# Research Papers — 2025-12 · bundle page 71 of 175

> Full-text markdown of papers #3501–3550 of 8703 published in 2025-12, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 8703-paper 2025-12 archive (50 papers per file).

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### Double Horizon Model-Based Policy Optimization

Authors: Akihiro Kubo, Paavo Parmas, Shin Ishii
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15439v1

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) reduces the cost of real-environment sampling by generating synthetic trajectories (called rollouts) from a learned dynamics model. However, choosing the length of the rollouts poses two dilemmas: (1) Longer rollouts better preserve on-policy training but amplify model bias, indicating the need for an intermediate horizon to mitigate distribution shift (i.e., the gap between on-policy and past off-policy samples). (2) Moreover, a longer model rollout may reduce value estimation bias but raise the variance of policy gradients due to backpropagation through multiple steps, implying another intermediate horizon for stable gradient estimates. However, these two optimal horizons may differ. To resolve this conflict, we propose Double Horizon Model-Based Policy Optimization (DHMBPO), which divides the rollout procedure into a long "distribution rollout" (DR) and a short "training rollout" (TR). The DR generates on-policy state samples for mitigating distribution shift. In contrast, the short TR leverages differentiable transitions to offer accurate value gradient estimation with stable gradient updates, thereby requiring fewer updates and reducing overall runtime. We demonstrate that the double-horizon approach effectively balances distribution shift, model bias, and gradient instability, and surpasses existing MBRL methods on continuous-control benchmarks in terms of both sample efficiency and runtime.

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### Online Partitioned Local Depth for semi-supervised applications

Authors: John D. Foley, Justin T. Lee
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15436v2

We introduce an extension of the partitioned local depth (PaLD) algorithm that is adapted to online applications such as semi-supervised prediction. PaLD is best known for unsupervised, parameter-free clustering, but its robustness is based on triples of data points, making exact analysis computationally expensive. Research is ongoing to improve the scalability of the underlying discrete algorithm and expand the breath of PaLD's applications. The new algorithm we present, online PaLD, is well-suited to situations where it is possible to pre-compute a cohesion network from a reference dataset. After $O(n^3)$ steps to construct a queryable data structure, online PaLD can extend the cohesion network to a new data point in $O(n^2)$ time. Our approach complements previous speed up approaches based on approximation and parallelism. In practical terms, online PaLD makes larger datasets accessible to exact analysis with a relatively simple implementation. We present applications to online anomaly detection and semi-supervised classification for health-care datasets as initial illustrations of online PaLD's potential to expand applications of the PaLD framework.

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### Outer-Learning Framework for Playing Multi-Player Trick-Taking Card Games: A Case Study in Skat

Authors: Stefan Edelkamp
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15435v1

In multi-player card games such as Skat or Bridge, the early stages of the game, such as bidding, game selection, and initial card selection, are often more critical to the success of the play than refined middle- and end-game play. At the current limits of computation, such early decision-making resorts to using statistical information derived from a large corpus of human expert games. In this paper, we derive and evaluate a general bootstrapping outer-learning framework that improves prediction accuracy by expanding the database of human games with millions of self-playing AI games to generate and merge statistics. We implement perfect feature hash functions to address compacted tables, producing a self-improving card game engine, where newly inferred knowledge is continuously improved during self-learning. The case study in Skat shows that the automated approach can be used to support various decisions in the game.

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### CLIP-FTI: Fine-Grained Face Template Inversion via CLIP-Driven Attribute Conditioning

Authors: Longchen Dai, Zixuan Shen, Zhiheng Zhou, Peipeng Yu, Zhihua Xia
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15433v1

Face recognition systems store face templates for efficient matching. Once leaked, these templates pose a threat: inverting them can yield photorealistic surrogates that compromise privacy and enable impersonation. Although existing research has achieved relatively realistic face template inversion, the reconstructed facial images exhibit over-smoothed facial-part attributes (eyes, nose, mouth) and limited transferability. To address this problem, we present CLIP-FTI, a CLIP-driven fine-grained attribute conditioning framework for face template inversion. Our core idea is to use the CLIP model to obtain the semantic embeddings of facial features, in order to realize the reconstruction of specific facial feature attributes. Specifically, facial feature attribute embeddings extracted from CLIP are fused with the leaked template via a cross-modal feature interaction network and projected into the intermediate latent space of a pretrained StyleGAN. The StyleGAN generator then synthesizes face images with the same identity as the templates but with more fine-grained facial feature attributes. Experiments across multiple face recognition backbones and datasets show that our reconstructions (i) achieve higher identification accuracy and attribute similarity, (ii) recover sharper component-level attribute semantics, and (iii) improve cross-model attack transferability compared to prior reconstruction attacks. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first method to use additional information besides the face template attack to realize face template inversion and obtains SOTA results.

