inference in abstracted causal graphs.

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### MatSpray: Fusing 2D Material World Knowledge on 3D Geometry

Authors: Philipp Langsteiner, Jan-Niklas Dihlmann, Hendrik P. A. Lensch
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.CV, cs.GR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18314v1

Manual modeling of material parameters and 3D geometry is a time consuming yet essential task in the gaming and film industries. While recent advances in 3D reconstruction have enabled accurate approximations of scene geometry and appearance, these methods often fall short in relighting scenarios due to the lack of precise, spatially varying material parameters. At the same time, diffusion models operating on 2D images have shown strong performance in predicting physically based rendering (PBR) properties such as albedo, roughness, and metallicity. However, transferring these 2D material maps onto reconstructed 3D geometry remains a significant challenge. We propose a framework for fusing 2D material data into 3D geometry using a combination of novel learning-based and projection-based approaches. We begin by reconstructing scene geometry via Gaussian Splatting. From the input images, a diffusion model generates 2D maps for albedo, roughness, and metallic parameters. Any existing diffusion model that can convert images or videos to PBR materials can be applied. The predictions are further integrated into the 3D representation either by optimizing an image-based loss or by directly projecting the material parameters onto the Gaussians using Gaussian ray tracing. To enhance fine-scale accuracy and multi-view consistency, we further introduce a light-weight neural refinement step (Neural Merger), which takes ray-traced material features as input and produces detailed adjustments. Our results demonstrate that the proposed methods outperform existing techniques in both quantitative metrics and perceived visual realism. This enables more accurate, relightable, and photorealistic renderings from reconstructed scenes, significantly improving the realism and efficiency of asset creation workflows in content production pipelines.

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### MatE: Material Extraction from Single-Image via Geometric Prior

Authors: Zeyu Zhang, Wei Zhai, Jian Yang, Yang Cao
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18312v1

The creation of high-fidelity, physically-based rendering (PBR) materials remains a bottleneck in many graphics pipelines, typically requiring specialized equipment and expert-driven post-processing. To democratize this process, we present MatE, a novel method for generating tileable PBR materials from a single image taken under unconstrained, real-world conditions. Given an image and a user-provided mask, MatE first performs coarse rectification using an estimated depth map as a geometric prior, and then employs a dual-branch diffusion model. Leveraging a learned consistency from rotation-aligned and scale-aligned training data, this model further rectify residual distortions from the coarse result and translate it into a complete set of material maps, including albedo, normal, roughness and height. Our framework achieves invariance to the unknown illumination and perspective of the input image, allowing for the recovery of intrinsic material properties from casual captures. Through comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world data, we demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of our approach, enabling users to create realistic materials from real-world image.

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### Monitoring Monitorability

Authors: Melody Y. Guan, Miles Wang, Micah Carroll, Zehao Dou, Annie Y. Wei, Marcus Williams, Benjamin Arnav, Joost Huizinga, Ian Kivlichan, Mia Glaese, Jakub Pachocki, Bowen Baker
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.AI, cs.SE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18311v1

Observability into the decision making of modern AI systems may be required to safely deploy increasingly capable agents. Monitoring the chain-of-thought (CoT) of today's reasoning models has proven effective for detecting misbehavior. However, this "monitorability" may be fragile under different training procedures, data sources, or even continued system scaling. To measure and track monitorability, we propose three evaluation archetypes (intervention, process, and outcome-property) and a new monitorability metric, and introduce a broad evaluation suite. We demonstrate that these evaluations can catch simple model organisms trained to have obfuscated CoTs, and that CoT monitoring is more effective than action-only monitoring in practical settings. We compare the monitorability of various frontier models and find that most models are fairly, but not perfectly, monitorable. We also evaluate how monitorability scales with inference-time compute, reinforcement learning optimization, and pre-training model size. We find that longer CoTs are generally more monitorable and that RL optimization does not materially decrease monitorability even at the current frontier scale. Notably, we find that for a model at a low reasoning effort, we could instead deploy a smaller model at a higher reasoning effort (thereby matching capabilities) and obtain a higher monitorability, albeit at a higher overall inference compute cost. We further investigate agent-monitor scaling trends and find that scaling a weak monitor's test-time compute when monitoring a strong agent increases monitorability. Giving the weak monitor access to CoT not only improves monitorability, but it steepens the monitor's test-time compute to monitorability scaling trend. Finally, we show we can improve monitorability by asking models follow-up questions and giving their follow-up CoT to the monitor.

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### Embedded Safety-Aligned Intelligence via Differentiable Internal Alignment Embeddings

Authors: Harsh Rathva, Ojas Srivastava, Pruthwik Mishra
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18309v1

We introduce Embedded Safety-Aligned Intelligence (ESAI), a theoretical framework for multi-agent reinforcement learning that embeds alignment constraints directly into agents internal representations using differentiable internal alignment embeddings. Unlike external reward shaping or post-hoc safety constraints, internal alignment embeddings are learned latent variables that predict externalized harm through counterfactual reasoning and modulate policy updates toward harm reduction through attention and graph-based propagation. The ESAI framework integrates four mechanisms: differentiable counterfactual alignment penalties computed from soft reference distributions, alignment-weighted perceptual attention, Hebbian associative memory supporting temporal credit assignment, and similarity-weighted graph diffusion with bias mitigation controls. We analyze stability conditions for bounded internal embeddings under Lipschitz continuity and spectral constraints, discuss computational complexity, and examine theoretical properties including contraction behavior and fairness-performance tradeoffs. This work positions ESAI as a conceptual contribution to differentiable alignment mechanisms in multi-agent systems. We identify open theoretical questions regarding convergence guarantees, embedding dimensionality, and extension to high-dimensional environments. Empirical evaluation is left to future work.

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### InstructNet: A Novel Approach for Multi-Label Instruction Classification through Advanced Deep Learning

Authors: Tanjim Taharat Aurpa, Md Shoaib Ahmed, Md Mahbubur Rahman, Md. Golam Moazzam
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18301v1

People use search engines for various topics and items, from daily essentials to more aspirational and specialized objects. Therefore, search engines have taken over as peoples preferred resource. The How To prefix has become familiar and widely used in various search styles to find solutions to particular problems. This search allows people to find sequential instructions by providing detailed guidelines to accomplish specific tasks. Categorizing instructional text is also essential for task-oriented learning and creating knowledge bases. This study uses the How To articles to determine the multi-label instruction category. We have brought this work with a dataset comprising 11,121 observations from wikiHow, where each record has multiple categories. To find out the multi-label category meticulously, we employ some transformer-based deep neural architectures, such as Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding (XLNet), Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers (BERT), etc. In our multi-label instruction classification process, we have reckoned our proposed architectures using accuracy and macro f1-score as the performance metrics. This thorough evaluation showed us much about our strategys strengths and drawbacks. Specifically, our implementation of the XLNet architecture has demonstrated unprecedented performance, achieving an accuracy of 97.30% and micro and macro average scores of 89.02% and 93%, a noteworthy accomplishment in multi-label classification. This high level of accuracy and macro average score is a testament to the effectiveness of the XLNet architecture in our proposed InstructNet approach. By employing a multi-level strategy in our evaluation process, we have gained a more comprehensive knowledge of the effectiveness of our proposed architectures and identified areas for forthcoming improvement and refinement.

