# Research Papers — 2025-12 · bundle page 54 of 175 > Full-text markdown of papers #2651–2700 of 8703 published in 2025-12, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 8703-paper 2025-12 archive (50 papers per file). Canonical page: https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-12/page/54 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-12/page/53.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-12/page/55.md) ### Long-Range depth estimation using learning based Hybrid Distortion Model for CCTV cameras Authors: Ami Pandat, Punna Rajasekhar, G. Aravamuthan, Gopika Vinod, Rohit Shukla Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17784v1 Accurate camera models are essential for photogrammetry applications such as 3D mapping and object localization, particularly for long distances. Various stereo-camera based 3D localization methods are available but are limited to few hundreds of meters' range. This is majorly due to the limitation of the distortion models assumed for the non-linearities present in the camera lens. This paper presents a framework for modeling a suitable distortion model that can be used for localizing the objects at longer distances. It is well known that neural networks can be a better alternative to model a highly complex non-linear lens distortion function; on contrary, it is observed that a direct application of neural networks to distortion models fails to converge to estimate the camera parameters. To resolve this, a hybrid approach is presented in this paper where the conventional distortion models are initially extended to incorporate higher-order terms and then enhanced using neural network based residual correction model. This hybrid approach has substantially improved long-range localization performance and is capable of estimating the 3D position of objects at distances up to 5 kilometres. The estimated 3D coordinates are transformed to GIS coordinates and are plotted on a GIS map for visualization. Experimental validation demonstrates the robustness and effectiveness of proposed framework, offering a practical solution to calibrate CCTV cameras for long-range photogrammetry applications. --- ### UrbanDIFF: A Denoising Diffusion Model for Spatial Gap Filling of Urban Land Surface Temperature Under Dense Cloud Cover Authors: Arya Chavoshi, Hassan Dashtian, Naveen Sudharsan, Dev Niyogi Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17782v1 Satellite-derived Land Surface Temperature (LST) products are central to surface urban heat island (SUHI) monitoring due to their consistent grid-based coverage over large metropolitan regions. However, cloud contamination frequently obscures LST observations, limiting their usability for continuous SUHI analysis. Most existing LST reconstruction methods rely on multitemporal information or multisensor data fusion, requiring auxiliary observations that may be unavailable or unreliable under persistent cloud cover. Purely spatial gap-filling approaches offer an alternative, but traditional statistical methods degrade under large or spatially contiguous gaps, while many deep learning based spatial models deteriorate rapidly with increasing missingness. Recent advances in denoising diffusion based image inpainting models have demonstrated improved robustness under high missingness, motivating their adoption for spatial LST reconstruction. In this work, we introduce UrbanDIFF, a purely spatial denoising diffusion model for reconstructing cloud contaminated urban LST imagery. The model is conditioned on static urban structure information, including built-up surface data and a digital elevation model, and enforces strict consistency with revealed cloud free pixels through a supervised pixel guided refinement step during inference. UrbanDIFF is trained and evaluated using NASA MODIS Terra LST data from seven major United States metropolitan areas spanning 2002 to 2025. Experiments using synthetic cloud masks with 20 to 85 percent coverage show that UrbanDIFF consistently outperforms an interpolation baseline, particularly under dense cloud occlusion, achieving SSIM of 0.89, RMSE of 1.2 K, and R2 of 0.84 at 85 percent cloud coverage, while exhibiting slower performance degradation as cloud density increases. --- ### LiteGE: Lightweight Geodesic Embedding for Efficient Geodesics Computation and Non-Isometric Shape Correspondence Authors: Yohanes Yudhi Adikusuma, Qixing Huang, Ying He Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CV, cs.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17781v2 Computing geodesic distances on 3D surfaces is fundamental to many tasks in 3D vision and geometry processing, with deep connections to tasks such as shape correspondence. Recent learning-based methods achieve strong performance but rely on large 3D backbones, leading to high memory usage and latency, which limit their use in interactive or resource-constrained settings. We introduce LiteGE, a lightweight approach that constructs compact, category-aware shape descriptors by applying Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to unsigned distance field (UDFs) samples at informative voxels. This descriptor is efficient to compute and removes the need for high-capacity networks. LiteGE remains robust on sparse point clouds, supporting inputs with as few as 300 points, where prior methods fail. Extensive experiments show that LiteGE reduces memory usage and inference time by up to 300$\times$ compared to existing neural approaches. In addition, by exploiting the intrinsic relationship between geodesic distance and shape correspondence, LiteGE enables fast and accurate shape matching. Our method achieves up to 1000$\times$ speedup over state-of-the-art mesh-based approaches while maintaining comparable accuracy on non-isometric shape pairs, including evaluations on point-cloud inputs. --- ### LiteGE: Lightweight Geodesic Embedding for Efficient Geodesics Computation and Non-Isometric Shape Correspondence Authors: Yohanes Yudhi Adikusuma, Qixing Huang, Ying He Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CV, cs.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17781v1 Computing geodesic distances on 3D surfaces is fundamental to many tasks in 3D vision and geometry processing, with deep connections to tasks such as shape correspondence. Recent learning-based methods achieve strong performance but rely on large 3D backbones, leading to high memory usage and latency, which limit their use in interactive or resource-constrained settings. We introduce LiteGE, a lightweight approach that constructs compact, category-aware shape descriptors by applying PCA to unsigned distance field (UDFs) samples at informative voxels. This descriptor is efficient to compute and removes the need for high-capacity networks. LiteGE remains robust on sparse point clouds, supporting inputs with as few as 300 points, where prior methods fail. Extensive experiments show that LiteGE reduces memory usage and inference time by up to 300$\times$ compared to existing neural approaches. In addition, by exploiting the intrinsic relationship between geodesic distance and shape correspondence, LiteGE enables fast and accurate shape matching. Our method achieves up to 1000$\times$ speedup over state-of-the-art mesh-based approaches while maintaining comparable accuracy on non-isometric shape pairs, including evaluations on point-cloud inputs. --- ### DEER: A Benchmark for Evaluating Deep Research Agents on Expert Report Generation Authors: Janghoon Han, Heegyu Kim, Changho Lee, Dahm Lee, Min Hyung Park, Hosung Song, Stanley Jungkyu Choi, Moontae Lee, Honglak Lee Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17776v5 Recent advances in large language models have enabled deep research systems that generate expert-level reports through multi-step reasoning and evidence-based synthesis. However, evaluating such reports remains challenging: report quality is multifaceted, making it difficult to determine what to assess and which criteria to use; LLM-based judges may miss errors that require domain expertise to identify; and because deep research relies on retrieved evidence, report-wide claim verification is also necessary. To address these issues, we propose DEER, a benchmark for evaluating expert-level deep research reports. DEER systematizes evaluation criteria with an expert-developed taxonomy (7 dimensions, 25 subdimensions) operationalized as 101 fine-grained rubric items. We also provide task-specific Expert Evaluation Guidance to support LLM-based judging. In addition to rubric-based assessment, we propose a claim verification architecture that verifies both cited and uncited claims and quantifies evidence quality. Experiments show that current systems produce structurally plausible, evidence-citing reports, but still struggle to fully satisfy expert-level user requests and achieve logical completeness. Beyond performance comparisons, DEER makes system strengths and limitations interpretable and provides diagnostic signals for improvement. --- ### DEER: A Comprehensive and Reliable Benchmark for Deep-Research Expert Reports Authors: Janghoon Han, Heegyu Kim, Changho Lee, Dahm Lee, Min Hyung Park, Hosung Song, Stanley Jungkyu Choi, Moontae Lee, Honglak Lee Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17776v1 As large language models (LLMs) advance, deep research systems can generate expert-level reports via multi-step reasoning and evidence-based synthesis, but evaluating such reports remains challenging. Existing benchmarks often lack systematic criteria for expert reporting, evaluations that rely heavily on LLM judges can fail to capture issues that require expert judgment, and source verification typically covers only a limited subset of explicitly cited statements rather than report-wide factual reliability. We introduce DEER, a benchmark for evaluating expert-level deep research reports. DEER comprises 50 report-writing tasks spanning 13 domains