# Research Papers — 2025-12 · bundle page 53 of 175

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### A Critical Review of Monte Carlo Algorithms Balancing Performance and Probabilistic Accuracy with AI Augmented Framework

Authors: Ravi Prasad
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: stat.CO, cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17968v1

Monte Carlo algorithms are a foundational pillar of modern computational science, yet their effective application hinges on a deep understanding of their performance trade offs. This paper presents a critical analysis of the evolution of Monte Carlo algorithms, focusing on the persistent tension between statistical efficiency and computational cost. We describe the historical development from the foundational Metropolis Hastings algorithm to contemporary methods like Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. A central emphasis of this survey is the rigorous discussion of time and space complexity, including upper, lower, and asymptotic tight bounds for each major algorithm class. We examine the specific motivations for developing these methods and the key theoretical and practical observations such as the introduction of gradient information and adaptive tuning in HMC that led to successively better solutions. Furthermore, we provide a justification framework that discusses explicit situations in which using one algorithm is demonstrably superior to another for the same problem. The paper concludes by assessing the profound significance and impact of these algorithms and detailing major current research challenges.

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### Both Semantics and Reconstruction Matter: Making Representation Encoders Ready for Text-to-Image Generation and Editing

Authors: Shilong Zhang, He Zhang, Zhifei Zhang, Chongjian Ge, Shuchen Xue, Shaoteng Liu, Mengwei Ren, Soo Ye Kim, Yuqian Zhou, Qing Liu, Daniil Pakhomov, Kai Zhang et al.
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17909v1

Modern Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) typically operate in low-level Variational Autoencoder (VAE) latent spaces that are primarily optimized for pixel-level reconstruction. To unify vision generation and understanding, a burgeoning trend is to adopt high-dimensional features from representation encoders as generative latents. However, we empirically identify two fundamental obstacles in this paradigm: (1) the discriminative feature space lacks compact regularization, making diffusion models prone to off-manifold latents that lead to inaccurate object structures; and (2) the encoder's inherently weak pixel-level reconstruction hinders the generator from learning accurate fine-grained geometry and texture. In this paper, we propose a systematic framework to adapt understanding-oriented encoder features for generative tasks. We introduce a semantic-pixel reconstruction objective to regularize the latent space, enabling the compression of both semantic information and fine-grained details into a highly compact representation (96 channels with 16x16 spatial downsampling). This design ensures that the latent space remains semantically rich and achieves state-of-the-art image reconstruction, while remaining compact enough for accurate generation. Leveraging this representation, we design a unified Text-to-Image (T2I) and image editing model. Benchmarking against various feature spaces, we demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction, faster convergence, and substantial performance gains in both T2I and editing tasks, validating that representation encoders can be effectively adapted into robust generative components.

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### ReDepth Anything: Test-Time Depth Refinement via Self-Supervised Re-lighting

Authors: Ananta R. Bhattarai, Helge Rhodin
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17908v2

Monocular depth estimation remains challenging, as foundation models such as Depth Anything V2 (DA-V2) struggle with real-world images that are far from the training distribution. We introduce Re-Depth Anything, a test-time self-supervision framework that bridges this domain gap by fusing foundation models with the powerful priors of large-scale 2D diffusion models. Our method performs label-free refinement directly on the input image by re-lighting the predicted depth map and augmenting the input. This re-synthesis method replaces classical photometric reconstruction by leveraging shape from shading (SfS) cues in a new, generative context with Score Distillation Sampling (SDS). To prevent optimization collapse, our framework updates only intermediate embeddings and the decoder's weights, rather than optimizing the depth tensor directly or fine-tuning the full model. Across diverse benchmarks, Re-Depth Anything yields substantial gains in depth accuracy and realism over DA-V2, and applied on top of Depth Anything 3 (DA3) achieves state-of-the-art results, showcasing new avenues for self-supervision by geometric reasoning.

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### Re-Depth Anything: Test-Time Depth Refinement via Self-Supervised Re-lighting

Authors: Ananta R. Bhattarai, Helge Rhodin
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17908v1

Monocular depth estimation remains challenging as recent foundation models, such as Depth Anything V2 (DA-V2), struggle with real-world images that are far from the training distribution. We introduce Re-Depth Anything, a test-time self-supervision framework that bridges this domain gap by fusing DA-V2 with the powerful priors of large-scale 2D diffusion models. Our method performs label-free refinement directly on the input image by re-lighting predicted depth maps and augmenting the input. This re-synthesis method replaces classical photometric reconstruction by leveraging shape from shading (SfS) cues in a new, generative context with Score Distillation Sampling (SDS). To prevent optimization collapse, our framework employs a targeted optimization strategy: rather than optimizing depth directly or fine-tuning the full model, we freeze the encoder and only update intermediate embeddings while also fine-tuning the decoder. Across diverse benchmarks, Re-Depth Anything yields substantial gains in depth accuracy and realism over the DA-V2, showcasing new avenues for self-supervision by augmenting geometric reasoning.

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### Dexterous World Models

Authors: Byungjun Kim, Taeksoo Kim, Junyoung Lee, Hanbyul Joo
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17907v1

Recent progress in 3D reconstruction has made it easy to create realistic digital twins from everyday environments. However, current digital twins remain largely static and are limited to navigation and view synthesis without embodied interactivity. To bridge this gap, we introduce Dexterous World Model (DWM), a scene-action-conditioned video diffusion framework that models how dexterous human actions induce dynamic changes in static 3D scenes. Given a static 3D scene rendering and an egocentric hand motion sequence, DWM generates temporally coherent videos depicting plausible human-scene interactions. Our approach conditions video generation on (1) static scene renderings following a specified camera trajectory to ensure spatial consistency, and (2) egocentric hand mesh renderings that encode both geometry and motion cues to model action-conditioned dynamics directly. To train DWM, we construct a hybrid interaction video dataset. Synthetic egocentric interactions provide fully aligned supervision for joint locomotion and manipulation learning, while fixed-camera real-world videos contribute diverse and realistic object dynamics. Experiments demonstrate that DWM enables realistic and physically plausible interactions, such as grasping, opening, and moving objects, while maintaining camera and scene consistency. This framework represents a first step toward video diffusion-based interactive digital twins and enables embodied simulation from egocentric actions.

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### Adversarial Robustness of Vision in Open Foundation Models

Authors: Jonathon Fox, William J Buchanan, Pavlos Papadopoulos
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17902v1

With the increase in deep learning, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand the model in which AI systems can identify objects. Thus, an adversary could aim to modify an image by adding unseen elements, which will confuse the AI in its recognition of an entity. This paper thus investigates the adversarial robustness of LLaVA-1.5-13B and Meta's Llama 3.2 Vision-8B-2. These are tested for untargeted PGD (Projected Gradient Descent) against the visual input modality, and empirically evaluated on the Visual Question Answering (VQA) v2 dataset subset. The results of these adversarial attacks are then quantified using the standard VQA accuracy metric. This evaluation is then compared with the accuracy degradation (accuracy drop) of LLaVA and Llama 3.2 Vision. A key finding is that Llama 3.2 Vision, despite a lower baseline accuracy in this setup, exhibited a smaller drop in performance under attack compared to LLaVA, particularly at higher perturbation levels. Overall, the findings confirm that the vision modality represents a viable attack vector for degrading the performance of contemporary open-weight VLMs, including Meta's Llama 3.2 Vision. Furthermore, they highlight that adversarial robustness does not necessarily correlate directly with standard benchmark performance and may be influenced by underlying architectural and training factors.