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### Step-GUI Technical Report

Authors: Haolong Yan, Jia Wang, Xin Huang, Yeqing Shen, Ziyang Meng, Zhimin Fan, Kaijun Tan, Jin Gao, Lieyu Shi, Mi Yang, Shiliang Yang, Zhirui Wang et al.
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15431v2

Recent advances in multimodal large language models unlock unprecedented opportunities for GUI automation. However, a fundamental challenge remains: how to efficiently acquire high-quality training data while maintaining annotation reliability? We introduce a self-evolving training pipeline powered by the Calibrated Step Reward System, which converts model-generated trajectories into reliable training signals through trajectory-level calibration, achieving >90% annotation accuracy with 10-100x lower cost. Leveraging this pipeline, we introduce Step-GUI, a family of models (4B/8B) that achieves state-of-the-art GUI performance (8B: 80.2% AndroidWorld, 48.5% OSWorld, 62.6% ScreenShot-Pro) while maintaining robust general capabilities. As GUI agent capabilities improve, practical deployment demands standardized interfaces across heterogeneous devices while protecting user privacy. To this end, we propose GUI-MCP, the first Model Context Protocol for GUI automation with hierarchical architecture that combines low-level atomic operations and high-level task delegation to local specialist models, enabling high-privacy execution where sensitive data stays on-device. Finally, to assess whether agents can handle authentic everyday usage, we introduce AndroidDaily, a benchmark grounded in real-world mobile usage patterns with 3146 static actions and 235 end-to-end tasks across high-frequency daily scenarios (8B: static 89.91%, end-to-end 52.50%). Our work advances the development of practical GUI agents and demonstrates strong potential for real-world deployment in everyday digital interactions.

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### FM-EAC: Feature Model-based Enhanced Actor-Critic for Multi-Task Control in Dynamic Environments

Authors: Quanxi Zhou, Wencan Mao, Manabu Tsukada, John C. S. Lui, Yusheng Ji
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15430v1

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) and model-free reinforcement learning (MFRL) evolve along distinct paths but converge in the design of Dyna-Q (1). However, modern RL methods still struggle with effective transferability across tasks and scenarios. Motivated by this limitation, we propose a generalized algorithm, Feature Model-Based Enhanced Actor-Critic (FM-EAC), that integrates planning, acting, and learning for multi-task control in dynamic environments. FM-EAC combines the strengths of MBRL and MFRL and improves generalizability through the use of novel feature-based models and an enhanced actor-critic framework. Simulations in both urban and agricultural applications demonstrate that FM-EAC consistently outperforms many state-of-the-art MBRL and MFRL methods. More importantly, different sub-networks can be customized within FM-EAC according to user-specific requirements.

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### Statistics of Min-max Normalized Eigenvalues in Random Matrices

Authors: Hyakka Nakada, Shu Tanaka
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.LG, cond-mat.stat-mech, math.ST
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15427v1

Random matrix theory has played an important role in various areas of pure mathematics, mathematical physics, and machine learning. From a practical perspective of data science, input data are usually normalized prior to processing. Thus, this study investigates the statistical properties of min-max normalized eigenvalues in random matrices. Previously, the effective distribution for such normalized eigenvalues has been proposed. In this study, we apply it to evaluate a scaling law of the cumulative distribution. Furthermore, we derive the residual error that arises during matrix factorization of random matrices. We conducted numerical experiments to verify these theoretical predictions.