and an expert-grounded evaluation taxonomy (7 dimensions, 25 sub-dimension) operationalized into 130 fine-grained rubric items. DEER further provides task-specific expert guidance to help LLM judges assess expert-level report quality more consistently. Complementing rubric-based assessment, we propose a document-level fact-checking architecture that extracts and verifies all claims across the entire report, including both cited and uncited ones, and quantifies external-evidence quality. DEER correlates closely with human expert judgments and yields interpretable diagnostics of system strengths and weaknesses. --- ### MedNeXt-v2: Scaling 3D ConvNeXts for Large-Scale Supervised Representation Learning in Medical Image Segmentation Authors: Saikat Roy, Yannick Kirchhoff, Constantin Ulrich, Maximillian Rokuss, Tassilo Wald, Fabian Isensee, Klaus Maier-Hein Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: eess.IV, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17774v1 Large-scale supervised pretraining is rapidly reshaping 3D medical image segmentation. However, existing efforts focus primarily on increasing dataset size and overlook the question of whether the backbone network is an effective representation learner at scale. In this work, we address this gap by revisiting ConvNeXt-based architectures for volumetric segmentation and introducing MedNeXt-v2, a compound-scaled 3D ConvNeXt that leverages improved micro-architecture and data scaling to deliver state-of-the-art performance. First, we show that routinely used backbones in large-scale pretraining pipelines are often suboptimal. Subsequently, we use comprehensive backbone benchmarking prior to scaling and demonstrate that stronger from scratch performance reliably predicts stronger downstream performance after pretraining. Guided by these findings, we incorporate a 3D Global Response Normalization module and use depth, width, and context scaling to improve our architecture for effective representation learning. We pretrain MedNeXt-v2 on 18k CT volumes and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance when fine-tuning across six challenging CT and MR benchmarks (144 structures), showing consistent gains over seven publicly released pretrained models. Beyond improvements, our benchmarking of these models also reveals that stronger backbones yield better results on similar data, representation scaling disproportionately benefits pathological segmentation, and that modality-specific pretraining offers negligible benefit once full finetuning is applied. In conclusion, our results establish MedNeXt-v2 as a strong backbone for large-scale supervised representation learning in 3D Medical Image Segmentation. Our code and pretrained models are made available with the official nnUNet repository at: https://www.github.com/MIC-DKFZ/nnUNet --- ### Pix2NPHM: Learning to Regress NPHM Reconstructions From a Single Image Authors: Simon Giebenhain, Tobias Kirschstein, Liam Schoneveld, Davide Davoli, Zhe Chen, Matthias Nießner Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17773v1 Neural Parametric Head Models (NPHMs) are a recent advancement over mesh-based 3d morphable models (3DMMs) to facilitate high-fidelity geometric detail. However, fitting NPHMs to visual inputs is notoriously challenging due to the expressive nature of their underlying latent space. To this end, we propose Pix2NPHM, a vision transformer (ViT) network that directly regresses NPHM parameters, given a single image as input. Compared to existing approaches, the neural parametric space allows our method to reconstruct more recognizable facial geometry and accurate facial expressions. For broad generalization, we exploit domain-specific ViTs as backbones, which are pretrained on geometric prediction tasks. We train Pix2NPHM on a mixture of 3D data, including a total of over 100K NPHM registrations that enable direct supervision in SDF space, and large-scale 2D video datasets, for which normal estimates serve as pseudo ground truth geometry. Pix2NPHM not only allows for 3D reconstructions at interactive frame rates, it is also possible to improve geometric fidelity by a subsequent inference-time optimization against estimated surface normals and canonical point maps. As a result, we achieve unprecedented face reconstruction quality that can run at scale on in-the-wild data. --- ### Easy Adaptation: An Efficient Task-Specific Knowledge Injection Method for Large Models in Resource-Constrained Environments Authors: Dong Chen, Zhengqing Hu, Shixing Zhao, Yibo Guo Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17771v1 While the enormous parameter scale endows Large Models (LMs) with unparalleled performance, it also limits their adaptability across specific tasks. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has emerged as a critical approach for effectively adapting LMs to a diverse range of downstream tasks. However, existing PEFT methods face two primary challenges: (1) High resource cost. Although PEFT methods significantly reduce resource demands compared to full fine-tuning, it still requires substantial time and memory, making it impractical in resource-constrained environments. (2) Parameter dependency. PEFT methods heavily rely on updating a subset of parameters associated with LMs to incorporate task-specific knowledge. Yet, due to increasing competition in the LMs landscape, many companies have adopted closed-source policies for their leading models, offering access only via Application Programming Interface (APIs). Whereas, the expense is often cost-prohibitive and difficult to sustain, as the fine-tuning process of LMs is extremely slow. Even if small models perform far worse than LMs in general, they can achieve superior results on particular distributions while requiring only minimal resources. Motivated by this insight, we propose Easy Adaptation (EA), which designs Specific Small Models (SSMs) to complement the underfitted data distribution for LMs. Extensive experiments show that EA matches the performance of PEFT on diverse tasks without accessing LM parameters, and requires only minimal resources. --- ### Bangla MedER: Multi-BERT Ensemble Approach for the Recognition of Bangla Medical Entity Authors: Tanjim Taharat Aurpa, Farzana Akter, Md. Mehedi Hasan, Shakil Ahmed, Shifat Ara Rafiq, Fatema Khan Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17769v1 Medical Entity Recognition (MedER) is an essential NLP task for extracting meaningful entities from the medical corpus. Nowadays, MedER-based research outcomes can remarkably contribute to the development of automated systems in the medical sector, ultimately enhancing patient care and outcomes. While extensive research has been conducted on MedER in English, low-resource languages like Bangla remain underexplored. Our work aims to bridge this gap. For Bangla medical entity recognition, this study first examined a number of transformer models, including BERT, DistilBERT, ELECTRA, and RoBERTa. We also propose a novel Multi-BERT Ensemble approach that outperformed all baseline models with the highest accuracy of 89.58%. Notably, it provides an 11.80% accuracy improvement over the single-layer BERT model, demonstrating its effectiveness for this task. A major challenge in MedER for low-resource languages is the lack of annotated datasets. To address this issue, we developed a high-quality dataset tailored for the Bangla MedER task. The dataset was used to evaluate the effectiveness of our model through multiple performance metrics, demonstrating its robustness and applicability. Our findings highlight the potential of Multi-BERT Ensemble models in improving MedER for Bangla and set the foundation for further advancements in low-resource medical NLP. --- ### Can You Hear Me Now? A Benchmark for Long-Range Graph Propagation Authors: Luca Miglior, Matteo Tolloso, Alessio Gravina, Davide Bacciu Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17762v2 Effectively capturing long-range interactions remains a fundamental yet unresolved challenge in graph neural network (GNN) research, critical for applications across diverse fields of science. To systematically address this, we introduce ECHO (Evaluating Communication over long HOps), a novel benchmark specifically designed to rigorously assess the capabilities of GNNs in handling very long-range graph propagation. ECHO includes three synthetic graph tasks, namely single-source shortest paths, node eccentricity, and graph diameter, each constructed over diverse and structurally challenging topologies intentionally designed to introduce significant information bottlenecks. ECHO also includes two real-world datasets, ECHO-Charge and ECHO-Energy, which define chemically grounded benchmarks for predicting atomic partial charges and molecular total energies, respectively, with reference computations obtained at the density functional theory (DFT) level. Both tasks inherently depend on capturing complex long-range molecular interactions. Our extensive benchmarking of popular GNN architectures reveals clear performance gaps, emphasizing the difficulty of true long-range propagation and highlighting design choices capable of overcoming inherent limitations. ECHO thereby sets a new standard for evaluating long-range information propagation, also providing a compelling example for its need in AI for science. --- ### Can You Hear Me Now? A Benchmark for Long-Range Graph Propagation Authors: Luca Miglior, Matteo Tolloso, Alessio Gravina, Davide Bacciu Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17762v1 Effectively capturing long-range interactions remains a fundamental yet unresolved challenge in graph neural network (GNN) research, critical for applications across diverse fields of science. To systematically address this, we introduce ECHO (Evaluating Communication over long HOps), a novel benchmark specifically designed to rigorously assess the capabilities of GNNs in handling very