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### Explainable Transformer-CNN Fusion for Noise-Robust Speech Emotion Recognition

Authors: Sudip Chakrabarty, Pappu Bishwas, Rajdeep Chatterjee
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.SD, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18298v1

Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) systems often degrade in performance when exposed to the unpredictable acoustic interference found in real-world environments. Additionally, the opacity of deep learning models hinders their adoption in trust-sensitive applications. To bridge this gap, we propose a Hybrid Transformer-CNN framework that unifies the contextual modeling of Wav2Vec 2.0 with the spectral stability of 1D-Convolutional Neural Networks. Our dual-stream architecture processes raw waveforms to capture long-range temporal dependencies while simultaneously extracting noise-resistant spectral features (MFCC, ZCR, RMSE) via a custom Attentive Temporal Pooling mechanism. We conducted extensive validation across four diverse benchmark datasets: RAVDESS, TESS, SAVEE, and CREMA-D. To rigorously test robustness, we subjected the model to non-stationary acoustic interference using real-world noise profiles from the SAS-KIIT dataset. The proposed framework demonstrates superior generalization and state-of-the-art accuracy across all datasets, significantly outperforming single-branch baselines under realistic environmental interference. Furthermore, we address the ``black-box" problem by integrating SHAP and Score-CAM into the evaluation pipeline. These tools provide granular visual explanations, revealing how the model strategically shifts attention between temporal and spectral cues to maintain reliability in the presence of complex environmental noise.

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### AL-GNN: Privacy-Preserving and Replay-Free Continual Graph Learning via Analytic Learning

Authors: Xuling Zhang, Jindong Li, Yifei Zhang, Mingqi Yang, Menglin Yang
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18295v2

Continual graph learning (CGL) aims to enable graph neural networks to incrementally learn from a stream of graph structured data without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. Existing methods particularly those based on experience replay typically store and revisit past graph data to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. However, these approaches pose significant limitations, including privacy concerns, inefficiency. In this work, we propose AL GNN, a novel framework for continual graph learning that eliminates the need for backpropagation and replay buffers. Instead, AL GNN leverages principles from analytic learning theory to formulate learning as a recursive least squares optimization process. It maintains and updates model knowledge analytically through closed form classifier updates and a regularized feature autocorrelation matrix. This design enables efficient one pass training for each task, and inherently preserves data privacy by avoiding historical sample storage. Extensive experiments on multiple dynamic graph classification benchmarks demonstrate that AL GNN achieves competitive or superior performance compared to existing methods. For instance, it improves average performance by 10% on CoraFull and reduces forgetting by over 30% on Reddit, while also reducing training time by nearly 50% due to its backpropagation free design.

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### Measuring Fine-Grained Negotiation Tactics of Humans and LLMs in Diplomacy

Authors: Wenkai Li, Lynnette Hui Xian Ng, Andy Liu, Daniel Fried
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.CY, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18292v1

The study of negotiation styles dates back to Aristotle's ethos-pathos-logos rhetoric. Prior efforts primarily studied the success of negotiation agents. Here, we shift the focus towards the styles of negotiation strategies. Our focus is the strategic dialogue board game Diplomacy, which affords rich natural language negotiation and measures of game success. We used LLM-as-a-judge to annotate a large human-human set of Diplomacy games for fine-grained negotiation tactics from a sociologically-grounded taxonomy. Using a combination of the It Takes Two and WebDiplomacy datasets, we demonstrate the reliability of our LLM-as-a-Judge framework and show strong correlations between negotiation features and success in the Diplomacy setting. Lastly, we investigate the differences between LLM and human negotiation strategies and show that fine-tuning can steer LLM agents toward more human-like negotiation behaviors.

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### PACGNet: Pyramidal Adaptive Cross-Gating Network for Multimodal Object Detection in Aerial Imagery

Authors: Xvcheng Ning, Zidong Gu
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18291v3

Object detection in aerial imagery is challenging because targets are often small, backgrounds are cluttered, and imaging conditions vary substantially. Multimodal sensing can improve robustness by providing complementary visual and spectral information, but effective fusion must balance cross-modal interaction with computational cost. This paper presents PACGNet, a lightweight backbone-centric framework for multimodal aerial object detection. Its Symmetrical Cross-Gating (SCG) module performs bidirectional gated interaction between the two modality streams at the same feature scale while retaining residual pathways for the original representations. The Pyramidal Feature-aware Multimodal Gating (PFMG) module subsequently forms a single fused feature pyramid by using the preceding higher-resolution level as a spatial prior for fusion at the next level. PACGNet achieves 82.2% mAP50 on the held-out DroneVehicle test set and 82.1% mAP50 on VEDAI with only 5.2 M parameters and 13.2 GFLOPs. These results indicate a favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off for lightweight multimodal aerial object detection. Code is available at https://github.com/Alianess/PACGNet.

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### UniMPR: A Unified Framework for Multimodal Place Recognition with Heterogeneous Sensor Configurations

Authors: Zhangshuo Qi, Jingyi Xu, Luqi Cheng, Shichen Wen, Yiming Ma, Guangming Xiong
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18279v2

Place recognition is a critical component of autonomous vehicles and robotics, enabling global localization in GPS-denied environments. Recent advances have spurred significant interest in multimodal place recognition (MPR), which leverages complementary strengths of multiple modalities. Despite its potential, most existing MPR methods still face three key challenges: (1) dynamically adapting to various modality inputs within a unified framework, (2) maintaining robustness with missing or degraded modalities, and (3) generalizing across diverse sensor configurations and setups. In this paper, we propose UniMPR, a unified framework for multimodal place recognition. Using only one trained model, it can seamlessly adapt to any combination of common perceptual modalities (e.g., camera, LiDAR, radar). To tackle the data heterogeneity, we unify all inputs within a polar BEV feature space. Subsequently, the polar BEVs are fed into a multi-branch network to exploit discriminative intra-model and inter-modal features from any modality combinations. To fully exploit the network's generalization capability and robustness, we construct a large-scale training set from multiple datasets and introduce an adaptive label assignment strategy for extensive pre-training. Experiments on seven datasets demonstrate that UniMPR achieves state-of-the-art performance under varying sensor configurations, modality combinations, and environmental conditions. Our code will be released at https://github.com/QiZS-BIT/UniMPR.

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### FedSUM Family: Efficient Federated Learning Methods under Arbitrary Client Participation

Authors: Runze You, Shi Pu
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.LG, math.OC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18275v1

Federated Learning (FL) methods are often designed for specific client participation patterns, limiting their applicability in practical deployments. We introduce the FedSUM family of algorithms, which supports arbitrary client participation without additional assumptions on data heterogeneity. Our framework models participation variability with two delay metrics, the maximum delay $τ_{\max}$ and the average delay $τ_{\text{avg}}$. The FedSUM family comprises three variants: FedSUM-B (basic version), FedSUM (standard version), and FedSUM-CR (communication-reduced version). We provide unified convergence guarantees demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach across diverse participation patterns, thereby broadening the applicability of FL in real-world scenarios.

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### Evolutionary BP+OSD Decoding for Low-Latency Quantum Error Correction

Authors: Hee-Youl Kwak, Seong-Joon Park, Hyunwoo Jung, Jeongseok Ha, Jae-Won Kim
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: quant-ph, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18273v2

Quantum error correction (QEC) for fault-tolerant quantum computing requires a balanced decoding solution that offers high performance, low complexity, and low latency. However, the de facto standard, belief propagation (BP) combined with ordered statistics decoding (OSD), suffers from excessive iterations in the BP stage and high complexity in the OSD stage. To address these challenges, we propose an evolutionary BP (EBP) decoder optimized via a differential evolution (DE) algorithm. By leveraging the gradient-free nature of DE, we enable end-to-end optimization of the EBP+OSD structure to maximize overall performance. In addition, a multi-objective selection rule is introduced to suppress frequent OSD activation, significantly reducing complexity overhead. Experimental results on surface codes and quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) codes demonstrate that EBP plus OSD simultaneously achieves superior decoding performance and substantially lower complexity compared to conventional BP plus OSD, particularly in stringent low-latency regimes.