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### The 3D Mirage: Probing and Taming 3D Hallucinations

Authors: Hoang Nguyen, Xiaohao Xu, Xiaonan Huang
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15423v2

Monocular depth foundation models achieve remarkable generalization by learning large-scale semantic priors, but this creates a critical vulnerability: they hallucinate illusory 3D structures from planar/low-curvature but perceptually ambiguous inputs. We term this failure the 3D Mirage. This paper introduces a novel end-to-end framework to probe, score, and tame this under-quantified safety risk in monocular depth under context variation. To probe, we present 3D-Mirage, the first benchmark to combine context variation and precise annotation for real-world illusions with real object exclusions, multi-surface support; purpose-built to stress-test monocular depth on real-world illusions. To score, we propose a second-order magnitude-based evaluation with two metrics: the Deviation Composite Score (DCS) for high second-order 3D structure and the Confusion Composite Score (CCS) for contextual instability. To tame this failure, we introduce Grounded Self-Distillation, a parameter-efficient strategy on Depth-Anything-V2 baseline that surgically targets and resolves hallucination on illusion ROIs while preserving background knowledge, avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Our work provides an innovative pipeline for diagnosing and addressing this phenomenon, urging a necessary shift in the evaluation of MDE from pixel-wise accuracy to structural and contextual robustness.

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### FlowBind: Efficient Any-to-Any Generation with Bidirectional Flows

Authors: Yeonwoo Cha, Semin Kim, Jinhyeon Kwon, Seunghoon Hong
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15420v2

Any-to-any generation seeks to translate between arbitrary subsets of modalities, enabling flexible cross-modal synthesis. Despite recent success, existing flow-based approaches are challenged by their inefficiency, as they require large-scale datasets often with restrictive pairing constraints, incur high computational cost from modeling joint distribution, and rely on complex multi-stage training. We propose FlowBind, an efficient framework for any-to-any generation. Our approach is distinguished by its simplicity: it learns a shared latent space capturing cross-modal information, with modality-specific invertible flows bridging this latent to each modality. Both components are optimized jointly under a single flow-matching objective, and at inference the invertible flows act as encoders and decoders for direct translation across modalities. By factorizing interactions through the shared latent, FlowBind naturally leverages arbitrary subsets of modalities for training, and achieves competitive generation quality while substantially reducing data requirements and computational cost. Experiments on text, image, and audio demonstrate that FlowBind attains comparable quality while requiring up to 6x fewer parameters and training 10x faster than prior methods. The project page with code is available at https://yeonwoo378.github.io/official_flowbind.

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### MiVLA: Towards Generalizable Vision-Language-Action Model with Human-Robot Mutual Imitation Pre-training

Authors: Zhenhan Yin, Xuanhan Wang, Jiahao Jiang, Kaiyuan Deng, Pengqi Chen, Shuangle Li, Chong Liu, Xing Xu, Jingkuan Song, Lianli Gao, Heng Tao Shen
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15411v2

While leveraging abundant human videos and simulated robot data poses a scalable solution to the scarcity of real-world robot data, the generalization capability of existing vision-language-action models (VLAs) remains limited by mismatches in camera views, visual appearance, and embodiment morphologies. To overcome this limitation, we propose MiVLA, a generalizable VLA empowered by human-robot mutual imitation pre-training, which leverages inherent behavioral similarity between human hands and robotic arms to build a foundation of strong behavioral priors for both human actions and robotic control. Specifically, our method utilizes kinematic rules with left/right hand coordinate systems for bidirectional alignment between human and robot action spaces. Given human or simulated robot demonstrations, MiVLA is trained to forecast behavior trajectories for one embodiment, and imitate behaviors for another one unseen in the demonstration. Based on this mutual imitation, it integrates the behavioral fidelity of real-world human data with the manipulative diversity of simulated robot data into a unified model, thereby enhancing the generalization capability for downstream tasks. Extensive experiments conducted on both simulation and real-world platforms with three robots (ARX, PiPer and LocoMan), demonstrate that MiVLA achieves strong improved generalization capability, outperforming state-of-the-art VLAs (e.g., $\boldsymbolπ_{0}$, $\boldsymbolπ_{0.5}$ and H-RDT) by 25% in simulation, and 14% in real-world robot control tasks.

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### Preserving Marker Specificity with Lightweight Channel-Independent Representation Learning

Authors: Simon Gutwein, Arthur Longuefosse, Jun Seita, Sabine Taschner-Mandl, Roxane Licandro
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15410v1

Multiplexed tissue imaging measures dozens of protein markers per cell, yet most deep learning models still apply early channel fusion, assuming shared structure across markers. We investigate whether preserving marker independence, combined with deliberately shallow architectures, provides a more suitable inductive bias for self-supervised representation learning in multiplex data than increasing model scale. Using a Hodgkin lymphoma CODEX dataset with 145,000 cells and 49 markers, we compare standard early-fusion CNNs with channel-separated architectures, including a marker-aware baseline and our novel shallow Channel-Independent Model (CIM-S) with 5.5K parameters. After contrastive pretraining and linear evaluation, early-fusion models show limited ability to retain marker-specific information and struggle particularly with rare-cell discrimination. Channel-independent architectures, and CIM-S in particular, achieve substantially stronger representations despite their compact size. These findings are consistent across multiple self-supervised frameworks, remain stable across augmentation settings, and are reproducible across both the 49-marker and reduced 18-marker settings. These results show that lightweight, channel-independent architectures can match or surpass deep early-fusion CNNs and foundation models for multiplex representation learning. Code is available at https://github.com/SimonBon/CIM-S.