long-range graph propagation. ECHO includes three synthetic graph tasks, namely single-source shortest paths, node eccentricity, and graph diameter, each constructed over diverse and structurally challenging topologies intentionally designed to introduce significant information bottlenecks. ECHO also includes two real-world datasets, ECHO-Charge and ECHO-Energy, which define chemically grounded benchmarks for predicting atomic partial charges and molecular total energies, respectively, with reference computations obtained at the density functional theory (DFT) level. Both tasks inherently depend on capturing complex long-range molecular interactions. Our extensive benchmarking of popular GNN architectures reveals clear performance gaps, emphasizing the difficulty of true long-range propagation and highlighting design choices capable of overcoming inherent limitations. ECHO thereby sets a new standard for evaluating long-range information propagation, also providing a compelling example for its need in AI for science. --- ### Breast Cancer Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy Treatment Response Prediction Using Aligned Longitudinal MRI and Clinical Data Authors: Rahul Ravi, Ruizhe Li, Tarek Abdelfatah, Stephen Chan, Xin Chen Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17759v1 Aim: This study investigates treatment response prediction to neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NACT) in breast cancer patients, using longitudinal contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance images (CE-MRI) and clinical data. The goal is to develop machine learning (ML) models to predict pathologic complete response (PCR binary classification) and 5-year relapse-free survival status (RFS binary classification). Method: The proposed framework includes tumour segmentation, image registration, feature extraction, and predictive modelling. Using the image registration method, MRI image features can be extracted and compared from the original tumour site at different time points, therefore monitoring the intratumor changes during NACT process. Four feature extractors, including one radiomics and three deep learning-based (MedicalNet, Segformer3D, SAM-Med3D) were implemented and compared. In combination with three feature selection methods and four ML models, predictive models are built and compared. Results: The proposed image registration-based feature extraction consistently improves the predictive models. In the PCR and RFS classification tasks logistic regression model trained on radiomic features performed the best with an AUC of 0.88 and classification accuracy of 0.85 for PCR classification, and AUC of 0.78 and classification accuracy of 0.72 for RFS classification. Conclusions: It is evidenced that the image registration method has significantly improved performance in longitudinal feature learning in predicting PCR and RFS. The radiomics feature extractor is more effective than the pre-trained deep learning feature extractors, with higher performance and better interpretability. --- ### AncientBench: Towards Comprehensive Evaluation on Excavated and Transmitted Chinese Corpora Authors: Zhihan Zhou, Daqian Shi, Rui Song, Lida Shi, Xiaolei Diao, Hao Xu Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17756v1 Comprehension of ancient texts plays an important role in archaeology and understanding of Chinese history and civilization. The rapid development of large language models needs benchmarks that can evaluate their comprehension of ancient characters. Existing Chinese benchmarks are mostly targeted at modern Chinese and transmitted documents in ancient Chinese, but the part of excavated documents in ancient Chinese is not covered. To meet this need, we propose the AncientBench, which aims to evaluate the comprehension of ancient characters, especially in the scenario of excavated documents. The AncientBench is divided into four dimensions, which correspond to the four competencies of ancient character comprehension: glyph comprehension, pronunciation comprehension, meaning comprehension, and contextual comprehension. The benchmark also contains ten tasks, including radical, phonetic radical, homophone, cloze, translation, and more, providing a comprehensive framework for evaluation. We convened archaeological researchers to conduct experimental evaluations, proposed an ancient model as baseline, and conducted extensive experiments on the currently best-performing large language models. The experimental results reveal the great potential of large language models in ancient textual scenarios as well as the gap with humans. Our research aims to promote the development and application of large language models in the field of archaeology and ancient Chinese language. --- ### Affect, Body, Cognition, Demographics, and Emotion: The ABCDE of Text Features for Computational Affective Science Authors: Jan Philip Wahle, Krishnapriya Vishnubhotla, Bela Gipp, Saif M. Mohammad Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17752v2 Work in Computational Affective Science and Computational Social Science explores a wide variety of research questions about people, emotions, behavior, and health. Such work often relies on language data that is first labeled with relevant information, such as the use of emotion words or the age of the speaker. Although many resources and algorithms exist to enable this type of labeling, discovering, accessing, and using them remains a substantial impediment, particularly for practitioners outside of computer science. Here, we present the ABCDE dataset (Affect, Body, Cognition, Demographics, and Emotion), a large-scale collection of over 400 million text utterances drawn from social media, blogs, books, and AI-generated sources. The dataset is annotated with a wide range of features relevant to computational affective and social science. ABCDE facilitates interdisciplinary research across numerous fields, including affective science, cognitive science, the digital humanities, sociology, political science, and computational linguistics. --- ### Affect, Body, Cognition, Demographics, and Emotion: The ABCDE of Text Features for Computational Affective Science Authors: Jan Philip Wahle, Krishnapriya Vishnubhotla, Bela Gipp, Saif M. Mohammad Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17752v1 Work in Computational Affective Science and Computational Social Science explores a wide variety of research questions about people, emotions, behavior, and health. Such work often relies on language data that is first labeled with relevant information, such as the use of emotion words or the age of the speaker. Although many resources and algorithms exist to enable this type of labeling, discovering, accessing, and using them remains a substantial impediment, particularly for practitioners outside of computer science. Here, we present the ABCDE dataset (Affect, Body, Cognition, Demographics, and Emotion), a large-scale collection of over 400 million text utterances drawn from social media, blogs, books, and AI-generated sources. The dataset is annotated with a wide range of features relevant to computational affective and social science. ABCDE facilitates interdisciplinary research across numerous fields, including affective science, cognitive science, the digital humanities, sociology, political science, and computational linguistics. --- ### When the Gold Standard Isn't Necessarily Standard: Challenges of Evaluating the Translation of User-Generated Content Authors: Lydia Nishimwe, Benoît Sagot, Rachel Bawden Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17738v3 User-generated content (UGC) is characterised by frequent use of non-standard language, from spelling errors to expressive choices such as slang, character repetitions, and emojis. This makes evaluating UGC translation challenging: what counts as a "good" translation depends on the desired standardness level of the output. To explore this, we examine the human translation guidelines of four UGC datasets, and derive a taxonomy of twelve non-standard phenomena and five translation actions (NORMALISE, COPY, TRANSFER, OMIT, CENSOR). Our analysis reveals notable differences in how UGC is treated, resulting in a spectrum of standardness in reference translations. We show that translation scores of large language models are highly sensitive to prompts with explicit UGC translation instructions, and that they improve when they align with the dataset guidelines. We argue that fair evaluation requires both models and metrics to be aware of translation guidelines. Finally, we call for clear guidelines during dataset creation and for the development of controllable, guideline-aware evaluation frameworks for UGC translation. --- ### When the Gold Standard isn't Necessarily Standard: Challenges of Evaluating the Translation of User-Generated Content Authors: Lydia Nishimwe, Benoît Sagot, Rachel Bawden Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17738v1 User-generated content (UGC) is characterised by frequent use of non-standard language, from spelling errors to expressive choices such as slang, character repetitions, and emojis. This makes evaluating UGC translation particularly challenging: what counts as a "good" translation depends on the level of standardness desired in the output. To explore this, we examine the human translation guidelines of four UGC datasets, and derive a taxonomy of twelve non-standard phenomena and five translation actions (NORMALISE, COPY, TRANSFER, OMIT, CENSOR). Our analysis reveals notable differences in how UGC is treated, resulting in a spectrum of standardness in reference translations. Through a case study on large language models (LLMs), we show that translation scores are highly sensitive to prompts with explicit translation instructions for UGC, and that they improve when these align with the dataset's guidelines. We argue that when preserving UGC style is important, fair evaluation