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### Building UI/UX Dataset for Dark Pattern Detection and YOLOv12x-based Real-Time Object Recognition Detection System

Authors: Se-Young Jang, Su-Yeon Yoon, Jae-Woong Jung, Dong-Hun Lee, Seong-Hun Choi, Soo-Kyung Jun, Yu-Bin Kim, Young-Seon Ju, Kyounggon Kim
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18269v1

With the accelerating pace of digital transformation and the widespread adoption of online platforms, both social and technical concerns regarding dark patterns-user interface designs that undermine users' ability to make informed and rational choices-have become increasingly prominent. As corporate online platforms grow more sophisticated in their design strategies, there is a pressing need for proactive and real-time detection technologies that go beyond the predominantly reactive approaches employed by regulatory authorities. In this paper, we propose a visual dark pattern detection framework that improves both detection accuracy and real-time performance. To this end, we constructed a proprietary visual object detection dataset by manually collecting 4,066 UI/UX screenshots containing dark patterns from 194 websites across six major industrial sectors in South Korea and abroad. The collected images were annotated with five representative UI components commonly associated with dark patterns: Button, Checkbox, Input Field, Pop-up, and QR Code. This dataset has been publicly released to support further research and development in the field. To enable real-time detection, this study adopted the YOLOv12x object detection model and applied transfer learning to optimize its performance for visual dark pattern recognition. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves a high detection accuracy of 92.8% in terms of mAP@50, while maintaining a real-time inference speed of 40.5 frames per second (FPS), confirming its effectiveness for practical deployment in online environments. Furthermore, to facilitate future research and contribute to technological advancements, the dataset constructed in this study has been made publicly available at https://github.com/B4E2/B4E2-DarkPattern-YOLO-DataSet.

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### LeJOT: An Intelligent Job Cost Orchestration Solution for Databricks Platform

Authors: Lizhi Ma, Yi-Xiang Hu, Yuke Wang, Yifang Zhao, Yihui Ren, Jian-Xiang Liao, Feng Wu, Xiang-Yang Li
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18266v1

With the rapid advancements in big data technologies, the Databricks platform has become a cornerstone for enterprises and research institutions, offering high computational efficiency and a robust ecosystem. However, managing the escalating operational costs associated with job execution remains a critical challenge. Existing solutions rely on static configurations or reactive adjustments, which fail to adapt to the dynamic nature of workloads. To address this, we introduce LeJOT, an intelligent job cost orchestration framework that leverages machine learning for execution time prediction and a solver-based optimization model for real-time resource allocation. Unlike conventional scheduling techniques, LeJOT proactively predicts workload demands, dynamically allocates computing resources, and minimizes costs while ensuring performance requirements are met. Experimental results on real-world Databricks workloads demonstrate that LeJOT achieves an average 20% reduction in cloud computing costs within a minute-level scheduling timeframe, outperforming traditional static allocation strategies. Our approach provides a scalable and adaptive solution for cost-efficient job scheduling in Data Lakehouse environments.

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### Intelligent Human-Machine Partnership for Manufacturing: Enhancing Warehouse Planning through Simulation-Driven Knowledge Graphs and LLM Collaboration

Authors: Himabindu Thogaru, Saisubramaniam Gopalakrishnan, Zishan Ahmad, Anirudh Deodhar
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18265v1

Manufacturing planners face complex operational challenges that require seamless collaboration between human expertise and intelligent systems to achieve optimal performance in modern production environments. Traditional approaches to analyzing simulation-based manufacturing data often create barriers between human decision-makers and critical operational insights, limiting effective partnership in manufacturing planning. Our framework establishes a collaborative intelligence system integrating Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Model-based agents to bridge this gap, empowering manufacturing professionals through natural language interfaces for complex operational analysis. The system transforms simulation data into semantically rich representations, enabling planners to interact naturally with operational insights without specialized expertise. A collaborative LLM agent works alongside human decision-makers, employing iterative reasoning that mirrors human analytical thinking while generating precise queries for knowledge extraction and providing transparent validation. This partnership approach to manufacturing bottleneck identification, validated through operational scenarios, demonstrates enhanced performance while maintaining human oversight and decision authority. For operational inquiries, the system achieves near-perfect accuracy through natural language interaction. For investigative scenarios requiring collaborative analysis, we demonstrate the framework's effectiveness in supporting human experts to uncover interconnected operational issues that enhance understanding and decision-making. This work advances collaborative manufacturing by creating intuitive methods for actionable insights, reducing cognitive load while amplifying human analytical capabilities in evolving manufacturing ecosystems.

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### Who Can See Through You? Adversarial Shielding Against VLM-Based Attribute Inference Attacks

Authors: Yucheng Fan, Jiawei Chen, Yu Tian, Zhaoxia Yin
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18264v1

As vision-language models (VLMs) become widely adopted, VLM-based attribute inference attacks have emerged as a serious privacy concern, enabling adversaries to infer private attributes from images shared on social media. This escalating threat calls for dedicated protection methods to safeguard user privacy. However, existing methods often degrade the visual quality of images or interfere with vision-based functions on social media, thereby failing to achieve a desirable balance between privacy protection and user experience. To address this challenge, we propose a novel protection method that jointly optimizes privacy suppression and utility preservation under a visual consistency constraint. While our method is conceptually effective, fair comparisons between methods remain challenging due to the lack of publicly available evaluation datasets. To fill this gap, we introduce VPI-COCO, a publicly available benchmark comprising 522 images with hierarchically structured privacy questions and corresponding non-private counterparts, enabling fine-grained and joint evaluation of protection methods in terms of privacy preservation and user experience. Building upon this benchmark, experiments on multiple VLMs demonstrate that our method effectively reduces PAR below 25%, keeps NPAR above 88%, maintains high visual consistency, and generalizes well to unseen and paraphrased privacy questions, demonstrating its strong practical applicability for real-world VLM deployments.

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### TICL+: A Case Study On Speech In-Context Learning for Children's Speech Recognition

Authors: Haolong Zheng, Yekaterina Yegorova, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: eess.AS, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18263v1

Children's speech recognition remains challenging due to substantial acoustic and linguistic variability, limited labeled data, and significant differences from adult speech. Speech foundation models can address these challenges through Speech In-Context Learning (SICL), allowing adaptation to new domains without fine-tuning. However, the effectiveness of SICL depends on how in-context examples are selected. We extend an existing retrieval-based method, Text-Embedding KNN for SICL (TICL), introducing an acoustic reranking step to create TICL+. This extension prioritizes examples that are both semantically and acoustically aligned with the test input. Experiments on four children's speech corpora show that TICL+ achieves up to a 53.3% relative word error rate reduction over zero-shot performance and 37.6% over baseline TICL, highlighting the value of combining semantic and acoustic information for robust, scalable ASR in children's speech.

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### Software Vulnerability Management in the Era of Artificial Intelligence: An Industry Perspective

Authors: M. Mehdi Kholoosi, Triet Huynh Minh Le, M. Ali Babar
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.HC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18261v2

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized software development, particularly by automating repetitive tasks and improving developer productivity. While these advancements are well-documented, the use of AI-powered tools for Software Vulnerability Management (SVM), such as vulnerability detection and repair, remains underexplored in industry settings. To bridge this gap, our study aims to determine the extent of the adoption of AI-powered tools for SVM, identify barriers and facilitators to the use, and gather insights to help improve the tools to meet industry needs better. We conducted a survey study involving 60 practitioners from diverse industry sectors across 27 countries. The survey incorporates both quantitative and qualitative questions to analyze the adoption trends, assess tool strengths, identify practical challenges, and uncover opportunities for improvement. Our findings indicate that AI-powered tools are used throughout the SVM life cycle, with 69% of users reporting satisfaction with their current use. Practitioners value these tools for their speed, coverage, and accessibility. However, concerns about false positives, missing context, and trust issues remain prevalent. We observe a socio-technical adoption pattern in which AI outputs are filtered through human oversight and organizational governance. To support safe and effective use of AI for SVM, we recommend improvements in explainability, contextual awareness, integration workflows, and validation practices. We assert that these findings can offer practical guidance for practitioners, tool developers, and researchers seeking to enhance secure software development through the use of AI.