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### When Reasoning Meets Its Laws

Authors: Junyu Zhang, Yifan Sun, Tianang Leng, Jingyan Shen, Liu Ziyin, Paul Pu Liang, Huan Zhang
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17901v1

Despite the superior performance of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), their reasoning behaviors are often counterintuitive, leading to suboptimal reasoning capabilities. To theoretically formalize the desired reasoning behaviors, this paper presents the Laws of Reasoning (LoRe), a unified framework that characterizes intrinsic reasoning patterns in LRMs. We first propose compute law with the hypothesis that the reasoning compute should scale linearly with question complexity. Beyond compute, we extend LoRe with a supplementary accuracy law. Since the question complexity is difficult to quantify in practice, we examine these hypotheses by two properties of the laws, monotonicity and compositionality. We therefore introduce LoRe-Bench, a benchmark that systematically measures these two tractable properties for large reasoning models. Evaluation shows that most reasoning models exhibit reasonable monotonicity but lack compositionality. In response, we develop an effective finetuning approach that enforces compute-law compositionality. Extensive empirical studies demonstrate that better compliance with compute laws yields consistently improved reasoning performance on multiple benchmarks, and uncovers synergistic effects across properties and laws. Project page: https://lore-project.github.io/

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### Diffusion Forcing for Multi-Agent Interaction Sequence Modeling

Authors: Vongani H. Maluleke, Kie Horiuchi, Lea Wilken, Evonne Ng, Jitendra Malik, Angjoo Kanazawa
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17900v2

Understanding and generating multi-person interactions is a fundamental challenge with broad implications for robotics and social computing. While humans naturally coordinate in groups, modeling such interactions remains difficult due to long temporal horizons, strong inter-agent dependencies, and variable group sizes. Existing motion generation methods are largely task-specific and do not generalize to flexible multi-agent generation. We introduce MAGNet (Multi-Agent Generative Network), a unified autoregressive diffusion framework for multi-agent motion generation that supports a wide range of interaction tasks through flexible conditioning and sampling. MAGNet performs dyadic and polyadic prediction, partner inpainting, partner prediction, and agentic generation all within a single model, and can autoregressively generate ultra-long sequences spanning hundreds of motion steps. We explicitly model inter-agent coupling during autoregressive denoising, enabling coherent coordination across agents. As a result, MAGNet captures both tightly synchronized activities (e.g., dancing, boxing) and loosely structured social interactions. Our approach performs on par with specialized methods on dyadic benchmarks while naturally extending to polyadic scenarios involving three or more interacting people. Please watch the supplemental video, where the temporal dynamics and spatial coordination of generated interactions are best appreciated. Project page: https://von31.github.io/MAGNet/

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### Diffusion Forcing for Multi-Agent Interaction Sequence Modeling

Authors: Vongani H. Maluleke, Kie Horiuchi, Lea Wilken, Evonne Ng, Jitendra Malik, Angjoo Kanazawa
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17900v1

Understanding and generating multi-person interactions is a fundamental challenge with broad implications for robotics and social computing. While humans naturally coordinate in groups, modeling such interactions remains difficult due to long temporal horizons, strong inter-agent dependencies, and variable group sizes. Existing motion generation methods are largely task-specific and do not generalize to flexible multi-agent generation. We introduce MAGNet (Multi-Agent Diffusion Forcing Transformer), a unified autoregressive diffusion framework for multi-agent motion generation that supports a wide range of interaction tasks through flexible conditioning and sampling. MAGNet performs dyadic prediction, partner inpainting, and full multi-agent motion generation within a single model, and can autoregressively generate ultra-long sequences spanning hundreds of v. Building on Diffusion Forcing, we introduce key modifications that explicitly model inter-agent coupling during autoregressive denoising, enabling coherent coordination across agents. As a result, MAGNet captures both tightly synchronized activities (e.g, dancing, boxing) and loosely structured social interactions. Our approach performs on par with specialized methods on dyadic benchmarks while naturally extending to polyadic scenarios involving three or more interacting people, enabled by a scalable architecture that is agnostic to the number of agents. We refer readers to the supplemental video, where the temporal dynamics and spatial coordination of generated interactions are best appreciated. Project page: https://von31.github.io/MAGNet/

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### Distributionally Robust Imitation Learning: Layered Control Architecture for Certifiable Autonomy

Authors: Aditya Gahlawat, Ahmed Aboudonia, Sandeep Banik, Naira Hovakimyan, Nikolai Matni, Aaron D. Ames, Gioele Zardini, Alberto Speranzon
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: eess.SY, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17899v1

Imitation learning (IL) enables autonomous behavior by learning from expert demonstrations. While more sample-efficient than comparative alternatives like reinforcement learning, IL is sensitive to compounding errors induced by distribution shifts. There are two significant sources of distribution shifts when using IL-based feedback laws on systems: distribution shifts caused by policy error and distribution shifts due to exogenous disturbances and endogenous model errors due to lack of learning. Our previously developed approaches, Taylor Series Imitation Learning (TaSIL) and $\mathcal{L}_1$ -Distributionally Robust Adaptive Control (\ellonedrac), address the challenge of distribution shifts in complementary ways. While TaSIL offers robustness against policy error-induced distribution shifts, \ellonedrac offers robustness against distribution shifts due to aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties. To enable certifiable IL for learned and/or uncertain dynamical systems, we formulate \textit{Distributionally Robust Imitation Policy (DRIP)} architecture, a Layered Control Architecture (LCA) that integrates TaSIL and~\ellonedrac. By judiciously designing individual layer-centric input and output requirements, we show how we can guarantee certificates for the entire control pipeline. Our solution paves the path for designing fully certifiable autonomy pipelines, by integrating learning-based components, such as perception, with certifiable model-based decision-making through the proposed LCA approach.

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### Humanlike AI Design Increases Anthropomorphism but Yields Divergent Outcomes on Engagement and Trust Globally

Authors: Robin Schimmelpfennig, Mark Díaz, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Aida Davani
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17898v2

Over a billion users globally interact with AI systems engineered to mimic human traits. This development raises concerns that anthropomorphism, the attribution of human characteristics to AI, may foster over-reliance and misplaced trust. Yet, causal effects of humanlike AI design on users remain untested in ecologically valid, cross-cultural settings, leaving policy discussions to rely on theoretical assumptions derived largely from Western populations. Here we conducted two experiments (N=3,500) across ten countries representing a wide cultural spectrum, involving real-time, open-ended interactions with a state-of-the-art chatbot. We found users evaluate human-likeness based on pragmatic interactional cues (conversation flow, response speed, perspective-taking) rather than abstract theory-driven attributes emphasized in academic discourse (e.g., sentience, consciousness). Furthermore, while experimentally increasing chatbot's human-likeness reliably increased anthropomorphism across all sampled countries, it did not universally increase trust or engagement. Instead, effects were culturally contingent; design choices fostering engagement or trust in one country may reduce them in another. These findings challenge prevailing assumptions that humanlike AI poses uniform psychological risks and necessarily increases trust. Risk is not inherent to humanlike design but emerges from its interplay with cultural context. Consequently, governance frameworks must move beyond universalist approaches to account for this global heterogeneity.