requires both models and metrics to be aware of translation guidelines. Finally, we call for clear guidelines during dataset creation and for the development of controllable, guideline-aware evaluation frameworks for UGC translation. --- ### Diversity Recommendation via Causal Deconfounding of Co-purchase Relations and Counterfactual Exposure Authors: Jingmao Zhang, Zhiting Zhao, Yunqi Lin, Jianghong Ma, Tianjun Wei, Haijun Zhang, Xiaofeng Zhang Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17733v1 Beyond user-item modeling, item-to-item relationships are increasingly used to enhance recommendation. However, common methods largely rely on co-occurrence, making them prone to item popularity bias and user attributes, which degrades embedding quality and performance. Meanwhile, although diversity is acknowledged as a key aspect of recommendation quality, existing research offers limited attention to it, with a notable lack of causal perspectives and theoretical grounding. To address these challenges, we propose Cadence: Diversity Recommendation via Causal Deconfounding of Co-purchase Relations and Counterfactual Exposure - a plug-and-play framework built upon LightGCN as the backbone, primarily designed to enhance recommendation diversity while preserving accuracy. First, we compute the Unbiased Asymmetric Co-purchase Relationship (UACR) between items - excluding item popularity and user attributes - to construct a deconfounded directed item graph, with an aggregation mechanism to refine embeddings. Second, we leverage UACR to identify diverse categories of items that exhibit strong causal relevance to a user's interacted items but have not yet been engaged with. We then simulate their behavior under high-exposure scenarios, thereby significantly enhancing recommendation diversity while preserving relevance. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art diversity models in both diversity and accuracy, and further validates its effectiveness, transferability, and efficiency over baselines. --- ### AdaptPrompt: Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of VLMs for Generalizable Deepfake Detection Authors: Yichen Jiang, Mohammed Talha Alam, Sohail Ahmed Khan, Duc-Tien Dang-Nguyen, Fakhri Karray Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17730v2 Detectors of AI-generated images tend to inherit the biases of the data they are trained on: models fitted to GAN imagery learn to treat GAN-specific artifacts as the very definition of "fake" and consequently miss images produced by diffusion models and commercial generation tools. We study this generalization problem from two directions. First, we introduce Diff-Gen, a balanced corpus consisting of 100k diffusion-generated samples and an equally sized set of real images, with the real subset selected to mirror the class distribution of the synthetic data. A spectral analysis shows that, unlike GAN data, Diff-Gen exhibits broad, non-periodic high-frequency energy, and we find that detectors trained on it transfer substantially better to unseen generator families. Second, we propose AdaptPrompt, a parameter-efficient adaptation of CLIP that combines a visual adapter with learnable text prompts and trains roughly 0.1% of the model's parameters. We further observe that truncating the last transformer block of the vision encoder consistently improves detection, suggesting that the final semantic-alignment layers of CLIP suppress the low-level traces on which forensic decisions rely. Across a benchmark of 25 test sets covering GANs, diffusion models, and commercial tools such as Midjourney and DALL-E 3, AdaptPrompt trained on Diff-Gen attains the best mean average precision (98.60%) and accuracy (92.72%), while matching fully fine-tuned baselines at a fraction of their training cost. We also show that the same framework supports data-efficient training and closed-set source attribution across 22 generators. --- ### AdaptPrompt: Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of VLMs for Generalizable Deepfake Detection Authors: Yichen Jiang, Mohammed Talha Alam, Sohail Ahmed Khan, Duc-Tien Dang-Nguyen, Fakhri Karray Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17730v1 Recent advances in image generation have led to the widespread availability of highly realistic synthetic media, increasing the difficulty of reliable deepfake detection. A key challenge is generalization, as detectors trained on a narrow class of generators often fail when confronted with unseen models. In this work, we address the pressing need for generalizable detection by leveraging large vision-language models, specifically CLIP, to identify synthetic content across diverse generative techniques. First, we introduce Diff-Gen, a large-scale benchmark dataset comprising 100k diffusion-generated fakes that capture broad spectral artifacts unlike traditional GAN datasets. Models trained on Diff-Gen demonstrate stronger cross-domain generalization, particularly on previously unseen image generators. Second, we propose AdaptPrompt, a parameter-efficient transfer learning framework that jointly learns task-specific textual prompts and visual adapters while keeping the CLIP backbone frozen. We further show via layer ablation that pruning the final transformer block of the vision encoder enhances the retention of high-frequency generative artifacts, significantly boosting detection accuracy. Our evaluation spans 25 challenging test sets, covering synthetic content generated by GANs, diffusion models, and commercial tools, establishing a new state-of-the-art in both standard and cross-domain scenarios. We further demonstrate the framework's versatility through few-shot generalization (using as few as 320 images) and source attribution, enabling the precise identification of generator architectures in closed-set settings. --- ### MambaMIL+: Modeling Long-Term Contextual Patterns for Gigapixel Whole Slide Image Authors: Qian Zeng, Yihui Wang, Shu Yang, Yingxue Xu, Fengtao Zhou, Jiabo Ma, Dejia Cai, Zhengyu Zhang, Lijuan Qu, Yu Wang, Li Liang, Hao Chen Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17726v1 Whole-slide images (WSIs) are an important data modality in computational pathology, yet their gigapixel resolution and lack of fine-grained annotations challenge conventional deep learning models. Multiple instance learning (MIL) offers a solution by treating each WSI as a bag of patch-level instances, but effectively modeling ultra-long sequences with rich spatial context remains difficult. Recently, Mamba has emerged as a promising alternative for long sequence learning, scaling linearly to thousands of tokens. However, despite its efficiency, it still suffers from limited spatial context modeling and memory decay, constraining its effectiveness to WSI analysis. To address these limitations, we propose MambaMIL+, a new MIL framework that explicitly integrates spatial context while maintaining long-range dependency modeling without memory forgetting. Specifically, MambaMIL+ introduces 1) overlapping scanning, which restructures the patch sequence to embed spatial continuity and instance correlations; 2) a selective stripe position encoder (S2PE) that encodes positional information while mitigating the biases of fixed scanning orders; and 3) a contextual token selection (CTS) mechanism, which leverages supervisory knowledge to dynamically enlarge the contextual memory for stable long-range modeling. Extensive experiments on 20 benchmarks across diagnostic classification, molecular prediction, and survival analysis demonstrate that MambaMIL+ consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance under three feature extractors (ResNet-50, PLIP, and CONCH), highlighting its effectiveness and robustness for large-scale computational pathology --- ### SAVeD: A First-Person Social Media Video Dataset for ADAS-equipped vehicle Near-Miss and Crash Event Analyses Authors: Shaoyan Zhai, Mohamed Abdel-Aty, Chenzhu Wang, Rodrigo Vena Garcia Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17724v1 The advancement of safety-critical research in driving behavior in ADAS-equipped vehicles require real-world datasets that not only include diverse traffic scenarios but also capture high-risk edge cases such as near-miss events and system failures. However, existing datasets are largely limited to either simulated environments or human-driven vehicle data, lacking authentic ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance System) vehicle behavior under risk conditions. To address this gap, this paper introduces SAVeD, a large-scale video dataset curated from publicly available social media content, explicitly focused on ADAS vehicle-related crashes, near-miss incidents, and disengagements. SAVeD features 2,119 first-person videos, capturing ADAS vehicle operations in diverse locations, lighting conditions, and weather scenarios. The dataset includes video frame-level annotations for collisions, evasive maneuvers, and disengagements, enabling analysis of both perception and decision-making failures. We demonstrate SAVeD's utility through multiple analyses and contributions: (1) We propose a novel framework integrating semantic segmentation and monocular depth estimation to compute real-time Time-to-Collision (TTC) for dynamic objects. (2) We utilize the Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) distribution to model and quantify the extreme risk in crash and near-miss events across different roadway types. (3) We establish benchmarks for state-of-the-art VLLMs (VideoLLaMA2 and InternVL2.5 HiCo R16), showing that SAVeD's detailed annotations significantly enhance model performance through domain adaptation in complex near-miss scenarios. --- ### Digital and Web Forensics Model Cards, V1 Authors: Paola Di Maio Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17722v1 This paper introduces a standardized model card framework specifically designed for digital and web forensics. Building