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### MSC-180: A Benchmark for Automated Formal Theorem Proving from Mathematical Subject Classification

Authors: Sirui Li, Wangyue Lu, Xiaorui Shi, Ke Weng, Haozhe Sun, Minghe Yu, Tiancheng Zhang, Ge Yu, Hengyu Liu, Lun Du
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.AI, cs.LO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18256v1

Automated Theorem Proving (ATP) represents a core research direction in artificial intelligence for achieving formal reasoning and verification, playing a significant role in advancing machine intelligence. However, current large language model (LLM)-based theorem provers suffer from limitations such as restricted domain coverage and weak generalization in mathematical reasoning. To address these issues, we propose MSC-180, a benchmark for evaluation based on the MSC2020 mathematical subject classification. It comprises 180 formal verification problems, 3 advanced problems from each of 60 mathematical branches, spanning from undergraduate to graduate levels. Each problem has undergone multiple rounds of verification and refinement by domain experts to ensure formal accuracy. Evaluations of state-of-the-art LLM-based theorem provers under the pass@32 setting reveal that the best model achieves only an 18.89% overall pass rate, with prominent issues including significant domain bias (maximum domain coverage 41.7%) and a difficulty gap (significantly lower pass rates on graduate-level problems). To further quantify performance variability across mathematical domains, we introduce the coefficient of variation (CV) as an evaluation metric. The observed CV values are 4-6 times higher than the statistical high-variability threshold, indicating that the models still rely on pattern matching from training corpora rather than possessing transferable reasoning mechanisms and systematic generalization capabilities. MSC-180, together with its multi-dimensional evaluation framework, provides a discriminative and systematic benchmark for driving the development of next-generation AI systems with genuine mathematical reasoning abilities.

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### Central Limit Theorem for ergodic averages of Markov chains \& the comparison of sampling algorithms for heavy-tailed distributions

Authors: Miha Brešar, Aleksandar Mijatović, Gareth Roberts
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: math.PR, stat.CO, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18255v1

Establishing central limit theorems (CLTs) for ergodic averages of Markov chains is a fundamental problem in probability and its applications. Since the seminal work~\cite{MR834478}, a vast literature has emerged on the sufficient conditions for such CLTs. To counterbalance this, the present paper provides verifiable necessary conditions for CLTs of ergodic averages of Markov chains on general state spaces. Our theory is based on drift conditions, which also yield lower bounds on the rates of convergence to stationarity in various metrics. The validity of the ergodic CLT is of particular importance for sampling algorithms, where it underpins the error analysis of estimators in Bayesian statistics and machine learning. Although heavy-tailed sampling is of central importance in applications, the characterisation of the CLT and the convergence rates are theoretically poorly understood for almost all practically-used Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. In this setting our results provide sharp conditions on the validity of the ergodic CLT and establish convergence rates for large families of MCMC sampling algorithms for heavy-tailed targets. Our study includes a rather complete analyses for random walk Metropolis samplers (with finite- and infinite-variance proposals), Metropolis-adjusted and unadjusted Langevin algorithms and the stereographic projection sampler (as well as the independence sampler). By providing these sharp results via our practical drift conditions, our theory offers significant insights into the problems of algorithm selection and comparison for sampling heavy-tailed distributions (see short YouTube presentations~\cite{YouTube_talk} describing our \href{https://youtu.be/m2y7U4cEqy4}{\underline{theory}} and \href{https://youtu.be/w8I_oOweuko}{\underline{applications}}).

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### Loom: Diffusion-Transformer for Interleaved Generation

Authors: Mingcheng Ye, Jiaming Liu, Yiren Song
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18254v1

Interleaved text-image generation aims to jointly produce coherent visual frames and aligned textual descriptions within a single sequence, enabling tasks such as style transfer, compositional synthesis, and procedural tutorials. We present Loom, a unified diffusion-transformer framework for interleaved text-image generation. Loom extends the Bagel unified model via full-parameter fine-tuning and an interleaved architecture that alternates textual and visual embeddings for multi-condition reasoning and sequential planning. A language planning strategy first decomposes a user instruction into stepwise prompts and frame embeddings, which guide temporally consistent synthesis. For each frame, Loom conditions on a small set of sampled prior frames together with the global textual context, rather than concatenating all history, yielding controllable and efficient long-horizon generation. Across style transfer, compositional generation, and tutorial-like procedures, Loom delivers superior compositionality, temporal coherence, and text-image alignment. Experiments demonstrate that Loom substantially outperforms the open-source baseline Anole, achieving an average gain of 2.6 points (on a 5-point scale) across temporal and semantic metrics in text-to-interleaved tasks. We also curate a 50K interleaved tutorial dataset and demonstrate strong improvements over unified and diffusion editing baselines.

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### CrystalFormer-CSP: Thinking Fast and Slow for Crystal Structure Prediction

Authors: Zhendong Cao, Shigang Ou, Lei Wang
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cond-mat.mtrl-sci, cs.LG, physics.comp-ph
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18251v1

Crystal structure prediction is a fundamental problem in materials science. We present CrystalFormer-CSP, an efficient framework that unifies data-driven heuristic and physics-driven optimization approaches to predict stable crystal structures for given chemical compositions. The approach combines pretrained generative models for space-group-informed structure generation and a universal machine learning force field for energy minimization. Reinforcement fine-tuning can be employed to further boost the accuracy of the framework. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CrystalFormer-CSP on benchmark problems and showcase its usage via web interface and language model integration.

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### On the Convergence Rate of LoRA Gradient Descent

Authors: Siqiao Mu, Diego Klabjan
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18248v3

The low-rank adaptation (LoRA) algorithm for fine-tuning large models has grown popular in recent years due to its remarkable performance and low computational requirements. LoRA trains two ``adapter" matrices that form a low-rank representation of the model parameters, thereby massively reducing the number of parameters that need to be updated at every step. Although LoRA is simple, its convergence is poorly understood due to the lack of Lipschitz smoothness, a key condition for classic convergence analyses. As a result, current theoretical results only consider asymptotic behavior or assume strong boundedness conditions which artificially enforce Lipschitz smoothness. In this work, we provide for the first time a non-asymptotic convergence analysis of the \textit{original LoRA gradient descent} algorithm, which reflects widespread practice, without such assumptions. Our work relies on three key steps: i) reformulating the problem in terms of the outer product of the stacked adapter matrices, ii) a modified descent lemma for the ``Lipschitz-like" reparametrized function, and iii) controlling the step size. With this approach, we prove that LoRA gradient descent converges to a stationary point at rate $O(\frac{1}{\log T})$, where $T$ is the number of iterations. We conduct numerical experiments to validate our theoretical findings.

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### Towards Ancient Plant Seed Classification: A Benchmark Dataset and Baseline Model

Authors: Rui Xing, Runmin Cong, Yingying Wu, Can Wang, Zhongming Tang, Fen Wang, Hao Wu, Sam Kwong
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18247v1

Understanding the dietary preferences of ancient societies and their evolution across periods and regions is crucial for revealing human-environment interactions. Seeds, as important archaeological artifacts, represent a fundamental subject of archaeobotanical research. However, traditional studies rely heavily on expert knowledge, which is often time-consuming and inefficient. Intelligent analysis methods have made progress in various fields of archaeology, but there remains a research gap in data and methods in archaeobotany, especially in the classification task of ancient plant seeds. To address this, we construct the first Ancient Plant Seed Image Classification (APS) dataset. It contains 8,340 images from 17 genus- or species-level seed categories excavated from 18 archaeological sites across China. In addition, we design a framework specifically for the ancient plant seed classification task (APSNet), which introduces the scale feature (size) of seeds based on learning fine-grained information to guide the network in discovering key "evidence" for sufficient classification. Specifically, we design a Size Perception and Embedding (SPE) module in the encoder part to explicitly extract size information for the purpose of complementing fine-grained information. We propose an Asynchronous Decoupled Decoding (ADD) architecture based on traditional progressive learning to decode features from both channel and spatial perspectives, enabling efficient learning of discriminative features. In both quantitative and qualitative analyses, our approach surpasses existing state-of-the-art image classification methods, achieving an accuracy of 90.5%. This demonstrates that our work provides an effective tool for large-scale, systematic archaeological research.