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### Humanlike AI Design Increases Anthropomorphism but Yields Divergent Outcomes on Engagement and Trust Globally

Authors: Robin Schimmelpfennig, Mark Díaz, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Aida Davani
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17898v1

Over a billion users across the globe interact with AI systems engineered with increasing sophistication to mimic human traits. This shift has triggered urgent debate regarding Anthropomorphism, the attribution of human characteristics to synthetic agents, and its potential to induce misplaced trust or emotional dependency. However, the causal link between more humanlike AI design and subsequent effects on engagement and trust has not been tested in realistic human-AI interactions with a global user pool. Prevailing safety frameworks continue to rely on theoretical assumptions derived from Western populations, overlooking the global diversity of AI users. Here, we address these gaps through two large-scale cross-national experiments (N=3,500) across 10 diverse nations, involving real-time and open-ended interactions with an AI system. We find that when evaluating an AI's human-likeness, users focus less on the kind of theoretical aspects often cited in policy (e.g., sentience or consciousness), but rather applied, interactional cues like conversation flow or understanding the user's perspective. We also experimentally demonstrate that humanlike design levers can causally increase anthropomorphism among users; however, we do not find that humanlike design universally increases behavioral measures for user engagement and trust, as previous theoretical work suggests. Instead, part of the connection between human-likeness and behavioral outcomes is fractured by culture: specific design choices that foster self-reported trust in AI-systems in some populations (e.g., Brazil) may trigger the opposite result in others (e.g., Japan). Our findings challenge prevailing narratives of inherent risk in humanlike AI design. Instead, we identify a nuanced, culturally mediated landscape of human-AI interaction, which demands that we move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach in AI governance.

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### RadarGen: Automotive Radar Point Cloud Generation from Cameras

Authors: Tomer Borreda, Fangqiang Ding, Sanja Fidler, Shengyu Huang, Or Litany
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17897v2

We present RadarGen, a diffusion model for synthesizing realistic automotive radar point clouds from multi-view camera imagery. RadarGen adapts efficient image-latent diffusion to the radar domain by representing radar measurements in bird's-eye-view form that encodes spatial structure together with radar cross section (RCS) and Doppler attributes. A lightweight recovery step reconstructs point clouds from the generated maps. To better align generation with the visual scene, RadarGen incorporates BEV-aligned depth, semantic, and motion cues extracted from pretrained foundation models, which guide the stochastic generation process toward physically plausible radar patterns. Conditioning on images makes the approach broadly compatible, in principle, with existing visual datasets and simulation frameworks, offering a scalable direction for multimodal generative simulation. Evaluations on large-scale driving data show that RadarGen captures characteristic radar measurement distributions and reduces the gap to perception models trained on real data, marking a step toward unified generative simulation across sensing modalities.

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### RadarGen: Automotive Radar Point Cloud Generation from Cameras

Authors: Tomer Borreda, Fangqiang Ding, Sanja Fidler, Shengyu Huang, Or Litany
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17897v1

We present RadarGen, a diffusion model for synthesizing realistic automotive radar point clouds from multi-view camera imagery. RadarGen adapts efficient image-latent diffusion to the radar domain by representing radar measurements in bird's-eye-view form that encodes spatial structure together with radar cross section (RCS) and Doppler attributes. A lightweight recovery step reconstructs point clouds from the generated maps. To better align generation with the visual scene, RadarGen incorporates BEV-aligned depth, semantic, and motion cues extracted from pretrained foundation models, which guide the stochastic generation process toward physically plausible radar patterns. Conditioning on images makes the approach broadly compatible, in principle, with existing visual datasets and simulation frameworks, offering a scalable direction for multimodal generative simulation. Evaluations on large-scale driving data show that RadarGen captures characteristic radar measurement distributions and reduces the gap to perception models trained on real data, marking a step toward unified generative simulation across sensing modalities.

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### Exploring the Effect of Basis Rotation on NQS Performance

Authors: Sven Benjamin Kožić, Vinko Zlatić, Fabio Franchini, Salvatore Marco Giampaolo
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: quant-ph, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17893v2

Neural Quantum States (NQS) are powerful variational representations of quantum many-body wavefunctions, yet their performance depends sensitively on the chosen basis. Using an exactly solvable one-dimensional Ising model, we show that local basis rotations leave the minimization landscape unchanged while relocating the exact ground state in parameter space. This provides a controlled framework to disentangle representational limitations from optimization-induced trainability effects. This geometric displacement, quantified through information-geometric measures, can steer optimization of shallow architectures toward saddle points and high-curvature regions. As a result, low energy errors may coexist with an incorrect wavefunction structure. By comparing energy and infidelity optimization within the same variational architectures, we show that optimization failure can persist even when the rotated target state remains representable. Our results identify a geometric mechanism contributing to basis dependence in NQS and motivate landscape-aware variational design.

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### Exploring the Effect of Basis Rotation on NQS Performance

Authors: Sven Benjamin Kožić, Vinko Zlatić, Fabio Franchini, Salvatore Marco Giampaolo
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: quant-ph, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17893v1

Neural Quantum States (NQS) use neural networks to represent wavefunctions of quantum many-body systems, but their performance depends on the choice of basis, yet the underlying mechanism remains poorly understood. We use a fully solvable one-dimensional Ising model to show that local basis rotations leave the loss landscape unchanged while relocating the exact wavefunction in parameter space, effectively increasing its geometric distance from typical initializations. By sweeping a rotation angle, we compute quantum Fisher information and Fubini-Study distances to quantify how the rotated wavefunction moves within the loss landscape. Shallow architectures (with focus on Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs)) trained with quantum natural gradient are more likely to fall into saddle-point regions depending on the rotation angle: they achieve low energy error but fail to reproduce correct coefficient distributions. In the ferromagnetic case, near-degenerate eigenstates create high-curvature barriers that trap optimization at intermediate fidelities. We introduce a framework based on an analytically solvable rotated Ising model to investigate how relocating the target wavefunction within a fixed loss landscape exposes information-geometric barriers,such as saddle points and high-curvature regions,that hinder shallow NQS optimization, underscoring the need for landscape-aware model design in variational training.

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### Keypoint Counting Classifiers: Turning Vision Transformers into Self-Explainable Models Without Training

Authors: Kristoffer Wickstrøm, Teresa Dorszewski, Siyan Chen, Michael Kampffmeyer, Elisabeth Wetzer, Robert Jenssen
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17891v1

Current approaches for designing self-explainable models (SEMs) require complicated training procedures and specific architectures which makes them impractical. With the advance of general purpose foundation models based on Vision Transformers (ViTs), this impracticability becomes even more problematic. Therefore, new methods are necessary to provide transparency and reliability to ViT-based foundation models. In this work, we present a new method for turning any well-trained ViT-based model into a SEM without retraining, which we call Keypoint Counting Classifiers (KCCs). Recent works have shown that ViTs can automatically identify matching keypoints between images with high precision, and we build on these results to create an easily interpretable decision process that is inherently visualizable in the input. We perform an extensive evaluation which show that KCCs improve the human-machine communication compared to recent baselines. We believe that KCCs constitute an important step towards making ViT-based foundation models more transparent and reliable.

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### Regularized Random Fourier Features and Finite Element Reconstruction for Operator Learning in Sobolev Space

Authors: Xinyue Yu, Hayden Schaeffer
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.LG, math.NA, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17884v1

Operator learning is a data-driven approximation of mappings between infinite-dimensional function spaces, such as the solution operators of partial differential equations. Kernel-based operator learning can offer accurate, theoretically justified approximations that require less training than standard methods. However, they can become computationally prohibitive for large training sets and can be sensitive to noise. We propose a regularized random Fourier feature (RRFF) approach, coupled with a finite element reconstruction map (RRFF-FEM), for learning operators from noisy data. The method uses random features drawn from multivariate Student's $t$ distributions, together with frequency-weighted Tikhonov regularization that suppresses high-frequency noise. We establish high-probability bounds on the extreme singular values of the associated random feature matrix and show that when the number of features $N$ scales like $m \log m$ with the number of training samples $m$, the system is well-conditioned, which yields estimation and generalization guarantees. Detailed numerical experiments on benchmark PDE problems, including advection, Burgers', Darcy flow, Helmholtz, Navier-Stokes, and structural mechanics, demonstrate that RRFF and RRFF-FEM are robust to noise and achieve improved performance with reduced training time compared to the unregularized random feature model, while maintaining competitive accuracy relative to kernel and neural operator tests.