upon established model card methodologies and recent work on abstract models for digital forensic analysis, this paper presents a web based framework that generates model cards specifically designed to represent knowledge in the forensic domain. The framework includes controlled vocabularies for classification, reasoning types, bias identification, and error categorization, along with a web-based generator tool to facilitate adoption. The paper describes the model card structure, presents the controlled vocabularies, and introduces the beta version of the generator tool, inviting community feedback to refine this emerging standard. Ultimately, the systemic risk is that that the anti fraud and digital and web forensics processes are controlled by the mobs. --- ### Mitigating Forgetting in Low Rank Adaptation Authors: Joanna Sliwa, Frank Schneider, Philipp Hennig, Jose Miguel Hernandez-Lobato Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17720v1 Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), enable fast specialization of large pre-trained models to different downstream applications. However, this process often leads to catastrophic forgetting of the model's prior domain knowledge. We address this issue with LaLoRA, a weight-space regularization technique that applies a Laplace approximation to Low-Rank Adaptation. Our approach estimates the model's confidence in each parameter and constrains updates in high-curvature directions, preserving prior knowledge while enabling efficient target-domain learning. By applying the Laplace approximation only to the LoRA weights, the method remains lightweight. We evaluate LaLoRA by fine-tuning a Llama model for mathematical reasoning and demonstrate an improved learning-forgetting trade-off, which can be directly controlled via the method's regularization strength. We further explore different loss landscape curvature approximations for estimating parameter confidence, analyze the effect of the data used for the Laplace approximation, and study robustness across hyperparameters. --- ### FlexAvatar: Flexible Large Reconstruction Model for Animatable Gaussian Head Avatars with Detailed Deformation Authors: Cheng Peng, Zhuo Su, Liao Wang, Chen Guo, Zhaohu Li, Chengjiang Long, Zheng Lv, Jingxiang Sun, Chenyangguang Zhang, Yebin Liu Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17717v1 We present FlexAvatar, a flexible large reconstruction model for high-fidelity 3D head avatars with detailed dynamic deformation from single or sparse images, without requiring camera poses or expression labels. It leverages a transformer-based reconstruction model with structured head query tokens as canonical anchor to aggregate flexible input-number-agnostic, camera-pose-free and expression-free inputs into a robust canonical 3D representation. For detailed dynamic deformation, we introduce a lightweight UNet decoder conditioned on UV-space position maps, which can produce detailed expression-dependent deformations in real time. To better capture rare but critical expressions like wrinkles and bared teeth, we also adopt a data distribution adjustment strategy during training to balance the distribution of these expressions in the training set. Moreover, a lightweight 10-second refinement can further enhances identity-specific details in extreme identities without affecting deformation quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our FlexAvatar achieves superior 3D consistency, detailed dynamic realism compared with previous methods, providing a practical solution for animatable 3D avatar creation. --- ### Revisiting the Broken Symmetry Phase of Solid Hydrogen: A Neural Network Variational Monte Carlo Study Authors: Shengdu Chai, Chen Lin, Xinyang Dong, Yuqiang Li, Wanli Ouyang, Lei Wang, X. C. Xie Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cond-mat.str-el, cond-mat.mtrl-sci, cs.LG, physics.comp-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17703v3 The crystal structure of high-pressure solid hydrogen remains a fundamental open problem. Although the research frontier has mostly shifted toward ultra-high pressure phases above 400 GPa, we show that even the broken symmetry phase observed around 130~GPa requires revisiting due to its intricate coupling of electronic and nuclear degrees of freedom. Here, we develop a first principle quantum Monte Carlo framework based on a deep neural network wave function that treats both electrons and nuclei quantum mechanically within the constant pressure ensemble. Our calculations reveal an unreported ground-state structure candidate for the broken symmetry phase with $Cmcm$ space group symmetry, and we test its stability up to 96 atoms. The predicted structure quantitatively matches the experimental equation of state and gives the closest x-ray diffraction peak-position match among the tested candidates. Furthermore, our group-theoretical analysis provides a symmetry-counting compatibility check between the $Cmcm$ structure and existing Raman and infrared spectroscopic data. Crucially, static density functional theory calculation reveals the $Cmcm$ structure as a dynamically unstable saddle point on the Born-Oppenheimer potential energy surface, demonstrating that a full quantum many-body treatment of the problem is necessary. These results shed new light on the phase diagram of high-pressure hydrogen and call for further experimental verifications. --- ### Revisiting the Broken Symmetry Phase of Solid Hydrogen: A Neural Network Variational Monte Carlo Study Authors: Shengdu Chai, Chen Lin, Xinyang Dong, Yuqiang Li, Wanli Ouyang, Lei Wang, X. C. Xie Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cond-mat.str-el, cond-mat.mtrl-sci, cs.LG, physics.comp-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17703v1 The crystal structure of high-pressure solid hydrogen remains a fundamental open problem. Although the research frontier has mostly shifted toward ultra-high pressure phases above 400 GPa, we show that even the broken symmetry phase observed around 130~GPa requires revisiting due to its intricate coupling of electronic and nuclear degrees of freedom. Here, we develop a first principle quantum Monte Carlo framework based on a deep neural network wave function that treats both electrons and nuclei quantum mechanically within the constant pressure ensemble. Our calculations reveal an unreported ground-state structure candidate for the broken symmetry phase with $Cmcm$ space group symmetry, and we test its stability up to 96 atoms. The predicted structure quantitatively matches the experimental equation of state and X-ray diffraction patterns. Furthermore, our group-theoretical analysis shows that the $Cmcm$ structure is compatible with existing Raman and infrared spectroscopic data. Crucially, static density functional theory calculation reveals the $Cmcm$ structure as a dynamically unstable saddle point on the Born-Oppenheimer potential energy surface, demonstrating that a full quantum many-body treatment of the problem is necessary. These results shed new light on the phase diagram of high-pressure hydrogen and call for further experimental verifications. --- ### Spatially-informed transformers: Injecting geostatistical covariance biases into self-attention for spatio-temporal forecasting Authors: Yuri Calleo Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ME, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17696v1 The modeling of high-dimensional spatio-temporal processes presents a fundamental dichotomy between the probabilistic rigor of classical geostatistics and the flexible, high-capacity representations of deep learning. While Gaussian processes offer theoretical consistency and exact uncertainty quantification, their prohibitive computational scaling renders them impractical for massive sensor networks. Conversely, modern transformer architectures excel at sequence modeling but inherently lack a geometric inductive bias, treating spatial sensors as permutation-invariant tokens without a native understanding of distance. In this work, we propose a spatially-informed transformer, a hybrid architecture that injects a geostatistical inductive bias directly into the self-attention mechanism via a learnable covariance kernel. By formally decomposing the attention structure into a stationary physical prior and a non-stationary data-driven residual, we impose a soft topological constraint that favors spatially proximal interactions while retaining the capacity to model complex dynamics. We demonstrate the phenomenon of ``Deep Variography'', where the network successfully recovers the true spatial decay parameters of the underlying process end-to-end via backpropagation. Extensive experiments on synthetic Gaussian random fields and real-world traffic benchmarks confirm that our method outperforms state-of-the-art graph neural networks. Furthermore, rigorous statistical validation confirms that the proposed method delivers not only superior predictive accuracy but also well-calibrated probabilistic forecasts, effectively bridging the gap between physics-aware modeling and data-driven learning. --- ### Imputation Uncertainty in Interpretable Machine Learning Methods Authors: Pegah Golchian, Marvin N. Wright Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17689v1 In real data, missing values occur frequently, which affects the interpretation with interpretable machine learning (IML) methods. Recent work considers bias and shows that model explanations may differ between imputation methods, while ignoring additional imputation uncertainty and its influence on variance and confidence intervals. We therefore compare the effects of different imputation methods on the confidence interval coverage probabilities of the IML methods permutation feature importance, partial dependence plots and Shapley values. We show that single imputation leads to underestimation of variance and that, in most cases, only multiple imputation is