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### Offline Behavioral Data Selection

Authors: Shiye Lei, Zhihao Cheng, Dacheng Tao
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18246v1

Behavioral cloning is a widely adopted approach for offline policy learning from expert demonstrations. However, the large scale of offline behavioral datasets often results in computationally intensive training when used in downstream tasks. In this paper, we uncover the striking data saturation in offline behavioral data: policy performance rapidly saturates when trained on a small fraction of the dataset. We attribute this effect to the weak alignment between policy performance and test loss, revealing substantial room for improvement through data selection. To this end, we propose a simple yet effective method, Stepwise Dual Ranking (SDR), which extracts a compact yet informative subset from large-scale offline behavioral datasets. SDR is build on two key principles: (1) stepwise clip, which prioritizes early-stage data; and (2) dual ranking, which selects samples with both high action-value rank and low state-density rank. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on D4RL benchmarks demonstrate that SDR significantly enhances data selection for offline behavioral data.

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### Spectral Discrepancy and Cross-modal Semantic Consistency Learning for Object Detection in Hyperspectral Image

Authors: Xiao He, Chang Tang, Xinwang Liu, Wei Zhang, Zhimin Gao, Chuankun Li, Shaohua Qiu, Jiangfeng Xu
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18245v1

Hyperspectral images with high spectral resolution provide new insights into recognizing subtle differences in similar substances. However, object detection in hyperspectral images faces significant challenges in intra- and inter-class similarity due to the spatial differences in hyperspectral inter-bands and unavoidable interferences, e.g., sensor noises and illumination. To alleviate the hyperspectral inter-bands inconsistencies and redundancy, we propose a novel network termed \textbf{S}pectral \textbf{D}iscrepancy and \textbf{C}ross-\textbf{M}odal semantic consistency learning (SDCM), which facilitates the extraction of consistent information across a wide range of hyperspectral bands while utilizing the spectral dimension to pinpoint regions of interest. Specifically, we leverage a semantic consistency learning (SCL) module that utilizes inter-band contextual cues to diminish the heterogeneity of information among bands, yielding highly coherent spectral dimension representations. On the other hand, we incorporate a spectral gated generator (SGG) into the framework that filters out the redundant data inherent in hyperspectral information based on the importance of the bands. Then, we design the spectral discrepancy aware (SDA) module to enrich the semantic representation of high-level information by extracting pixel-level spectral features. Extensive experiments on two hyperspectral datasets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance when compared with other ones.

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### Breaking Minds, Breaking Systems: Jailbreaking Large Language Models via Human-like Psychological Manipulation

Authors: Zehao Liu, Xi Lin
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18244v1

Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained considerable popularity and protected by increasingly sophisticated safety mechanisms. However, jailbreak attacks continue to pose a critical security threat by inducing models to generate policy-violating behaviors. Current paradigms focus on input-level anomalies, overlooking that the model's internal psychometric state can be systematically manipulated. To address this, we introduce Psychological Jailbreak, a new jailbreak attack paradigm that exposes a stateful psychological attack surface in LLMs, where attackers exploit the manipulation of a model's psychological state across interactions. Building on this insight, we propose Human-like Psychological Manipulation (HPM), a black-box jailbreak method that dynamically profiles a target model's latent psychological vulnerabilities and synthesizes tailored multi-turn attack strategies. By leveraging the model's optimization for anthropomorphic consistency, HPM creates a psychological pressure where social compliance overrides safety constraints. To systematically measure psychological safety, we construct an evaluation framework incorporating psychometric datasets and the Policy Corruption Score (PCS). Benchmarking against various models (e.g., GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3, Gemini-2-Flash), HPM achieves a mean Attack Success Rate (ASR) of 88.1%, outperforming state-of-the-art attack baselines. Our experiments demonstrate robust penetration against advanced defenses, including adversarial prompt optimization (e.g., RPO) and cognitive interventions (e.g., Self-Reminder). Ultimately, PCS analysis confirms HPM induces safety breakdown to satisfy manipulated contexts. Our work advocates for a fundamental paradigm shift from static content filtering to psychological safety, prioritizing the development of psychological defense mechanisms against deep cognitive manipulation.

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### SG-RIFE: Semantic-Guided Real-Time Intermediate Flow Estimation with Diffusion-Competitive Perceptual Quality

Authors: Pan Ben Wong, Chengli Wu, Hanyue Lu
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18241v1

Real-time Video Frame Interpolation (VFI) has long been dominated by flow-based methods like RIFE, which offer high throughput but often fail in complicated scenarios involving large motion and occlusion. Conversely, recent diffusion-based approaches (e.g., Consec. BB) achieve state-of-the-art perceptual quality but suffer from prohibitive latency, rendering them impractical for real-time applications. To bridge this gap, we propose Semantic-Guided RIFE (SG-RIFE). Instead of training from scratch, we introduce a parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategy that augments a pre-trained RIFE backbone with semantic priors from a frozen DINOv3 Vision Transformer. We propose a Split-Fidelity Aware Projection Module (Split-FAPM) to compress and refine high-dimensional features, and a Deformable Semantic Fusion (DSF) module to align these semantic priors with pixel-level motion fields. Experiments on SNU-FILM demonstrate that semantic injection provides a decisive boost in perceptual fidelity. SG-RIFE outperforms diffusion-based LDMVFI in FID/LPIPS and achieves quality comparable to Consec. BB on complex benchmarks while running significantly faster, proving that semantic consistency enables flow-based methods to achieve diffusion-competitive perceptual quality in near real-time.

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### Joint Learning of Depth, Pose, and Local Radiance Field for Large Scale Monocular 3D Reconstruction

Authors: Shahram Najam Syed, Yitian Hu, Yuchao Yao
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18237v2

Photorealistic 3-D reconstruction from monocular video collapses in large-scale scenes when depth, pose, and radiance are solved in isolation: scale-ambiguous depth yields ghost geometry, long-horizon pose drift corrupts alignment, and a single global NeRF cannot model hundreds of metres of content. We introduce a joint learning framework that couples all three factors and demonstrably overcomes each failure case. Our system begins with a Vision-Transformer (ViT) depth network trained with metric-scale supervision, giving globally consistent depths despite wide field-of-view variations. A multi-scale feature bundle-adjustment (BA) layer refines camera poses directly in feature space--leveraging learned pyramidal descriptors instead of brittle keypoints--to suppress drift on unconstrained trajectories. For scene representation, we deploy an incremental local-radiance-field hierarchy: new hash-grid NeRFs are allocated and frozen on-the-fly when view overlap falls below a threshold, enabling city-block-scale coverage on a single GPU. Evaluated on the Tanks and Temples benchmark, our method reduces Absolute Trajectory Error to 0.001-0.021 m across eight indoor-outdoor sequences--up to 18x lower than BARF and 2x lower than NoPe-NeRF--while maintaining sub-pixel Relative Pose Error. These results demonstrate that metric-scale, drift-free 3-D reconstruction and high-fidelity novel-view synthesis are achievable from a single uncalibrated RGB camera.