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### Weighted Stochastic Differential Equation to Implement Wasserstein-Fisher-Rao Gradient Flow

Authors: Herlock Rahimi
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17878v1

Score-based diffusion models currently constitute the state of the art in continuous generative modeling. These methods are typically formulated via overdamped or underdamped Ornstein--Uhlenbeck-type stochastic differential equations, in which sampling is driven by a combination of deterministic drift and Brownian diffusion, resulting in continuous particle trajectories in the ambient space. While such dynamics enjoy exponential convergence guarantees for strongly log-concave target distributions, it is well known that their mixing rates deteriorate exponentially in the presence of nonconvex or multimodal landscapes, such as double-well potentials. Since many practical generative modeling tasks involve highly non-log-concave target distributions, considerable recent effort has been devoted to developing sampling schemes that improve exploration beyond classical diffusion dynamics. A promising line of work leverages tools from information geometry to augment diffusion-based samplers with controlled mass reweighting mechanisms. This perspective leads naturally to Wasserstein--Fisher--Rao (WFR) geometries, which couple transport in the sample space with vertical (reaction) dynamics on the space of probability measures. In this work, we formulate such reweighting mechanisms through the introduction of explicit correction terms and show how they can be implemented via weighted stochastic differential equations using the Feynman--Kac representation. Our study provides a preliminary but rigorous investigation of WFR-based sampling dynamics, and aims to clarify their geometric and operator-theoretic structure as a foundation for future theoretical and algorithmic developments.

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### Learning vertical coordinates via automatic differentiation of a dynamical core

Authors: Tim Whittaker, Seth Taylor, Elsa Cardoso-Bihlo, Alejandro Di Luca, Alex Bihlo
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: physics.ao-ph, cs.LG, physics.flu-dyn
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17877v1

Terrain-following coordinates in atmospheric models often imprint their grid structure onto the solution, particularly over steep topography, where distorted coordinate layers can generate spurious horizontal and vertical motion. Standard formulations, such as hybrid or SLEVE coordinates, mitigate these errors by using analytic decay functions controlled by heuristic scale parameters that are typically tuned by hand and fixed a priori. In this work, we propose a framework to define a parametric vertical coordinate system as a learnable component within a differentiable dynamical core. We develop an end-to-end differentiable numerical solver for the two-dimensional non-hydrostatic Euler equations on an Arakawa C-grid, and introduce a NEUral Vertical Enhancement (NEUVE) terrain-following coordinate based on an integral transformed neural network that guarantees monotonicity. A key feature of our approach is the use of automatic differentiation to compute exact geometric metric terms, thereby eliminating truncation errors associated with finite-difference coordinate derivatives. By coupling simulation errors through the time integration to the parameterization, our formulation finds a grid structure optimized for both the underlying physics and numerics. Using several standard tests, we demonstrate that these learned coordinates reduce the mean squared error by a factor of 1.4 to 2 in non-linear statistical benchmarks, and eliminate spurious vertical velocity striations over steep topography.

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### Visually Prompted Benchmarks Are Surprisingly Fragile

Authors: Haiwen Feng, Long Lian, Lisa Dunlap, Jiahao Shu, XuDong Wang, Renhao Wang, Trevor Darrell, Alane Suhr, Angjoo Kanazawa
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17875v2

A key challenge in evaluating VLMs is testing models' ability to analyze visual content independently from their textual priors. Recent benchmarks such as BLINK probe visual perception through visual prompting, where questions about visual content are paired with coordinates to which the question refers, with the coordinates explicitly marked in the image itself. While these benchmarks are an important part of VLM evaluation, we find that existing models are surprisingly fragile to seemingly irrelevant details of visual prompting: simply changing a visual marker from red to blue can completely change rankings among models on a leaderboard. By evaluating nine commonly-used open- and closed-source VLMs on two visually prompted tasks, we demonstrate how details in benchmark setup, including visual marker design and dataset size, have a significant influence on model performance and leaderboard rankings. These effects can even be exploited to lift weaker models above stronger ones; for instance, slightly increasing the size of the visual marker results in open-source InternVL3-8B ranking alongside or better than much larger proprietary models like Gemini 2.5 Pro. We further show that low-level inference choices that are often ignored in benchmarking, such as JPEG compression levels in API calls, can also cause model lineup changes. These details have substantially larger impacts on visually prompted benchmarks than on conventional semantic VLM evaluations. To mitigate this instability, we curate existing datasets to create VPBench, a larger visually prompted benchmark with 16 visual marker variants. We open-source VPBench and our analysis framework at: https://lisadunlap.github.io/vpbench/.

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### Visually Prompted Benchmarks Are Surprisingly Fragile

Authors: Haiwen Feng, Long Lian, Lisa Dunlap, Jiahao Shu, XuDong Wang, Renhao Wang, Trevor Darrell, Alane Suhr, Angjoo Kanazawa
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17875v1

A key challenge in evaluating VLMs is testing models' ability to analyze visual content independently from their textual priors. Recent benchmarks such as BLINK probe visual perception through visual prompting, where questions about visual content are paired with coordinates to which the question refers, with the coordinates explicitly marked in the image itself. While these benchmarks are an important part of VLM evaluation, we find that existing models are surprisingly fragile to seemingly irrelevant details of visual prompting: simply changing a visual marker from red to blue can completely change rankings among models on a leaderboard. By evaluating nine commonly-used open- and closed-source VLMs on two visually prompted tasks, we demonstrate how details in benchmark setup, including visual marker design and dataset size, have a significant influence on model performance and leaderboard rankings. These effects can even be exploited to lift weaker models above stronger ones; for instance, slightly increasing the size of the visual marker results in open-source InternVL3-8B ranking alongside or better than much larger proprietary models like Gemini 2.5 Pro. We further show that low-level inference choices that are often ignored in benchmarking, such as JPEG compression levels in API calls, can also cause model lineup changes. These details have substantially larger impacts on visually prompted benchmarks than on conventional semantic VLM evaluations. To mitigate this instability, we curate existing datasets to create VPBench, a larger visually prompted benchmark with 16 visual marker variants. VPBench and additional analysis tools are released at https://lisadunlap.github.io/vpbench/.

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### Preserving Spectral Structure and Statistics in Diffusion Models

Authors: Baohua Yan, Jennifer Kava, Qingyuan Liu, Xuan Di
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17873v2

Standard diffusion models (DMs) rely on the total destruction of data into non-informative white noise, forcing the backward process to denoise from a fully unstructured noise state. While ensuring diversity, this results in a cumbersome and computationally intensive image generation task. We address this challenge by proposing new forward and backward process within a mathematically tractable spectral space. Unlike pixel-based DMs, our forward process converges towards an informative Gaussian prior N(mu_hat,Sigma_hat) rather than white noise. Our method, termed Preserving Spectral Structure and Statistics (PreSS) in diffusion models, guides spectral components toward this informative prior while ensuring that corresponding structural signals remain intact at terminal time. This provides a principled starting point for the backward process, enabling high-quality image reconstruction that builds upon preserved spectral structure while maintaining high generative diversity. Experimental results on CIFAR-10, CelebA and CelebA-HQ demonstrate significant reductions in computational complexity, improved visual diversity, less drift, and a smoother diffusion process compared to pixel-based DMs.