close to nominal coverage. --- ### Convergence Guarantees for Federated SARSA with Local Training and Heterogeneous Agents Authors: Paul Mangold, Eloïse Berthier, Eric Moulines Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17688v2 We present a novel theoretical analysis of Federated SARSA (FedSARSA) with linear function approximation and local training. We establish convergence guarantees for FedSARSA in the presence of heterogeneity, both in local transitions and rewards, providing the first sample and communication complexity bounds in this setting. At the core of our analysis is a new, exact multi-step error expansion for single-agent SARSA, which is of independent interest. Our analysis precisely quantifies the impact of heterogeneity, demonstrating the convergence of FedSARSA with multiple local updates. Crucially, we show that FedSARSA achieves linear speed-up with respect to the number of agents, up to higher-order terms due to Markovian sampling. Numerical experiments support our theoretical findings. --- ### Convergence Guarantees for Federated SARSA with Local Training and Heterogeneous Agents Authors: Paul Mangold, Eloïse Berthier, Eric Moulines Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17688v1 We present a novel theoretical analysis of Federated SARSA (FedSARSA) with linear function approximation and local training. We establish convergence guarantees for FedSARSA in the presence of heterogeneity, both in local transitions and rewards, providing the first sample and communication complexity bounds in this setting. At the core of our analysis is a new, exact multi-step error expansion for single-agent SARSA, which is of independent interest. Our analysis precisely quantifies the impact of heterogeneity, demonstrating the convergence of FedSARSA with multiple local updates. Crucially, we show that FedSARSA achieves linear speed-up with respect to the number of agents, up to higher-order terms due to Markovian sampling. Numerical experiments support our theoretical findings. --- ### You Only Train Once: Differentiable Subset Selection for Omics Data Authors: Daphné Chopard, Jorge da Silva Gonçalves, Irene Cannistraci, Thomas M. Sutter, Julia E. Vogt Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17678v2 Selecting compact and informative gene subsets from single-cell transcriptomic data is essential for biomarker discovery, improving interpretability, and cost-effective profiling. However, most existing feature selection approaches either operate as multi-stage pipelines or rely on post hoc feature attribution, making selection and prediction weakly coupled. In this work, we present YOTO (you only train once), an end-to-end framework that jointly identifies discrete gene subsets and performs prediction within a single differentiable architecture. In our model, the prediction task directly guides which genes are selected, while the learned subsets, in turn, shape the predictive representation. This closed feedback loop enables the model to iteratively refine both what it selects and how it predicts during training. Unlike existing approaches, YOTO enforces sparsity so that only the selected genes contribute to inference, eliminating the need to train additional downstream classifiers. Through a multi-task learning design, the model learns shared representations across related objectives, allowing partially labeled datasets to inform one another, and discovering gene subsets that generalize across tasks without additional training steps. We evaluate YOTO on two representative single-cell RNA-seq datasets, showing that it consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. These results demonstrate that sparse, end-to-end, multi-task gene subset selection improves predictive performance and yields compact and meaningful gene subsets, advancing biomarker discovery and single-cell analysis. --- ### You Only Train Once: Differentiable Subset Selection for Omics Data Authors: Daphné Chopard, Jorge da Silva Gonçalves, Irene Cannistraci, Thomas M. Sutter, Julia E. Vogt Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17678v1 Selecting compact and informative gene subsets from single-cell transcriptomic data is essential for biomarker discovery, improving interpretability, and cost-effective profiling. However, most existing feature selection approaches either operate as multi-stage pipelines or rely on post hoc feature attribution, making selection and prediction weakly coupled. In this work, we present YOTO (you only train once), an end-to-end framework that jointly identifies discrete gene subsets and performs prediction within a single differentiable architecture. In our model, the prediction task directly guides which genes are selected, while the learned subsets, in turn, shape the predictive representation. This closed feedback loop enables the model to iteratively refine both what it selects and how it predicts during training. Unlike existing approaches, YOTO enforces sparsity so that only the selected genes contribute to inference, eliminating the need to train additional downstream classifiers. Through a multi-task learning design, the model learns shared representations across related objectives, allowing partially labeled datasets to inform one another, and discovering gene subsets that generalize across tasks without additional training steps. We evaluate YOTO on two representative single-cell RNA-seq datasets, showing that it consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. These results demonstrate that sparse, end-to-end, multi-task gene subset selection improves predictive performance and yields compact and meaningful gene subsets, advancing biomarker discovery and single-cell analysis. --- ### Toward Ethical AI Through Bayesian Uncertainty in Neural Question Answering Authors: Riccardo Di Sipio Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17677v1 We explore Bayesian reasoning as a means to quantify uncertainty in neural networks for question answering. Starting with a multilayer perceptron on the Iris dataset, we show how posterior inference conveys confidence in predictions. We then extend this to language models, applying Bayesian inference first to a frozen head and finally to LoRA-adapted transformers, evaluated on the CommonsenseQA benchmark. Rather than aiming for state-of-the-art accuracy, we compare Laplace approximations against maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimates to highlight uncertainty calibration and selective prediction. This allows models to abstain when confidence is low. An ``I don't know'' response not only improves interpretability but also illustrates how Bayesian methods can contribute to more responsible and ethical deployment of neural question-answering systems. --- ### An Empirical Study of Sampling Hyperparameters in Diffusion-Based Super-Resolution Authors: Yudhistira Arief Wibowo Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17675v1 Diffusion models have shown strong potential for solving inverse problems such as single-image super-resolution, where a high-resolution image is recovered from a low-resolution observation using a pretrained unconditional prior. Conditioning methods, including Diffusion Posterior Sampling (DPS) and Manifold Constrained Gradient (MCG), can substantially improve reconstruction quality, but they introduce additional hyperparameters that require careful tuning. In this work, we conduct an empirical ablation study on FFHQ super-resolution to identify the dominant factors affecting performance when applying conditioning to pretrained diffusion models, and show that the conditioning step size has a significantly greater impact than the diffusion step count, with step sizes in the range of (2.0, 3.0) yielding the best overall performance in our experiments. --- ### Learning Spatio-Temporal Feature Representations for Video-Based Gaze Estimation Authors: Alexandre Personnic, Mihai Bâce Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17673v1 Video-based gaze estimation methods aim to capture the inherently temporal dynamics of human eye gaze from multiple image frames. However, since models must capture both spatial and temporal relationships, performance is limited by the feature representations within a frame but also between multiple frames. We propose the Spatio-Temporal Gaze Network (ST-Gaze), a model that combines a CNN backbone with dedicated channel attention and self-attention modules to fuse eye and face features optimally. The fused features are then treated as a spatial sequence, allowing for the capture of an intra-frame context, which is then propagated through time to model inter-frame dynamics. We evaluated our method on the EVE dataset and show that ST-Gaze achieves state-of-the-art performance both with and without person-specific adaptation. Additionally, our ablation study provides further insights into the model performance, showing that preserving and modelling intra-frame spatial context with our spatio-temporal recurrence is fundamentally superior to premature spatial pooling. As such, our results pave the way towards more robust video-based gaze estimation using commonly available cameras. --- ### Polyharmonic Cascade Authors: Yuriy N. Bakhvalov Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.LG, math.NA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17671v1 This paper presents a deep machine learning architecture, the "polyharmonic cascade" -- a sequence of packages of polyharmonic splines, where each layer is rigorously derived from the theory of random functions and the principles of indifference. This makes it possible to approximate nonlinear functions of arbitrary complexity while preserving global smoothness and a probabilistic interpretation. For the polyharmonic cascade, a training method alternative to gradient descent is proposed: instead of directly optimizing the coefficients, one solves a single global linear system on each batch with