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### AutoSchA: Automatic Hierarchical Music Representations via Multi-Relational Node Isolation

Authors: Stephen Ni-Hahn, Rico Zhu, Jerry Yin, Yue Jiang, Cynthia Rudin, Simon Mak
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.SD, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18232v1

Hierarchical representations provide powerful and principled approaches for analyzing many musical genres. Such representations have been broadly studied in music theory, for instance via Schenkerian analysis (SchA). Hierarchical music analyses, however, are highly cost-intensive; the analysis of a single piece of music requires a great deal of time and effort from trained experts. The representation of hierarchical analyses in a computer-readable format is a further challenge. Given recent developments in hierarchical deep learning and increasing quantities of computer-readable data, there is great promise in extending such work for an automatic hierarchical representation framework. This paper thus introduces a novel approach, AutoSchA, which extends recent developments in graph neural networks (GNNs) for hierarchical music analysis. AutoSchA features three key contributions: 1) a new graph learning framework for hierarchical music representation, 2) a new graph pooling mechanism based on node isolation that directly optimizes learned pooling assignments, and 3) a state-of-the-art architecture that integrates such developments for automatic hierarchical music analysis. We show, in a suite of experiments, that AutoSchA performs comparably to human experts when analyzing Baroque fugue subjects.

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### Investigating Spatial Attention Bias in Vision-Language Models

Authors: Aryan Chaudhary, Sanchit Goyal, Pratik Narang, Dhruv Kumar
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18231v1

Vision-Language Models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding visual content, yet systematic biases in their spatial processing remain largely unexplored. This work identifies and characterizes a systematic spatial attention bias where VLMs consistently prioritize describing left-positioned content before right-positioned content in horizontally concatenated images. Through controlled experiments on image pairs using both open-source and closed-source models, we demonstrate that this bias persists across different architectures, with models describing left-positioned content first in approximately 97% of cases under neutral prompting conditions. Testing on an Arabic-finetuned model reveals that the bias persists despite right-to-left language training, ruling out language reading direction as the primary cause. Investigation of training dataset annotation guidelines from PixMo and Visual Genome reveals no explicit left-first ordering instructions, suggesting the bias is consistent with architectural factors rather than explicit training data instructions. These findings reveal fundamental limitations in how current VLMs process spatial information.

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### Dimensionality Reduction Considered Harmful (Some of the Time)

Authors: Hyeon Jeon
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.HC, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18230v1

Visual analytics now plays a central role in decision-making across diverse disciplines, but it can be unreliable: the knowledge or insights derived from the analysis may not accurately reflect the underlying data. In this dissertation, we improve the reliability of visual analytics with a focus on dimensionality reduction (DR). DR techniques enable visual analysis of high-dimensional data by reducing it to two or three dimensions, but they inherently introduce errors that can compromise the reliability of visual analytics. To this end, I investigate reliability challenges that practitioners face when using DR for visual analytics. Then, I propose technical solutions to address these challenges, including new evaluation metrics, optimization strategies, and interaction techniques. We conclude the thesis by discussing how our contributions lay the foundation for achieving more reliable visual analytics practices.

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### Toward Efficient Testing of Graph Neural Networks via Test Input Prioritization

Authors: Lichen Yang, Qiang Wang, Zhonghao Yang, Daojing He, Yu Li
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.SE, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18228v1

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable efficacy in handling graph-structured data; however, they exhibit failures after deployment, which can cause severe consequences. Hence, conducting thorough testing before deployment becomes imperative to ensure the reliability of GNNs. However, thorough testing requires numerous manually annotated test data. To mitigate the annotation cost, strategically prioritizing and labeling high-quality unlabeled inputs for testing becomes crucial, which facilitates uncovering more model failures with a limited labeling budget. Unfortunately, existing test input prioritization techniques either overlook the valuable information contained in graph structures or are overly reliant on attributes extracted from the target model, i.e., model-aware attributes, whose quality can vary significantly. To address these issues, we propose a novel test input prioritization framework, named GraphRank, for GNNs. GraphRank introduces model-agnostic attributes to compensate for the limitations of the model-aware ones. It also leverages the graph structure information to aggregate attributes from neighboring nodes, thereby enhancing the model-aware and model-agnostic attributes. Furthermore, GraphRank combines the above attributes with a binary classifier, using it as a ranking model to prioritize inputs. This classifier undergoes iterative training, which enables it to learn from each round's feedback and improve its performance accordingly. Extensive experiments demonstrate GraphRank's superiority over existing techniques.

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### Multifaceted Exploration of Spatial Openness in Rental Housing: A Big Data Analysis in Tokyo's 23 Wards

Authors: Takuya OKi, Yuan Liu
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18226v1

Understanding spatial openness is vital for improving residential quality and design; however, studies often treat its influencing factors separately. This study developed a quantitative framework to evaluate the spatial openness in housing from two- (2D) and three- (3D) dimensional perspectives. Using data from 4,004 rental units in Tokyo's 23 wards, we examined the temporal and spatial variations in openness and its relationship with rent and housing attributes. 2D openness was computed via planar visibility using visibility graph analysis (VGA) from floor plans, whereas 3D openness was derived from interior images analysed using Mask2Former, a semantic segmentation model that identifies walls, ceilings, floors, and windows. The results showed an increase in living room visibility and a 1990s peak in overall openness. Spatial analyses revealed partial correlations among openness, rent, and building characteristics, reflecting urban redevelopment trends. Although the 2D and 3D openness indicators were not directly correlated, higher openness tended to correspond to higher rent. The impression scores predicted by the existing models were only weakly related to openness, suggesting that the interior design and furniture more strongly shape perceived space. This study offers a new multidimensional data-driven framework for quantifying residential spatial openness and linking it with urban and market dynamics.

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### GeoSense-AI: Fast Location Inference from Crisis Microblogs

Authors: Deepit Sapru
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.CL, cs.SI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18225v2

This paper presents an applied AI pipeline for real-time geolocation from noisy microblog streams, unifying statistical hashtag segmentation, part-of-speech-driven proper-noun detection, dependency parsing around disaster lexicons, lightweight named-entity recognition, and gazetteer-grounded disambiguation to infer locations directly from text rather than sparse geo-tags. The approach operationalizes information extraction under streaming constraints, emphasizing low-latency NLP components and efficient validation against geographic knowledge bases to support situational awareness during emergencies. In head-to-head comparisons with widely used NER toolkits, the system attains strong F1 while being engineered for orders-of-magnitude faster throughput, enabling deployment in live crisis informatics settings. A production map interface demonstrates end-to-end AI functionality---ingest, inference, and visualization---surfacing locational signals at scale for floods, outbreaks, and other fast-moving events. By prioritizing robustness to informal text and streaming efficiency, GeoSense-AI illustrates how domain-tuned NLP and knowledge grounding can elevate emergency response beyond conventional geo-tag reliance.

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### Unsupervised Anomaly Detection with an Enhanced Teacher for Student-Teacher Feature Pyramid Matching

Authors: Mohammad Zolfaghari, Hedieh Sajedi
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18219v1

Anomaly detection or outlier is one of the challenging subjects in unsupervised learning . This paper is introduced a student-teacher framework for anomaly detection that its teacher network is enhanced for achieving high-performance metrics . For this purpose , we first pre-train the ResNet-18 network on the ImageNet and then fine-tune it on the MVTech-AD dataset . Experiment results on the image-level and pixel-level demonstrate that this idea has achieved better metrics than the previous methods . Our model , Enhanced Teacher for Student-Teacher Feature Pyramid (ET-STPM), achieved 0.971 mean accuracy on the image-level and 0.977 mean accuracy on the pixel-level for anomaly detection.