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### InSPECT: Invariant Spectral Features Preservation of Diffusion Models

Authors: Baohua Yan, Qingyuan Liu, Jennifer Kava, Xuan Di
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17873v1

Modern diffusion models (DMs) have achieved state-of-the-art image generation. However, the fundamental design choice of diffusing data all the way to white noise and then reconstructing it leads to an extremely difficult and computationally intractable prediction task. To overcome this limitation, we propose InSPECT (Invariant Spectral Feature-Preserving Diffusion Model), a novel diffusion model that keeps invariant spectral features during both the forward and backward processes. At the end of the forward process, the Fourier coefficients smoothly converge to a specified random noise, enabling features preservation while maintaining diversity and randomness. By preserving invariant features, InSPECT demonstrates enhanced visual diversity, faster convergence rate, and a smoother diffusion process. Experiments on CIFAR-10, Celeb-A, and LSUN demonstrate that InSPECT achieves on average a 39.23% reduction in FID and 45.80% improvement in IS against DDPM for 10K iterations under specified parameter settings, which demonstrates the significant advantages of preserving invariant features: achieving superior generation quality and diversity, while enhancing computational efficiency and enabling faster convergence rate. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to analyze and preserve invariant spectral features in diffusion models.

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### Interpretable Plant Leaf Disease Detection Using Attention-Enhanced CNN

Authors: Balram Singh, Ram Prakash Sharma, Somnath Dey
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17864v2

Plant diseases pose a significant threat to global food security, necessitating accurate and interpretable disease detection methods. This study introduces an interpretable attention-guided Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), CBAM-VGG16, for plant leaf disease detection. By integrating Convolution Block Attention Module (CBAM) at each convolutional stage, the model enhances feature extraction and disease localization. Trained on five diverse plant disease datasets, our approach outperforms recent techniques, achieving high accuracy (up to 98.87%) and demonstrating robust generalization. Here, we show the effectiveness of our method through comprehensive evaluation and interpretability analysis using CBAM attention maps, Grad-CAM, Grad-CAM++, and Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP). This study advances the application of explainable AI in agricultural diagnostics, offering a transparent and reliable system for smart farming. The code of our proposed work is available at https://github.com/BS0111/PlantAttentionCBAM.

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### Interpretable Plant Leaf Disease Detection Using Attention-Enhanced CNN

Authors: Balram Singh, Ram Prakash Sharma, Somnath Dey
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17864v1

Plant diseases pose a significant threat to global food security, necessitating accurate and interpretable disease detection methods. This study introduces an interpretable attention-guided Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), CBAM-VGG16, for plant leaf disease detection. By integrating Convolution Block Attention Module (CBAM) at each convolutional stage, the model enhances feature extraction and disease localization. Trained on five diverse plant disease datasets, our approach outperforms recent techniques, achieving high accuracy (up to 98.87%) and demonstrating robust generalization. Here, we show the effectiveness of our method through comprehensive evaluation and interpretability analysis using CBAM attention maps, Grad-CAM, Grad-CAM++, and Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP). This study advances the application of explainable AI in agricultural diagnostics, offering a transparent and reliable system for smart farming. The code of our proposed work is available at https://github.com/BS0111/PlantAttentionCBAM.

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### AnyTask: an Automated Task and Data Generation Framework for Advancing Sim-to-Real Policy Learning

Authors: Ran Gong, Xiaohan Zhang, Jinghuan Shang, Maria Vittoria Minniti, Jigarkumar Patel, Valerio Pepe, Riedana Yan, Ahmet Gundogdu, Ivan Kapelyukh, Ali Abbas, Xiaoqiang Yan, Harsh Patel et al.
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17853v2

Generalist robot learning remains constrained by data: large-scale, diverse, and high-quality interaction data are expensive to collect in the real world. While simulation has become a promising way for scaling up data collection, the related tasks, including simulation task design, task-aware scene generation, expert demonstration synthesis, and sim-to-real transfer, still demand substantial human effort. We present AnyTask, an automated framework that pairs massively parallel GPU simulation with foundation models to design diverse manipulation tasks and synthesize robot data. We introduce three AnyTask agents for generating expert demonstrations aiming to solve as many tasks as possible: 1) ViPR, a novel task and motion planning agent with VLM-in-the-loop Parallel Refinement; 2) ViPR-Eureka, a reinforcement learning agent with generated dense rewards and LLM-guided contact sampling; 3) ViPR-RL, a hybrid planning and learning approach that jointly produces high-quality demonstrations with only sparse rewards. We train behavior cloning policies on generated data, validate them in simulation, and deploy them directly on real robot hardware. The policies generalize to novel object poses, achieving 44% average success across a suite of real-world pick-and-place, drawer opening, contact-rich pushing, and long-horizon manipulation tasks. Our project website is at https://anytask.rai-inst.com .

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### AnyTask: an Automated Task and Data Generation Framework for Advancing Sim-to-Real Policy Learning

Authors: Ran Gong, Xiaohan Zhang, Jinghuan Shang, Maria Vittoria Minniti, Jigarkumar Patel, Valerio Pepe, Riedana Yan, Ahmet Gundogdu, Ivan Kapelyukh, Ali Abbas, Xiaoqiang Yan, Harsh Patel et al.
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17853v1

Generalist robot learning remains constrained by data: large-scale, diverse, and high-quality interaction data are expensive to collect in the real world. While simulation has become a promising way for scaling up data collection, the related tasks, including simulation task design, task-aware scene generation, expert demonstration synthesis, and sim-to-real transfer, still demand substantial human effort. We present AnyTask, an automated framework that pairs massively parallel GPU simulation with foundation models to design diverse manipulation tasks and synthesize robot data. We introduce three AnyTask agents for generating expert demonstrations aiming to solve as many tasks as possible: 1) ViPR, a novel task and motion planning agent with VLM-in-the-loop Parallel Refinement; 2) ViPR-Eureka, a reinforcement learning agent with generated dense rewards and LLM-guided contact sampling; 3) ViPR-RL, a hybrid planning and learning approach that jointly produces high-quality demonstrations with only sparse rewards. We train behavior cloning policies on generated data, validate them in simulation, and deploy them directly on real robot hardware. The policies generalize to novel object poses, achieving 44% average success across a suite of real-world pick-and-place, drawer opening, contact-rich pushing, and long-horizon manipulation tasks. Our project website is at https://anytask.rai-inst.com .

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### Simulation-Driven Deep Learning Framework for Raman Spectral Denoising Under Fluorescence-Dominant Conditions

Authors: Mengkun Chen, Sanidhya D. Tripathi, James W. Tunnell
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17852v1

Raman spectroscopy enables non-destructive, label-free molecular analysis with high specificity, making it a powerful tool for biomedical diagnostics. However, its application to biological tissues is challenged by inherently weak Raman scattering and strong fluorescence background, which significantly degrade signal quality. In this study, we present a simulation-driven denoising framework that combines a statistically grounded noise model with deep learning to enhance Raman spectra acquired under fluorescence-dominated conditions. We comprehensively modeled major noise sources. Based on this model, we generated biologically realistic Raman spectra and used them to train a cascaded deep neural network designed to jointly suppress stochastic detector noise and fluorescence baseline interference. To evaluate the performance of our approach, we simulated human skin spectra derived from real experimental data as a validation case study. Our results demonstrate the potential of physics-informed learning to improve spectral quality and enable faster, more accurate Raman-based tissue analysis.

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### InfSplign: Inference-Time Spatial Alignment of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Authors: Sarah Rastegar, Violeta Chatalbasheva, Sieger Falkena, Anuj Singh, Yanbo Wang, Tejas Gokhale, Hamid Palangi, Hadi Jamali-Rad
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17851v2

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models generate high-quality images but often fail to capture the spatial relations specified in text prompts. This limitation can be traced to two factors: lack of fine-grained spatial supervision in training data and inability of text embeddings to encode spatial semantics. We introduce InfSplign, a training-free inference-time method that improves spatial alignment by adjusting the noise through a compound loss in every denoising step. Proposed loss leverages different levels of cross-attention maps extracted from the backbone decoder to enforce accurate object placement and a balanced object presence during sampling. The method is lightweight, plug-and-play, and compatible with any diffusion backbone. Our comprehensive evaluations on VISOR and T2I-CompBench show that InfSplign establishes a new state-of-the-art (to the best of our knowledge), achieving substantial performance gains over the strongest existing inference-time baselines and even outperforming the fine-tuning-based methods. Codebase is available at GitHub.