respect to the function values at fixed "constellations" of nodes. This yields synchronized updates of all layers, preserves the probabilistic interpretation of individual layers and theoretical consistency with the original model, and scales well: all computations reduce to 2D matrix operations efficiently executed on a GPU. Fast learning without overfitting on MNIST is demonstrated. --- ### STAR: Semantic-Traffic Alignment and Retrieval for Zero-Shot HTTPS Website Fingerprinting Authors: Yifei Cheng, Yujia Zhu, Baiyang Li, Xinhao Deng, Yitong Cai, Yaochen Ren, Qingyun Liu Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.NI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17667v1 Modern HTTPS mechanisms such as Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) and encrypted DNS improve privacy but remain vulnerable to website fingerprinting (WF) attacks, where adversaries infer visited sites from encrypted traffic patterns. Existing WF methods rely on supervised learning with site-specific labeled traces, which limits scalability and fails to handle previously unseen websites. We address these limitations by reformulating WF as a zero-shot cross-modal retrieval problem and introducing STAR. STAR learns a joint embedding space for encrypted traffic traces and crawl-time logic profiles using a dual-encoder architecture. Trained on 150K automatically collected traffic-logic pairs with contrastive and consistency objectives and structure-aware augmentation, STAR retrieves the most semantically aligned profile for a trace without requiring target-side traffic during training. Experiments on 1,600 unseen websites show that STAR achieves 87.9 percent top-1 accuracy and 0.963 AUC in open-world detection, outperforming supervised and few-shot baselines. Adding an adapter with only four labeled traces per site further boosts top-5 accuracy to 98.8 percent. Our analysis reveals intrinsic semantic-traffic alignment in modern web protocols, identifying semantic leakage as the dominant privacy risk in encrypted HTTPS traffic. We release STAR's datasets and code to support reproducibility and future research. --- ### Vidarc: Embodied Video Diffusion Model for Closed-loop Control Authors: Yao Feng, Chendong Xiang, Xinyi Mao, Hengkai Tan, Zuyue Zhang, Shuhe Huang, Kaiwen Zheng, Haitian Liu, Hang Su, Jun Zhu Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17661v1 Robotic arm manipulation in data-scarce settings is a highly challenging task due to the complex embodiment dynamics and diverse contexts. Recent video-based approaches have shown great promise in capturing and transferring the temporal and physical interactions by pre-training on Internet-scale video data. However, such methods are often not optimized for the embodiment-specific closed-loop control, typically suffering from high latency and insufficient grounding. In this paper, we present Vidarc (Video Diffusion for Action Reasoning and Closed-loop Control), a novel autoregressive embodied video diffusion approach augmented by a masked inverse dynamics model. By grounding video predictions with action-relevant masks and incorporating real-time feedback through cached autoregressive generation, Vidarc achieves fast, accurate closed-loop control. Pre-trained on one million cross-embodiment episodes, Vidarc surpasses state-of-the-art baselines, achieving at least a 15% higher success rate in real-world deployment and a 91% reduction in latency. We also highlight its robust generalization and error correction capabilities across previously unseen robotic platforms. --- ### Fraud detection in credit card transactions using Quantum-Assisted Restricted Boltzmann Machines Authors: João Marcos Cavalcanti de Albuquerque Neto, Gustavo Castro do Amaral, Guilherme Penello Temporão Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: quant-ph, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17660v1 Use cases for emerging quantum computing platforms become economically relevant as the efficiency of processing and availability of quantum computers increase. We assess the performance of Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM) assisted by quantum computing, running on real quantum hardware and simulators, using a real dataset containing 145 million transactions provided by Stone, a leading Brazilian fintech, for credit card fraud detection. The results suggest that the quantum-assisted RBM method is able to achieve superior performance in most figures of merit in comparison to classical approaches, even using current noisy quantum annealers. Our study paves the way for implementing quantum-assisted RBMs for general fault detection in financial systems. --- ### Generative Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization with Scalable Batch Evaluations for Sample-Efficient De Novo Molecular Design Authors: Madhav R. Muthyala, Farshud Sorourifar, Tianhong Tan, You Peng, Joel A. Paulson Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: stat.ML, cond-mat.mtrl-sci, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17659v1 Designing molecules that must satisfy multiple, often conflicting objectives is a central challenge in molecular discovery. The enormous size of chemical space and the cost of high-fidelity simulations have driven the development of machine learning-guided strategies for accelerating design with limited data. Among these, Bayesian optimization (BO) offers a principled framework for sample-efficient search, while generative models provide a mechanism to propose novel, diverse candidates beyond fixed libraries. However, existing methods that couple the two often rely on continuous latent spaces, which introduces both architectural entanglement and scalability challenges. This work introduces an alternative, modular "generate-then-optimize" framework for de novo multi-objective molecular design/discovery. At each iteration, a generative model is used to construct a large, diverse pool of candidate molecules, after which a novel acquisition function, qPMHI (multi-point Probability of Maximum Hypervolume Improvement), is used to optimally select a batch of candidates most likely to induce the largest Pareto front expansion. The key insight is that qPMHI decomposes additively, enabling exact, scalable batch selection via only simple ranking of probabilities that can be easily estimated with Monte Carlo sampling. We benchmark the framework against state-of-the-art latent-space and discrete molecular optimization methods, demonstrating significant improvements across synthetic benchmarks and application-driven tasks. Specifically, in a case study related to sustainable energy storage, we show that our approach quickly uncovers novel, diverse, and high-performing organic (quinone-based) cathode materials for aqueous redox flow battery applications. --- ### Peeking Into The Future For Contextual Biasing Authors: Ramaneswaran Selvakumar, Cindy Tseng, Eesung Kim, Vijendra Raj Apsingekar, Yun Tang Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17657v1 While end-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) models excel at general transcription, they struggle to recognize rare or unseen named entities (e.g., contact names, locations), which are critical for downstream applications like virtual assistants. In this paper, we propose a contextual biasing method for attention based encoder decoder (AED) models using a list of candidate named entities. Instead of predicting only the next token, we simultaneously predict multiple future tokens, enabling the model to "peek into the future" and score potential candidate entities in the entity list. Moreover, our approach leverages the multi-token prediction logits directly without requiring additional entity encoders or cross-attention layers, significantly reducing architectural complexity. Experiments on Librispeech demonstrate that our approach achieves up to 50.34% relative improvement in named entity word error rate compared to the baseline AED model. --- ### Bitbox: Behavioral Imaging Toolbox for Computational Analysis of Behavior from Videos Authors: Evangelos Sariyanidi, Gokul Nair, Lisa Yankowitz, Casey J. Zampella, Mohan Kashyap Pargi, Aashvi Manakiwala, Maya McNealis, John D. Herrington, Jeffrey Cohn, Robert T. Schultz, Birkan Tunc Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CV, q-bio.NC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17655v1 Computational measurement of human behavior from video has recently become feasible due to major advances in AI. These advances now enable granular and precise quantification of facial expression, head movement, body action, and other behavioral modalities and are increasingly used in psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and mental health research. However, mainstream adoption remains slow. Most existing methods and software are developed for engineering audiences, require specialized software stacks, and fail to provide behavioral measurements at a level directly useful for hypothesis-driven research. As a result, there is a large barrier to entry for researchers who wish to use modern, AI-based tools in their work. We introduce Bitbox, an open-source toolkit designed to remove this barrier and make advanced computational analysis directly usable by behavioral scientists and clinical researchers. Bitbox is guided by principles of reproducibility, modularity, and interpretability. It provides a standardized interface for extracting high-level behavioral measurements from video, leveraging multiple face, head, and body processors. The core modules have been tested and validated on clinical samples and are designed so that new measures can be added with minimal effort. Bitbox is intended to serve both sides of the translational gap. It gives behavioral researchers access to robust, high-level behavioral metrics without requiring engineering expertise, and it provides computer scientists a practical mechanism for disseminating