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### EUBRL: Epistemic Uncertainty Directed Bayesian Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Jianfei Ma, Wee Sun Lee
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15405v2

At the boundary between the known and the unknown, an agent inevitably confronts the dilemma of whether to explore or to exploit. Epistemic uncertainty reflects such boundaries, representing systematic uncertainty due to limited knowledge. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm, $\texttt{EUBRL}$, which leverages epistemic guidance to achieve principled exploration. This guidance adaptively reduces per-step regret arising from estimation errors. We establish nearly minimax-optimal regret and sample complexity guarantees for a class of sufficiently expressive priors in infinite-horizon discounted MDPs. Empirically, we evaluate $\texttt{EUBRL}$ on tasks characterized by sparse rewards, long horizons, and stochasticity. Results demonstrate that $\texttt{EUBRL}$ achieves superior sample efficiency, scalability, and consistency.

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### ORACLE: Time-Dependent Recursive Summary Graphs for Foresight on News Data Using LLMs

Authors: Lev Kharlashkin, Eiaki Morooka, Yehor Tereshchenko, Mika Hämäläinen
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15397v1

ORACLE turns daily news into week-over-week, decision-ready insights for one of the Finnish University of Applied Sciences. The platform crawls and versions news, applies University-specific relevance filtering, embeds content, classifies items into PESTEL dimensions and builds a concise Time-Dependent Recursive Summary Graph (TRSG): two clustering layers summarized by an LLM and recomputed weekly. A lightweight change detector highlights what is new, removed or changed, then groups differences into themes for PESTEL-aware analysis. We detail the pipeline, discuss concrete design choices that make the system stable in production and present a curriculum-intelligence use case with an evaluation plan.

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### SMART: Semantic Matching Contrastive Learning for Partially View-Aligned Clustering

Authors: Liang Peng, Yixuan Ye, Cheng Liu, Hangjun Che, Fei Wang, Zhiwen Yu, Si Wu, Hau-San Wong
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15396v1

Multi-view clustering has been empirically shown to improve learning performance by leveraging the inherent complementary information across multiple views of data. However, in real-world scenarios, collecting strictly aligned views is challenging, and learning from both aligned and unaligned data becomes a more practical solution. Partially View-aligned Clustering aims to learn correspondences between misaligned view samples to better exploit the potential consistency and complementarity across views, including both aligned and unaligned data. However, most existing PVC methods fail to leverage unaligned data to capture the shared semantics among samples from the same cluster. Moreover, the inherent heterogeneity of multi-view data induces distributional shifts in representations, leading to inaccuracies in establishing meaningful correspondences between cross-view latent features and, consequently, impairing learning effectiveness. To address these challenges, we propose a Semantic MAtching contRasTive learning model (SMART) for PVC. The main idea of our approach is to alleviate the influence of cross-view distributional shifts, thereby facilitating semantic matching contrastive learning to fully exploit semantic relationships in both aligned and unaligned data. Extensive experiments on eight benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing approaches on the PVC problem.

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### Bilateral Spatial Reasoning about Street Networks: Graph-based RAG with Qualitative Spatial Representations

Authors: Reinhard Moratz, Niklas Daute, James Ondieki, Markus Kattenbeck, Mario Krajina, Ioannis Giannopoulos
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15388v1

This paper deals with improving the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLM) to provide route instructions for pedestrian wayfinders by means of qualitative spatial relations.