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### InfSplign: Inference-Time Spatial Alignment of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Authors: Sarah Rastegar, Violeta Chatalbasheva, Sieger Falkena, Anuj Singh, Yanbo Wang, Tejas Gokhale, Hamid Palangi, Hadi Jamali-Rad
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17851v1

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models generate high-quality images but often fail to capture the spatial relations specified in text prompts. This limitation can be traced to two factors: lack of fine-grained spatial supervision in training data and inability of text embeddings to encode spatial semantics. We introduce InfSplign, a training-free inference-time method that improves spatial alignment by adjusting the noise through a compound loss in every denoising step. Proposed loss leverages different levels of cross-attention maps extracted from the backbone decoder to enforce accurate object placement and a balanced object presence during sampling. The method is lightweight, plug-and-play, and compatible with any diffusion backbone. Our comprehensive evaluations on VISOR and T2I-CompBench show that InfSplign establishes a new state-of-the-art (to the best of our knowledge), achieving substantial performance gains over the strongest existing inference-time baselines and even outperforming the fine-tuning-based methods. Codebase is available at GitHub.

---

### Integrating Computational Methods and AI into Qualitative Studies of Aging and Later Life

Authors: Corey M. Abramson
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI, cs.HC, stat.AP
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17850v2

This chapter demonstrates how computational social science (CSS) tools are extending and expanding research on aging. The depth and context from traditionally qualitative methods such as participant observation, in-depth interviews, and historical documents are increasingly employed alongside scalable data management, computational text analysis, and open-science practices. Machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP), provide resources to aggregate and systematically index large volumes of qualitative data, identify patterns, and maintain clear links to in-depth accounts. Drawing on case studies of projects that examine later life--including examples with original data from the DISCERN study (a team-based ethnography of life with dementia) and secondary analyses of the American Voices Project (nationally representative interview)--the chapter highlights both uses and challenges of bringing CSS tools into more meaningful dialogue with qualitative aging research. The chapter argues such work has potential for (1) streamlining and augmenting existing workflows, (2) scaling up samples and projects, and (3) generating multi-method approaches to address important questions in new ways, before turning to practices useful for individuals and teams seeking to understand current possibilities or refine their workflow processes. The chapter concludes that current developments are not without peril, but offer potential for new insights into aging and the life course by broadening--rather than replacing--the methodological foundations of qualitative research.

---

### Integrating Computational Methods and AI into Qualitative Studies of Aging and Later Life

Authors: Corey M. Abramson
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI, cs.HC, stat.AP
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17850v1

This chapter demonstrates how computational social science (CSS) tools are extending and expanding research on aging. The depth and context from traditionally qualitative methods such as participant observation, in-depth interviews, and historical documents are increasingly employed alongside scalable data management, computational text analysis, and open-science practices. Machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP), provide resources to aggregate and systematically index large volumes of qualitative data, identify patterns, and maintain clear links to in-depth accounts. Drawing on case studies of projects that examine later life--including examples with original data from the DISCERN study (a team-based ethnography of life with dementia) and secondary analyses of the American Voices Project (nationally representative interview)--the chapter highlights both uses and challenges of bringing CSS tools into more meaningful dialogue with qualitative aging research. The chapter argues such work has potential for (1) streamlining and augmenting existing workflows, (2) scaling up samples and projects, and (3) generating multi-method approaches to address important questions in new ways, before turning to practices useful for individuals and teams seeking to understand current possibilities or refine their workflow processes. The chapter concludes that current developments are not without peril, but offer potential for new insights into aging and the life course by broadening--rather than replacing--the methodological foundations of qualitative research.

---

### Planning as Descent: Goal-Conditioned Latent Trajectory Synthesis in Learned Energy Landscapes

Authors: Carlos Vélez García, Miguel Cazorla, Jorge Pomares
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17846v1

We present Planning as Descent (PaD), a framework for offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning that grounds trajectory synthesis in verification. Instead of learning a policy or explicit planner, PaD learns a goal-conditioned energy function over entire latent trajectories, assigning low energy to feasible, goal-consistent futures. Planning is realized as gradient-based refinement in this energy landscape, using identical computation during training and inference to reduce train-test mismatch common in decoupled modeling pipelines. PaD is trained via self-supervised hindsight goal relabeling, shaping the energy landscape around the planning dynamics. At inference, multiple trajectory candidates are refined under different temporal hypotheses, and low-energy plans balancing feasibility and efficiency are selected. We evaluate PaD on OGBench cube manipulation tasks. When trained on narrow expert demonstrations, PaD achieves state-of-the-art 95\% success, strongly outperforming prior methods that peak at 68\%. Remarkably, training on noisy, suboptimal data further improves success and plan efficiency, highlighting the benefits of verification-driven planning. Our results suggest learning to evaluate and refine trajectories provides a robust alternative to direct policy learning for offline, reward-free planning.

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### ShareChat: A Dataset of Chatbot Conversations in the Wild

Authors: Yueru Yan, Tuc Nguyen, Bo Su, Melissa Lieffers, Thai Le
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.HC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17843v4

By evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) through uniform, text-only interfaces, current academic benchmarks obscure how the unique designs and affordances of distinct commercial platforms shape real-world user behavior and system performance. To bridge this gap, we present ShareChat, the first large-scale corpus of 142,808 conversations (660,293 turns) collected from publicly shared URLs on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, Gemini, and Claude. ShareChat preserves native platform affordances, including citations, thinking traces, and code artifacts, across 95 languages and the period from April 2023 to October 2025, complementing existing corpora that homogenize these interactions. To demonstrate the dataset's evaluative utility, we present three case studies: a conversation completeness analysis assessing cross-platform differences in intent satisfaction, a source grounding analysis comparing citation strategies between search-augmented systems, and a temporal analysis revealing divergent response latency dynamics. Together, these analyses demonstrate research questions that are inaccessible to single-platform or stripped-affordance corpora. The dataset is publicly available.

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### ShareChat: A Dataset of Chatbot Conversations in the Wild

Authors: Yueru Yan, Tuc Nguyen, Bo Su, Melissa Lieffers, Thai Le
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.HC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17843v1

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have evolved into distinct platforms with unique interface designs and capabilities, existing public datasets treat models as generic text generators, stripping away the interface context that actively shapes user interaction. To address this limitation, we present ShareChat, a large-scale, cross-platform corpus comprising 142,808 conversations and over 660,000 turns collected from publicly shared URLs across five major platforms: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok. ShareChat distinguishes itself by preserving native platform affordances often lost in standard logs, including reasoning traces, source links, and code artifacts, while spanning 101 languages over the period from April 2023 to October 2025. Furthermore, ShareChat offers substantially longer context windows and greater interaction depth than prior datasets. We demonstrate the dataset's multifaceted utility through three representative analyses: (1) analyzing conversation completeness to measure user intent satisfaction; (2) evaluating source citation behaviors in content generation; and (3) conducting temporal analysis to track evolving usage patterns. This work provides the community with a vital and timely resource for understanding authentic user-LLM chatbot interactions in the wild.