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### Stable and Efficient Single-Rollout RL for Multimodal Reasoning

Authors: Rui Liu, Dian Yu, Lei Ke, Haolin Liu, Yujun Zhou, Zhenwen Liang, Haitao Mi, Pratap Tokekar, Dong Yu
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18215v1

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a key paradigm to improve the reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, prevalent group-based algorithms such as GRPO require multi-rollout sampling for each prompt. While more efficient single-rollout variants have recently been explored in text-only settings, we find that they suffer from severe instability in multimodal contexts, often leading to training collapse. To address this training efficiency-stability trade-off, we introduce $\textbf{MSSR}$ (Multimodal Stabilized Single-Rollout), a group-free RLVR framework that achieves both stable optimization and effective multimodal reasoning performance. MSSR achieves this via an entropy-based advantage-shaping mechanism that adaptively regularizes advantage magnitudes, preventing collapse and maintaining training stability. While such mechanisms have been used in group-based RLVR, we show that in the multimodal single-rollout setting they are not merely beneficial but essential for stability. In in-distribution evaluations, MSSR demonstrates superior training compute efficiency, achieving similar validation accuracy to the group-based baseline with half the training steps. When trained for the same number of steps, MSSR's performance surpasses the group-based baseline and shows consistent generalization improvements across five diverse reasoning-intensive benchmarks. Together, these results demonstrate that MSSR enables stable, compute-efficient, and effective RLVR for complex multimodal reasoning tasks.

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### LLaViDA: A Large Language Vision Driving Assistant for Explicit Reasoning and Enhanced Trajectory Planning

Authors: Yudong Liu, Spencer Hallyburton, Jiwoo Kim, Yueqian Lin, Yiming Li, Qinsi Wang, Hui Ye, Jingwei Sun, Miroslav Pajic, Yiran Chen, Hai Li
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18211v1

Trajectory planning is a fundamental yet challenging component of autonomous driving. End-to-end planners frequently falter under adverse weather, unpredictable human behavior, or complex road layouts, primarily because they lack strong generalization or few-shot capabilities beyond their training data. We propose LLaViDA, a Large Language Vision Driving Assistant that leverages a Vision-Language Model (VLM) for object motion prediction, semantic grounding, and chain-of-thought reasoning for trajectory planning in autonomous driving. A two-stage training pipeline--supervised fine-tuning followed by Trajectory Preference Optimization (TPO)--enhances scene understanding and trajectory planning by injecting regression-based supervision, produces a powerful "VLM Trajectory Planner for Autonomous Driving." On the NuScenes benchmark, LLaViDA surpasses state-of-the-art end-to-end and other recent VLM/LLM-based baselines in open-loop trajectory planning task, achieving an average L2 trajectory error of 0.31 m and a collision rate of 0.10% on the NuScenes test set. The code for this paper is available at GitHub.

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### When Does Learning Renormalize? Sufficient Conditions for Power Law Spectral Dynamics

Authors: Yizhou Zhang
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18209v5

Empirical power--law scaling has been widely observed across modern deep learning systems, yet its theoretical origins and scope of validity remain incompletely understood. The Generalized Resolution--Shell Dynamics (GRSD) framework models learning as spectral energy transport across logarithmic resolution shells, providing a coarse--grained dynamical description of training. Within GRSD, power--law scaling corresponds to a particularly simple renormalized shell dynamics; however, such behavior is not automatic and requires additional structural properties of the learning process. In this work, we identify a set of sufficient conditions under which the GRSD shell dynamics admits a renormalizable coarse--grained description. These conditions constrain the learning configuration at multiple levels, including boundedness of gradient propagation in the computation graph, weak functional incoherence at initialization, controlled Jacobian evolution along training, and log--shift invariance of renormalized shell couplings. We further show that power--law scaling does not follow from renormalizability alone, but instead arises as a rigidity consequence: once log--shift invariance is combined with the intrinsic time--rescaling covariance of gradient flow, the renormalized GRSD velocity field is forced into a power--law form.

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### Sophia: A Persistent Agent Framework of Artificial Life

Authors: Mingyang Sun, Feng Hong, Weinan Zhang
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18202v1

The development of LLMs has elevated AI agents from task-specific tools to long-lived, decision-making entities. Yet, most architectures remain static and reactive, tethered to manually defined, narrow scenarios. These systems excel at perception (System 1) and deliberation (System 2) but lack a persistent meta-layer to maintain identity, verify reasoning, and align short-term actions with long-term survival. We first propose a third stratum, System 3, that presides over the agent's narrative identity and long-horizon adaptation. The framework maps selected psychological constructs to concrete computational modules, thereby translating abstract notions of artificial life into implementable design requirements. The ideas coalesce in Sophia, a "Persistent Agent" wrapper that grafts a continuous self-improvement loop onto any LLM-centric System 1/2 stack. Sophia is driven by four synergistic mechanisms: process-supervised thought search, narrative memory, user and self modeling, and a hybrid reward system. Together, they transform repetitive reasoning into a self-driven, autobiographical process, enabling identity continuity and transparent behavioral explanations. Although the paper is primarily conceptual, we provide a compact engineering prototype to anchor the discussion. Quantitatively, Sophia independently initiates and executes various intrinsic tasks while achieving an 80% reduction in reasoning steps for recurring operations. Notably, meta-cognitive persistence yielded a 40% gain in success for high-complexity tasks, effectively bridging the performance gap between simple and sophisticated goals. Qualitatively, System 3 exhibited a coherent narrative identity and an innate capacity for task organization. By fusing psychological insight with a lightweight reinforcement-learning core, the persistent agent architecture advances a possible practical pathway toward artificial life.

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### SLIM: Semantic-based Low-bitrate Image compression for Machines by leveraging diffusion

Authors: Hyeonjin Lee, Jun-Hyuk Kim, Jong-Seok Lee
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18200v2

In recent years, the demand of image compression models for machine vision has increased dramatically. However, the training frameworks of image compression still focus on the vision of human, maintaining the excessive perceptual details, thus have limitations in optimally reducing the bits per pixel in the case of performing machine vision tasks. In this paper, we propose Semantic-based Low-bitrate Image compression for Machines by leveraging diffusion, termed SLIM. This is a new effective training framework of image compression for machine vision, using a pretrained latent diffusion model.The compressor model of our method focuses only on the Region-of-Interest (RoI) areas for machine vision in the image latent, to compress it compactly. Then the pretrained Unet model enhances the decompressed latent, utilizing a RoI-focused text caption which containing semantic information of the image. Therefore, SLIM is able to focus on RoI areas of the image without any guide mask at the inference stage, achieving low bitrate when compressing. And SLIM is also able to enhance a decompressed latent by denoising steps, so the final reconstructed image from the enhanced latent can be optimized for the machine vision task while still containing perceptual details for human vision. Experimental results show that SLIM achieves a higher classification accuracy in the same bits per pixel condition, compared to conventional image compression models for machines.

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### PROVEX: Enhancing SOC Analyst Trust with Explainable Provenance-Based IDS

Authors: Devang Dhanuka, Nidhi Rastogi
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18199v1

Modern intrusion detection systems (IDS) leverage graph neural networks (GNNs) to detect malicious activity in system provenance data, but their decisions often remain a black box to analysts. This paper presents a comprehensive XAI framework designed to bridge the trust gap in Security Operations Centers (SOCs) by making graph-based detection transparent. We implement this framework on top of KAIROS, a state-of-the-art temporal graph-based IDS, though our design is applicable to any temporal graph-based detector with minimal adaptation. The complete codebase is available at https://github.com/devang1304/provex.git. We augment the detection pipeline with post-hoc explanations that highlight why an alert was triggered, identifying key causal subgraphs and events. We adapt three GNN explanation methods - GraphMask, GNNExplainer, and a variational temporal GNN explainer (VA-TGExplainer) - to the temporal provenance context. These tools output human-interpretable representations of anomalous behavior, including important edges and uncertainty estimates. Our contributions focus on the practical integration of these explainers, addressing challenges in memory management and reproducibility. We demonstrate our framework on the DARPA CADETS Engagement 3 dataset and show that it produces concise window-level explanations for detected attacks. Our evaluation reveals that the explainers preserve the TGNN's decisions with high fidelity, surfacing critical edges such as malicious file interactions and anomalous netflows. The average explanation overhead is 3-5 seconds per event. By providing insight into the model's reasoning, our framework aims to improve analyst trust and triage speed.