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### See It Before You Grab It: Deep Learning-based Action Anticipation in Basketball

Authors: Arnau Barrera Roy, Albert Clapés Sintes
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15386v1

Computer vision and video understanding have transformed sports analytics by enabling large-scale, automated analysis of game dynamics from broadcast footage. Despite significant advances in player and ball tracking, pose estimation, action localization, and automatic foul recognition, anticipating actions before they occur in sports videos has received comparatively little attention. This work introduces the task of action anticipation in basketball broadcast videos, focusing on predicting which team will gain possession of the ball following a shot attempt. To benchmark this task, a new self-curated dataset comprising 100,000 basketball video clips, over 300 hours of footage, and more than 2,000 manually annotated rebound events is presented. Comprehensive baseline results are reported using state-of-the-art action anticipation methods, representing the first application of deep learning techniques to basketball rebound prediction. Additionally, two complementary tasks, rebound classification and rebound spotting, are explored, demonstrating that this dataset supports a wide range of video understanding applications in basketball, for which no comparable datasets currently exist. Experimental results highlight both the feasibility and inherent challenges of anticipating rebounds, providing valuable insights into predictive modeling for dynamic multi-agent sports scenarios. By forecasting team possession before rebounds occur, this work enables applications in real-time automated broadcasting and post-game analysis tools to support decision-making.

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### Robustness Evaluation of Machine Learning Models for Fault Classification and Localization In Power System Protection

Authors: Julian Oelhaf, Mehran Pashaei, Georg Kordowich, Christian Bergler, Andreas Maier, Johann Jäger, Siming Bayer
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.LG, eess.SP
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15385v1

The growing penetration of renewable and distributed generation is transforming power systems and challenging conventional protection schemes that rely on fixed settings and local measurements. Machine learning (ML) offers a data-driven alternative for centralized fault classification (FC) and fault localization (FL), enabling faster and more adaptive decision-making. However, practical deployment critically depends on robustness. Protection algorithms must remain reliable even when confronted with missing, noisy, or degraded sensor data. This work introduces a unified framework for systematically evaluating the robustness of ML models in power system protection. High-fidelity EMT simulations are used to model realistic degradation scenarios, including sensor outages, reduced sampling rates, and transient communication losses. The framework provides a consistent methodology for benchmarking models, quantifying the impact of limited observability, and identifying critical measurement channels required for resilient operation. Results show that FC remains highly stable under most degradation types but drops by about 13% under single-phase loss, while FL is more sensitive overall, with voltage loss increasing localization error by over 150%. These findings offer actionable guidance for robustness-aware design of future ML-assisted protection systems.

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### Interpretable Multivariate Conformal Prediction with Fast Transductive Standardization

Authors: Yunjie Fan, Matteo Sesia
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: stat.ME, math.ST, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15383v1

We propose a conformal prediction method for constructing tight simultaneous prediction intervals for multiple, potentially related, numerical outputs given a single input. This method can be combined with any multi-target regression model and guarantees finite-sample coverage. It is computationally efficient and yields informative prediction intervals even with limited data. The core idea is a novel \emph{coordinate-wise} standardization procedure that makes residuals across output dimensions directly comparable, estimating suitable scaling parameters using the calibration data themselves. This does not require modeling of cross-output dependence nor auxiliary sample splitting. Implementing this idea requires overcoming technical challenges associated with transductive or full conformal prediction. Experiments on simulated and real data demonstrate this method can produce tighter prediction intervals than existing baselines while maintaining valid simultaneous coverage.

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### Remotely Detectable Robot Policy Watermarking

Authors: Michael Amir, Manon Flageat, Amanda Prorok
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.RO, cs.CR, cs.LG, eess.SY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15379v1

The success of machine learning for real-world robotic systems has created a new form of intellectual property: the trained policy. This raises a critical need for novel methods that verify ownership and detect unauthorized, possibly unsafe misuse. While watermarking is established in other domains, physical policies present a unique challenge: remote detection. Existing methods assume access to the robot's internal state, but auditors are often limited to external observations (e.g., video footage). This ``Physical Observation Gap'' means the watermark must be detected from signals that are noisy, asynchronous, and filtered by unknown system dynamics. We formalize this challenge using the concept of a \textit{glimpse sequence}, and introduce Colored Noise Coherency (CoNoCo), the first watermarking strategy designed for remote detection. CoNoCo embeds a spectral signal into the robot's motions by leveraging the policy's inherent stochasticity. To show it does not degrade performance, we prove CoNoCo preserves the marginal action distribution. Our experiments demonstrate strong, robust detection across various remote modalities, including motion capture and side-way/top-down video footage, in both simulated and real-world robot experiments. This work provides a necessary step toward protecting intellectual property in robotics, offering the first method for validating the provenance of physical policies non-invasively, using purely remote observations.