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### ReX-MLE: The Autonomous Agent Benchmark for Medical Imaging Challenges

Authors: Roshan Kenia, Xiaoman Zhang, Pranav Rajpurkar
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17838v1

Autonomous coding agents built on large language models (LLMs) can now solve many general software and machine learning tasks, but they remain ineffective on complex, domain-specific scientific problems. Medical imaging is a particularly demanding domain, requiring long training cycles, high-dimensional data handling, and specialized preprocessing and validation pipelines, capabilities not fully measured in existing agent benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce ReX-MLE, a benchmark of 20 challenges derived from high-impact medical imaging competitions spanning diverse modalities and task types. Unlike prior ML-agent benchmarks, ReX-MLE evaluates full end-to-end workflows, requiring agents to independently manage data preprocessing, model training, and submission under realistic compute and time constraints. Evaluating state-of-the-art agents (AIDE, ML-Master, R&D-Agent) with different LLM backends (GPT-5, Gemini, Claude), we observe a severe performance gap: most submissions rank in the 0th percentile compared to human experts. Failures stem from domain-knowledge and engineering limitations. ReX-MLE exposes these bottlenecks and provides a foundation for developing domain-aware autonomous AI systems.

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### Exploiting ID-Text Complementarity via Ensembling for Sequential Recommendation

Authors: Liam Collins, Bhuvesh Kumar, Clark Mingxuan Ju, Tong Zhao, Donald Loveland, Leonardo Neves, Neil Shah
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17820v2

Modern Sequential Recommendation (SR) models commonly utilize modality features to represent items, motivated in large part by recent advancements in language and vision modeling. To do so, several works completely replace ID embeddings with modality embeddings, claiming that modality embeddings render ID embeddings unnecessary because they can match or even exceed ID embedding performance. On the other hand, many works jointly utilize ID and modality features, but posit that complex fusion strategies, such as multi-stage training and/or intricate alignment architectures, are necessary for this joint utilization. However, underlying both these lines of work is a lack of understanding of the complementarity of ID and modality features. In this work, we address this gap by studying the complementarity of ID- and text-based SR models. We show that these models do learn complementary signals, meaning that either should provide performance gain when used properly alongside the other. Motivated by this, we propose a new SR method that preserves ID-text complementarity through independent model training, then harnesses it through a simple ensembling strategy. Despite this method's simplicity, we show it outperforms several competitive SR baselines, implying that both ID and text features are necessary to achieve state-of-the-art SR performance but complex fusion architectures are not.

---

### Exploiting ID-Text Complementarity via Ensembling for Sequential Recommendation

Authors: Liam Collins, Bhuvesh Kumar, Clark Mingxuan Ju, Tong Zhao, Donald Loveland, Leonardo Neves, Neil Shah
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17820v1

Modern Sequential Recommendation (SR) models commonly utilize modality features to represent items, motivated in large part by recent advancements in language and vision modeling. To do so, several works completely replace ID embeddings with modality embeddings, claiming that modality embeddings render ID embeddings unnecessary because they can match or even exceed ID embedding performance. On the other hand, many works jointly utilize ID and modality features, but posit that complex fusion strategies, such as multi-stage training and/or intricate alignment architectures, are necessary for this joint utilization. However, underlying both these lines of work is a lack of understanding of the complementarity of ID and modality features. In this work, we address this gap by studying the complementarity of ID- and text-based SR models. We show that these models do learn complementary signals, meaning that either should provide performance gain when used properly alongside the other. Motivated by this, we propose a new SR method that preserves ID-text complementarity through independent model training, then harnesses it through a simple ensembling strategy. Despite this method's simplicity, we show it outperforms several competitive SR baselines, implying that both ID and text features are necessary to achieve state-of-the-art SR performance but complex fusion architectures are not.

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### Chorus: Multi-Teacher Pretraining for Holistic 3D Gaussian Scene Encoding

Authors: Yue Li, Qi Ma, Runyi Yang, Mengjiao Ma, Bin Ren, Nikola Popovic, Nicu Sebe, Theo Gevers, Luc Van Gool, Danda Pani Paudel, Martin R. Oswald
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17817v3

While 3DGS has emerged as a high-fidelity scene representation, encoding rich, general-purpose features directly from its primitives remains under-explored. We address this gap by introducing Chorus, a multi-teacher pretraining framework that learns a holistic feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) scene encoder by distilling complementary signals from 2D foundation models. Chorus employs a shared 3D encoder and teacher-specific projectors to learn from language-aligned, generalist, and object-aware teachers, encouraging a shared embedding space that captures signals from high-level semantics to fine-grained structure. We evaluate Chorus on a wide range of tasks: open-vocabulary semantic and instance segmentation, linear and decoder probing, data-efficient supervision, as well as LLM-based Q&A. Besides 3DGS, we also test Chorus on several benchmarks that only support point clouds by pretraining a variant using only Gaussian centers, colors, and estimated normals. Surprisingly, this encoder shows strong transfer and outperforms the point-cloud baseline while using 39.9 times fewer training scenes. Finally, we propose a render-and-distill adaptation that facilitates out-of-domain finetuning.

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### Chorus: Multi-Teacher Pretraining for Holistic 3D Gaussian Scene Encoding

Authors: Yue Li, Qi Ma, Runyi Yang, Mengjiao Ma, Bin Ren, Nikola Popovic, Nicu Sebe, Theo Gevers, Luc Van Gool, Danda Pani Paudel, Martin R. Oswald
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17817v1

While 3DGS has emerged as a high-fidelity scene representation, encoding rich, general-purpose features directly from its primitives remains under-explored. We address this gap by introducing Chorus, a multi-teacher pretraining framework that learns a holistic feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) scene encoder by distilling complementary signals from 2D foundation models. Chorus employs a shared 3D encoder and teacher-specific projectors to learn from language-aligned, generalist, and object-aware teachers, encouraging a shared embedding space that captures signals from high-level semantics to fine-grained structure. We evaluate Chorus on a wide range of tasks: open-vocabulary semantic and instance segmentation, linear and decoder probing, as well as data-efficient supervision. Besides 3DGS, we also test Chorus on several benchmarks that only support point clouds by pretraining a variant using only Gaussians' centers, colors, estimated normals as inputs. Interestingly, this encoder shows strong transfer and outperforms the point clouds baseline while using 39.9 times fewer training scenes. Finally, we propose a render-and-distill adaptation that facilitates out-of-domain finetuning. Our code and model will be released upon publication.

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### LLM-based Behaviour Driven Development for Hardware Design

Authors: Rolf Drechsler, Qian Liu
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.AR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17814v2

Test and verification are essential activities in hardware and system design, but their complexity grows significantly with increasing system sizes. While Behavior Driven Development (BDD) has proven effective in software engineering, it is not yet well established in hardware design, and its practical use remains limited. One contributing factor is the manual effort required to derive precise behavioral scenarios from textual specifications. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new opportunities to automate this step. In this paper, we investigate the use of LLM-based techniques to support BDD in the context of hardware design.

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### LLM-based Behaviour Driven Development for Hardware Design

Authors: Rolf Drechsler, Qian Liu
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.AR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17814v1

Test and verification are essential activities in hardware and system design, but their complexity grows significantly with increasing system sizes. While Behavior Driven Development (BDD) has proven effective in software engineering, it is not yet well established in hardware design, and its practical use remains limited. One contributing factor is the manual effort required to derive precise behavioral scenarios from textual specifications. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new opportunities to automate this step. In this paper, we investigate the use of LLM-based techniques to support BDD in the context of hardware design.