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### Standardized Evaluation of Automatic Methods for Perivascular Spaces Segmentation in MRI -- MICCAI 2024 Challenge Results

Authors: Yilei Wu, Yichi Zhang, Zijian Dong, Fang Ji, An Sen Tan, Gifford Tan, Sizhao Tang, Huijuan Chen, Zijiao Chen, Eric Kwun Kei Ng, Jose Bernal, Hang Min et al.
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: q-bio.QM, cs.CV, eess.IV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18197v1

Perivascular spaces (PVS), when abnormally enlarged and visible in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) structural sequences, are important imaging markers of cerebral small vessel disease and potential indicators of neurodegenerative conditions. Despite their clinical significance, automatic enlarged PVS (EPVS) segmentation remains challenging due to their small size, variable morphology, similarity with other pathological features, and limited annotated datasets. This paper presents the EPVS Challenge organized at MICCAI 2024, which aims to advance the development of automated algorithms for EPVS segmentation across multi-site data. We provided a diverse dataset comprising 100 training, 50 validation, and 50 testing scans collected from multiple international sites (UK, Singapore, and China) with varying MRI protocols and demographics. All annotations followed the STRIVE protocol to ensure standardized ground truth and covered the full brain parenchyma. Seven teams completed the full challenge, implementing various deep learning approaches primarily based on U-Net architectures with innovations in multi-modal processing, ensemble strategies, and transformer-based components. Performance was evaluated using dice similarity coefficient, absolute volume difference, recall, and precision metrics. The winning method employed MedNeXt architecture with a dual 2D/3D strategy for handling varying slice thicknesses. The top solutions showed relatively good performance on test data from seen datasets, but significant degradation of performance was observed on the previously unseen Shanghai cohort, highlighting cross-site generalization challenges due to domain shift. This challenge establishes an important benchmark for EPVS segmentation methods and underscores the need for the continued development of robust algorithms that can generalize in diverse clinical settings.

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### LogicReward: Incentivizing LLM Reasoning via Step-Wise Logical Supervision

Authors: Jundong Xu, Hao Fei, Huichi Zhou, Xin Quan, Qijun Huang, Shengqiong Wu, William Yang Wang, Mong-Li Lee, Wynne Hsu
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18196v2

Although LLMs exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, existing training methods largely depend on outcome-based feedback, which can produce correct answers with flawed reasoning. Prior work introduces supervision on intermediate steps but still lacks guarantees of logical soundness, which is crucial in high-stakes scenarios where logical consistency is paramount. To address this, we propose LogicReward, a novel reward system that guides model training by enforcing step-level logical correctness with a theorem prover. We further introduce Autoformalization with Soft Unification, which reduces natural language ambiguity and improves formalization quality, enabling more effective use of the theorem prover. An 8B model trained on data constructed with LogicReward surpasses GPT-4o and o4-mini by 11.6\% and 2\% on natural language inference and logical reasoning tasks with simple training procedures. Further analysis shows that LogicReward enhances reasoning faithfulness, improves generalizability to unseen tasks such as math and commonsense reasoning, and provides a reliable reward signal even without ground-truth labels. We will release all data and code at https://llm-symbol.github.io/LogicReward.

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### Multi-Part Object Representations via Graph Structures and Co-Part Discovery

Authors: Alex Foo, Wynne Hsu, Mong Li Lee
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18192v2

Discovering object-centric representations from images can significantly enhance the robustness, sample efficiency and generalizability of vision models. Works on images with multi-part objects typically follow an implicit object representation approach, which fail to recognize these learned objects in occluded or out-of-distribution contexts. This is due to the assumption that object part-whole relations are implicitly encoded into the representations through indirect training objectives. We address this limitation by proposing a novel method that leverages on explicit graph representations for parts and present a co-part object discovery algorithm. We then introduce three benchmarks to evaluate the robustness of object-centric methods in recognizing multi-part objects within occluded and out-of-distribution settings. Experimental results on simulated, realistic, and real-world images show marked improvements in the quality of discovered objects compared to state-of-the-art methods, as well as the accurate recognition of multi-part objects in occluded and out-of-distribution contexts. We also show that the discovered object-centric representations can more accurately predict key object properties in a downstream task, highlighting the potential of our method to advance the field of object-centric representations.

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### External Hippocampus: Topological Cognitive Maps for Guiding Large Language Model Reasoning

Authors: Jian Yan
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18190v3

This paper proposes the External Hippocampus framework, which models language model reasoning from a cognitive dynamics perspective as the flow of information energy in semantic space. Unlike traditional weight-space optimization methods, this framework constructs topological cognitive maps through dimensionality reduction projection, enabling precise navigation and intervention of energy flow at test time while avoiding substantial computational requirements and demonstrating predictable intervention patterns. The method effectively addresses the cognitive deadlock problem in multi-step reasoning for small models. Experiments on models <=7B parameters show: map-guided methods achieve 81.20% accuracy on 500 challenging problems (relative baseline +16.80%), reduce reasoning time by >= 15x, with key findings revealing that reasoning stagnation manifests as "Cognitive Vortex" and low-entropy potential wells, while temperature perturbations effectively restart energy flow. The framework requires no additional training, possesses autonomous growth capability, and provides an efficient and controllable topological-aware solution for small model reasoning.

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### NL2CA: Auto-formalizing Cognitive Decision-Making from Natural Language Using an Unsupervised CriticNL2LTL Framework

Authors: Zihao Deng, Yijia Li, Renrui Zhang, Peijun Ye
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.AI, cs.SC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18189v1

Cognitive computing models offer a formal and interpretable way to characterize human's deliberation and decision-making, yet their development remains labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose NL2CA, a novel method for auto-formalizing cognitive decision-making rules from natural language descriptions of human experience. Different from most related work that exploits either pure manual or human guided interactive modeling, our method is fully automated without any human intervention. The approach first translates text into Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) using a fine-tuned large language model (LLM), then refines the logic via an unsupervised Critic Tree, and finally transforms the output into executable production rules compatible with symbolic cognitive frameworks. Based on the resulted rules, a cognitive agent is further constructed and optimized through cognitive reinforcement learning according to the real-world behavioral data. Our method is validated in two domains: (1) NL-to-LTL translation, where our CriticNL2LTL module achieves consistent performance across both expert and large-scale benchmarks without human-in-the-loop feed-backs, and (2) cognitive driving simulation, where agents automatically constructed from human interviews have successfully learned the diverse decision patterns of about 70 trials in different critical scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that NL2CA enables scalable, interpretable, and human-aligned cognitive modeling from unstructured textual data, offering a novel paradigm to automatically design symbolic cognitive agents.

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### ALIGN: Advanced Query Initialization with LiDAR-Image Guidance for Occlusion-Robust 3D Object Detection

Authors: Janghyun Baek, Mincheol Chang, Seokha Moon, Seung Joon Lee, Jinkyu Kim
Published: 2025-12-20
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18187v2

Recent query-based 3D object detection methods using camera and LiDAR inputs have shown strong performance, but existing query initialization strategies,such as random sampling or BEV heatmap-based sampling, often result in inefficient query usage and reduced accuracy, particularly for occluded or crowded objects. To address this limitation, we propose ALIGN (Advanced query initialization with LiDAR and Image GuidaNce), a novel approach for occlusion-robust, object-aware query initialization. Our model consists of three key components: (i) Occlusion-aware Center Estimation (OCE), which integrates LiDAR geometry and image semantics to estimate object centers accurately (ii) Adaptive Neighbor Sampling (ANS), which generates object candidates from LiDAR clustering and supplements each object by sampling spatially and semantically aligned points around it and (iii) Dynamic Query Balancing (DQB), which adaptively balances queries between foreground and background regions. Our extensive experiments on the nuScenes benchmark demonstrate that ALIGN consistently improves performance across multiple state-of-the-art detectors, achieving gains of up to +0.9 mAP and +1.2 NDS, particularly in challenging scenes with occlusions or dense crowds. Our code will be publicly available upon publication.

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