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### A Regime-Aware Fusion Framework for Time Series Classification

Authors: Honey Singh Chauhan, Zahraa S. Abdallah
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15378v2

Kernel-based methods such as Rocket are among the most effective default approaches for univariate time series classification (TSC), yet they do not perform equally well across all datasets. We revisit the long-standing intuition that different representations capture complementary structure and show that selectively fusing them can yield consistent improvements over Rocket on specific, systematically identifiable kinds of datasets. We introduce Fusion-3 (F3), a lightweight framework that adaptively fuses Rocket, SAX, and SFA representations. To understand when fusion helps, we cluster UCR datasets into six groups using meta-features capturing series length, spectral structure, roughness, and class imbalance, and treat these clusters as interpretable data-structure regimes. Our analysis shows that fusion typically outperforms strong baselines in regimes with structured variability or rich frequency content, while offering diminishing returns in highly irregular or outlier-heavy settings. To support these findings, we combine three complementary analyses: non-parametric paired statistics across datasets, ablation studies isolating the roles of individual representations, and attribution via SHAP to identify which dataset properties predict fusion gains. Sample-level case studies further reveal the underlying mechanism: fusion primarily improves performance by rescuing specific errors, with adaptive increases in frequency-domain weighting precisely where corrections occur. Using 5-fold cross-validation on the 113 UCR datasets, F3 yields small but consistent average improvements over Rocket, supported by frequentist and Bayesian evidence and accompanied by clearly identifiable failure cases. Our results show that selectively applied fusion provides dependable and interpretable extension to strong kernel-based methods, correcting their weaknesses precisely where the data support it.

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### Emotion Recognition in Signers

Authors: Kotaro Funakoshi, Yaoxiong Zhu
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15376v2

Recognition of signers' emotions suffers from one theoretical challenge and one practical challenge, namely, the overlap between grammatical and affective facial expressions and the scarcity of data for model training. This paper addresses these two challenges in a cross-lingual setting using our eJSL dataset, a new benchmark dataset for emotion recognition in Japanese Sign Language signers, and BOBSL, a large British Sign Language dataset with subtitles. In eJSL, two signers expressed 78 distinct utterances with each of seven different emotional states, resulting in 1,092 video clips. We empirically demonstrate that 1) textual emotion recognition in spoken language mitigates data scarcity in sign language, 2) temporal segment selection has a significant impact, and 3) incorporating hand motion enhances emotion recognition in signers. Finally we establish a stronger baseline than spoken language LLMs.

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### SCOPE: Prompt Evolution for Enhancing Agent Effectiveness

Authors: Zehua Pei, Hui-Ling Zhen, Shixiong Kai, Sinno Jialin Pan, Yunhe Wang, Mingxuan Yuan, Bei Yu
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15374v2

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in environments that generate massive, dynamic contexts. However, a critical bottleneck remains: while agents have access to this context, their static prompts lack the mechanisms to manage it effectively, leading to recurring Corrective and Enhancement failures. To address this capability gap, we introduce Self-evolving Context Optimization via Prompt Evolution (SCOPE). SCOPE frames context management as an \textit{online optimization} problem, synthesizing guidelines from execution traces to automatically evolve the agent's prompt. We propose a Dual-Stream mechanism that routes guidelines between tactical memory (immediate error correction) and strategic memory, which is continuously refined through conflict resolution, subsumption pruning, and consolidation. To maximize strategy coverage, Perspective-Driven Exploration evolves multiple parallel prompts guided by distinct optimization perspectives. Experiments on the HLE benchmark show that SCOPE improves task success rates from 14.23\% to 38.64\% without human intervention. We make our code publicly available at https://github.com/JarvisPei/SCOPE.

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### Image Complexity-Aware Adaptive Retrieval for Efficient Vision-Language Models

Authors: Mikel Williams-Lekuona, Georgina Cosma
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG, cs.MM
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15372v2

Vision transformers in vision-language models typically use the same amount of compute for every image, regardless of whether it is simple or complex. We propose ICAR (Image Complexity-Aware Retrieval), an adaptive computation approach that enables vision transformers to use less compute for simple images whilst processing complex images through their full network depth. The key challenge is maintaining cross-modal alignment: embeddings from different processing depths must remain compatible for text matching. ICAR solves this through dual-path training that produces compatible embeddings from both the early-exit and full-depth paths. This maintains compatibility between image representations and text embeddings in the same semantic space, whether an image exits early or processes fully. Unlike existing two-stage approaches that require expensive reranking, ICAR enables direct image-text matching without additional overhead. To determine how much compute to use, we develop ConvNeXt-IC, which treats image complexity assessment as a classification task. By applying modern classifier backbones rather than specialised architectures, ConvNeXt-IC achieves state-of-the-art performance, attaining a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.959 with human labelling whilst delivering 4.4x faster complexity prediction. Evaluated on standard benchmarks augmented with real-world web data, ICAR achieves 20% faster image encoding while maintaining category-level performance and 95% of instance-level performance, enabling sustainable scaling of vision-language systems.