---

### Towards Sharp Minimax Risk Bounds for Operator Learning

Authors: Ben Adcock, Gregor Maier, Rahul Parhi
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: math.ST, math.NA, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17805v2

We develop a minimax theory for operator learning, where the goal is to estimate an unknown operator between separable Hilbert spaces from finitely many noisy input-output samples. For uniformly bounded Lipschitz operators, we prove information-theoretic lower bounds together with matching or near-matching upper bounds, covering both fixed and random designs under Hilbert-valued Gaussian noise and Gaussian white noise errors. The rates are controlled by the spectrum of the covariance operator of the measure that defines the error metric. Our setup is very general and allows for measures with unbounded support. A key implication is a curse of sample complexity, which shows that the minimax risk for generic Lipschitz operators cannot decay at any algebraic rate in the sample size. We obtain sharp characterizations when the covariance spectrum decays exponentially and provide general upper and lower bounds in slower-decay regimes. Finally, we show that assuming higher regularity, i.e., Hölder smoothness, does not improve minimax rates over the Lipschitz case, up to potential constants. Thus, we show that learning operators of any finite regularity necessarily suffers a curse of sample complexity.

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### Towards Sharp Minimax Risk Bounds for Operator Learning

Authors: Ben Adcock, Gregor Maier, Rahul Parhi
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: math.ST, math.NA, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17805v1

We develop a minimax theory for operator learning, where the goal is to estimate an unknown operator between separable Hilbert spaces from finitely many noisy input-output samples. For uniformly bounded Lipschitz operators, we prove information-theoretic lower bounds together with matching or near-matching upper bounds, covering both fixed and random designs under Hilbert-valued Gaussian noise and Gaussian white noise errors. The rates are controlled by the spectrum of the covariance operator of the measure that defines the error metric. Our setup is very general and allows for measures with unbounded support. A key implication is a curse of sample complexity which shows that the minimax risk for generic Lipschitz operators cannot decay at any algebraic rate in the sample size. We obtain essentially sharp characterizations when the covariance spectrum decays exponentially and provide general upper and lower bounds in slower-decay regimes.

---

### Domain-Aware Quantum Circuit for QML

Authors: Gurinder Singh, Thaddeus Pellegrini, Kenneth M. Merz,
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: quant-ph, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17800v1

Designing parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) that are expressive, trainable, and robust to hardware noise is a central challenge for quantum machine learning (QML) on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. We present a Domain-Aware Quantum Circuit (DAQC) that leverages image priors to guide locality-preserving encoding and entanglement via non-overlapping DCT-style zigzag windows. The design employs interleaved encode-entangle-train cycles, where entanglement is applied among qubits hosting neighboring pixels, aligned to device connectivity. This staged, locality-preserving information flow expands the effective receptive field without deep global mixing, enabling efficient use of limited depth and qubits. The design concentrates representational capacity on short-range correlations, reduces long-range two-qubit operations, and encourages stable optimization, thereby mitigating depth-induced and globally entangled barren-plateau effects. We evaluate DAQC on MNIST, FashionMNIST, and PneumoniaMNIST datasets. On quantum hardware, DAQC achieves performance competitive with strong classical baselines (e.g., ResNet-18/50, DenseNet-121, EfficientNet-B0) and substantially outperforming Quantum Circuit Search (QCS) baselines. To the best of our knowledge, DAQC, which uses a quantum feature extractor with only a linear classical readout (no deep classical backbone), currently achieves the best reported performance on real quantum hardware for QML-based image classification tasks. Code and pretrained models are available at: https://github.com/gurinder-hub/DAQC.

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### Intelligent Knowledge Mining Framework: Bridging AI Analysis and Trustworthy Preservation

Authors: Binh Vu
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.DL, cs.AI, cs.IR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17795v2

The unprecedented proliferation of digital data presents significant challenges in access, integration, and value creation across all data-intensive sectors. Valuable information is frequently encapsulated within disparate systems, unstructured documents, and heterogeneous formats, creating silos that impede efficient utilization and collaborative decision-making. This paper introduces the Intelligent Knowledge Mining Framework (IKMF), a comprehensive conceptual model designed to bridge the critical gap between dynamic AI-driven analysis and trustworthy long-term preservation. The framework proposes a dual-stream architecture: a horizontal Mining Process that systematically transforms raw data into semantically rich, machine-actionable knowledge, and a parallel Trustworthy Archiving Stream that ensures the integrity, provenance, and computational reproducibility of these assets. By defining a blueprint for this symbiotic relationship, the paper provides a foundational model for transforming static repositories into living ecosystems that facilitate the flow of actionable intelligence from producers to consumers. This paper outlines the motivation, problem statement, and key research questions guiding the research and development of the framework, presents the underlying scientific methodology, and details its conceptual design and modeling.

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### Intelligent Knowledge Mining Framework: Bridging AI Analysis and Trustworthy Preservation

Authors: Binh Vu
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.DL, cs.AI, cs.IR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17795v1

The unprecedented proliferation of digital data presents significant challenges in access, integration, and value creation across all data-intensive sectors. Valuable information is frequently encapsulated within disparate systems, unstructured documents, and heterogeneous formats, creating silos that impede efficient utilization and collaborative decision-making. This paper introduces the Intelligent Knowledge Mining Framework (IKMF), a comprehensive conceptual model designed to bridge the critical gap between dynamic AI-driven analysis and trustworthy long-term preservation. The framework proposes a dual-stream architecture: a horizontal Mining Process that systematically transforms raw data into semantically rich, machine-actionable knowledge, and a parallel Trustworthy Archiving Stream that ensures the integrity, provenance, and computational reproducibility of these assets. By defining a blueprint for this symbiotic relationship, the paper provides a foundational model for transforming static repositories into living ecosystems that facilitate the flow of actionable intelligence from producers to consumers. This paper outlines the motivation, problem statement, and key research questions guiding the research and development of the framework, presents the underlying scientific methodology, and details its conceptual design and modeling.

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### Calibratable Disambiguation Loss for Multi-Instance Partial-Label Learning

Authors: Wei Tang, Yin-Fang Yang, Weijia Zhang, Min-Ling Zhang
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17788v2

Multi-instance partial-label learning (MIPL) is a weakly supervised framework that extends the principles of multi-instance learning (MIL) and partial-label learning (PLL) to address the challenges of inexact supervision in both instance and label spaces. However, existing MIPL approaches often suffer from poor calibration, undermining classifier reliability. In this work, we propose a plug-and-play calibratable disambiguation loss (CDL) for classification and calibration, which modulates a disambiguation objective by a top-vs-competitor prediction margin. The competitor is instantiated either as the second strongest candidate label or as the strongest non-candidate label, yielding two variants that respectively emphasize candidate-level separation and candidate-vs-non-candidate suppression. Theoretically, we analyze CDL as a margin-modulated momentum-based disambiguation loss (MDL) objective, derive a lower-bound and a pseudo-label confidence-alignment bound for calibration, and show through gradient and momentum analyses how margin shaping affects weight updates. Experimental results on benchmark and real-world MIPL datasets, together with representative PLL adaptation, confirm that our CDL significantly improves both classification accuracy and expected calibration error.

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### Calibratable Disambiguation Loss for Multi-Instance Partial-Label Learning

Authors: Wei Tang, Yin-Fang Yang, Weijia Zhang, Min-Ling Zhang
Published: 2025-12-19
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17788v1

Multi-instance partial-label learning (MIPL) is a weakly supervised framework that extends the principles of multi-instance learning (MIL) and partial-label learning (PLL) to address the challenges of inexact supervision in both instance and label spaces. However, existing MIPL approaches often suffer from poor calibration, undermining classifier reliability. In this work, we propose a plug-and-play calibratable disambiguation loss (CDL) that simultaneously improves classification accuracy and calibration performance. The loss has two instantiations: the first one calibrates predictions based on probabilities from the candidate label set, while the second one integrates probabilities from both candidate and non-candidate label sets. The proposed CDL can be seamlessly incorporated into existing MIPL and PLL frameworks. We provide a theoretical analysis that establishes the lower bound and regularization properties of CDL, demonstrating its superiority over conventional disambiguation losses. Experimental results on benchmark and real-world datasets confirm that our CDL significantly enhances both classification and calibration performance.

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