methods to domains where their impact is most needed. We expect that Bitbox will accelerate integration of computational behavioral measurement into behavioral, clinical, and mental health research. Bitbox has been designed from the beginning as a community-driven effort that will evolve through contributions from both method developers and domain scientists. --- ### Learning-Based Estimation of Spatially Resolved Scatter Radiation Fields in Interventional Radiology Authors: Felix Lehner, Pasquale Lombardo, Susana Castillo, Oliver Hupe, Marcus Magnor Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.LG, physics.comp-ph, physics.med-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17654v3 We present three variants of a lightweight, fully connected artificial neural network, suited for interactive estimation of three-dimensional, spatially resolved volumes of scattered radiation fields and a corresponding training pipeline for radiation protection dosimetry in medical radiation fields, such as those found in interventional radiology and cardiology. Accompanying, we present three different synthetically generated datasets with increasing complexity for training, generated using RadField3D, a Monte Carlo simulation application based on Geant4. As the primary scatter object, we employed the torso of a male Alderson RANDO phantom. On those datasets, we evaluate convolutional and fully connected architectures of neural networks to demonstrate which design decisions work well for reconstructing the fluence and spectra distributions over the spatial domain of such radiation fields. All our datasets, as well as our training pipeline, are published as open source in separate repositories. To evaluate the presented neural networks, we define and assess several metrics. Across these measures, the model variants demonstrate good spatial agreement between predicted and ground-truth radiation fields, particularly within specific regions of interest within the radiation field. Of particular relevance for potential application in out-of-field dosimetry is the SMAPE of the scatter radiation field, which represents the most challenging metric and was consistently above 84 %. --- ### Estimating Spatially Resolved Radiation Fields Using Neural Networks Authors: Felix Lehner, Pasquale Lombardo, Susana Castillo, Oliver Hupe, Marcus Magnor Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.LG, physics.comp-ph, physics.med-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17654v1 We present an in-depth analysis on how to build and train neural networks to estimate the spatial distribution of scattered radiation fields for radiation protection dosimetry in medical radiation fields, such as those found in Interventional Radiology and Cardiology. Therefore, we present three different synthetically generated datasets with increasing complexity for training, using a Monte-Carlo Simulation application based on Geant4. On those datasets, we evaluate convolutional and fully connected architectures of neural networks to demonstrate which design decisions work well for reconstructing the fluence and spectra distributions over the spatial domain of such radiation fields. All used datasets as well as our training pipeline are published as open source in separate repositories. --- ### Region-Constraint In-Context Generation for Instructional Video Editing Authors: Zhongwei Zhang, Fuchen Long, Wei Li, Zhaofan Qiu, Wu Liu, Ting Yao, Tao Mei Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CV, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17650v1 The In-context generation paradigm recently has demonstrated strong power in instructional image editing with both data efficiency and synthesis quality. Nevertheless, shaping such in-context learning for instruction-based video editing is not trivial. Without specifying editing regions, the results can suffer from the problem of inaccurate editing regions and the token interference between editing and non-editing areas during denoising. To address these, we present ReCo, a new instructional video editing paradigm that novelly delves into constraint modeling between editing and non-editing regions during in-context generation. Technically, ReCo width-wise concatenates source and target video for joint denoising. To calibrate video diffusion learning, ReCo capitalizes on two regularization terms, i.e., latent and attention regularization, conducting on one-step backward denoised latents and attention maps, respectively. The former increases the latent discrepancy of the editing region between source and target videos while reducing that of non-editing areas, emphasizing the modification on editing area and alleviating outside unexpected content generation. The latter suppresses the attention of tokens in the editing region to the tokens in counterpart of the source video, thereby mitigating their interference during novel object generation in target video. Furthermore, we propose a large-scale, high-quality video editing dataset, i.e., ReCo-Data, comprising 500K instruction-video pairs to benefit model training. Extensive experiments conducted on four major instruction-based video editing tasks demonstrate the superiority of our proposal. --- ### Simulstream: Open-Source Toolkit for Evaluation and Demonstration of Streaming Speech-to-Text Translation Systems Authors: Marco Gaido, Sara Papi, Mauro Cettolo, Matteo Negri, Luisa Bentivogli Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17648v3 Streaming Speech-to-Text Translation (StreamST) requires producing translations concurrently with incoming speech under strict latency constraints, demanding models that balance low latency with high translation quality. Despite rapid progress, evaluation remains fragmented across existing frameworks, which make different assumptions about how systems operate - for example, whether they process continuous speech or short pre-segmented audio, and whether they support output revision (retranslation) or not (incremental). For instance, SimulEval, the most widely used framework, supports only incremental decoding, assumes short segmented inputs, and lacks a native support for system demonstrations. As a result, comparing systems fairly and consistently across studies remains challenging, with no unified solution for benchmarking and interactive demonstration. To address this gap, we introduce simulstream, the first open-source framework for StreamST evaluation and demonstration. It supports both incremental and re-translation decoding on long-form speech, provides fine-grained logging for quality and latency evaluation, and includes an interactive web interface for real-time visualization and comparison. --- ### Simulstream: Open-Source Toolkit for Evaluation and Demonstration of Streaming Speech-to-Text Translation Systems Authors: Marco Gaido, Sara Papi, Mauro Cettolo, Matteo Negri, Luisa Bentivogli Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17648v1 Streaming Speech-to-Text Translation (StreamST) requires producing translations concurrently with incoming speech, imposing strict latency constraints and demanding models that balance partial-information decision-making with high translation quality. Research efforts on the topic have so far relied on the SimulEval repository, which is no longer maintained and does not support systems that revise their outputs. In addition, it has been designed for simulating the processing of short segments, rather than long-form audio streams, and it does not provide an easy method to showcase systems in a demo. As a solution, we introduce simulstream, the first open-source framework dedicated to unified evaluation and demonstration of StreamST systems. Designed for long-form speech processing, it supports not only incremental decoding approaches, but also re-translation methods, enabling for their comparison within the same framework both in terms of quality and latency. In addition, it also offers an interactive web interface to demo any system built within the tool. --- ### Generative Human-Object Interaction Detection via Differentiable Cognitive Steering of Multi-modal LLMs Authors: Zhaolin Cai, Huiyu Duan, Zitong Xu, Fan Li, Zhi Liu, Jing Liu, Wei Shen, Xiongkuo Min, Guangtao Zhai Published: 2025-12-19 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17640v1 Human-object interaction (HOI) detection aims to localize human-object pairs and the interactions between them. Existing methods operate under a closed-world assumption, treating the task as a classification problem over a small, predefined verb set, which struggles to generalize to the long-tail of unseen or ambiguous interactions in the wild. While recent multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) possess the rich world knowledge required for open-vocabulary understanding, they remain decoupled from existing HOI detectors since fine-tuning them is computationally prohibitive. To address these constraints, we propose \GRASP-HO}, a novel Generative Reasoning And Steerable Perception framework that reformulates HOI detection from the closed-set classification task to the open-vocabulary generation problem. To bridge the vision and cognitive, we first extract hybrid interaction representations, then design a lightweight learnable cognitive steering conduit (CSC) module to inject the fine-grained visual evidence into a frozen MLLM for effective reasoning. To address the supervision mismatch between classification-based HOI datasets and open-vocabulary generative models, we introduce a hybrid guidance strategy that coupling the language modeling loss and auxiliary classification loss, enabling discriminative grounding without sacrificing generative flexibility. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art closed-set performance and strong zero-shot generalization, achieving a unified paradigm that seamlessly bridges discriminative perception and generative reasoning for open-world HOI detection. ---