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### SemanticBridge - A Dataset for 3D Semantic Segmentation of Bridges and Domain Gap Analysis

Authors: Maximilian Kellner, Mariana Ferrandon Cervantes, Yuandong Pan, Ruodan Lu, Ioannis Brilakis, Alexander Reiterer
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15369v2

We propose a novel dataset that has been specifically designed for 3D semantic segmentation of bridges and the domain gap analysis caused by varying sensors. This addresses a critical need in the field of infrastructure inspection and maintenance, which is essential for modern society. The dataset comprises high-resolution 3D scans of a diverse range of bridge structures from various countries, with detailed semantic labels provided for each. Our initial objective is to facilitate accurate and automated segmentation of bridge components, thereby advancing the structural health monitoring practice. To evaluate the effectiveness of existing 3D deep learning models on this novel dataset, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of three distinct state-of-the-art architectures. Furthermore, we present data acquired through diverse sensors to quantify the domain gap resulting from sensor variations. Our findings indicate that all architectures demonstrate robust performance on the specified task. However, the domain gap can potentially lead to a decline in the performance of up to 11.4% mIoU.

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### Dual-Density Inference for Efficient Language Model Reasoning

Authors: Zhengyi Zhao, Shubo Zhang, Yuxi Zhang, Huimin Wang, Binyang Li, Kam-Fai Wong
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15358v1

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in complex reasoning tasks. However, current approaches employ uniform language density for both intermediate reasoning and final answers, leading to computational inefficiency. Our observation found that reasoning process serves a computational function for the model itself, while answering serves a communicative function for human understanding. This distinction enables the use of compressed, symbol-rich language for intermediate computations while maintaining human-readable final explanations. To address this inefficiency, we present Denser: \underline{D}ual-d\underline{ens}ity inf\underline{er}ence, a novel framework that optimizes information density separately for reasoning and answering phases. Our framework implements this through three components: a query processing module that analyzes input problems, a high-density compressed reasoning mechanism for efficient intermediate computations, and an answer generation component that translates compressed reasoning into human-readable solutions. Experimental evaluation across multiple reasoning question answering benchmarks demonstrates that Denser reduces token consumption by up to 62\% compared to standard Chain-of-Thought methods while preserving or improving accuracy. These efficiency gains are particularly significant for complex multi-step reasoning problems where traditional methods generate extensive explanations.

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### Adversarial versification in portuguese as a jailbreak operator in LLMs

Authors: Joao Queiroz
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15353v1

Recent evidence shows that the versification of prompts constitutes a highly effective adversarial mechanism against aligned LLMs. The study 'Adversarial poetry as a universal single-turn jailbreak mechanism in large language models' demonstrates that instructions routinely refused in prose become executable when rewritten as verse, producing up to 18 x more safety failures in benchmarks derived from MLCommons AILuminate. Manually written poems reach approximately 62% ASR, and automated versions 43%, with some models surpassing 90% success in single-turn interactions. The effect is structural: systems trained with RLHF, constitutional AI, and hybrid pipelines exhibit consistent degradation under minimal semiotic formal variation. Versification displaces the prompt into sparsely supervised latent regions, revealing guardrails that are excessively dependent on surface patterns. This dissociation between apparent robustness and real vulnerability exposes deep limitations in current alignment regimes. The absence of evaluations in Portuguese, a language with high morphosyntactic complexity, a rich metric-prosodic tradition, and over 250 million speakers, constitutes a critical gap. Experimental protocols must parameterise scansion, metre, and prosodic variation to test vulnerabilities specific to Lusophone patterns, which are currently ignored.

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### Expand and Prune: Maximizing Trajectory Diversity for Effective GRPO in Generative Models

Authors: Shiran Ge, Chenyi Huang, Yuang Ai, Qihang Fan, Huaibo Huang, Ran He
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15347v1

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is a powerful technique for aligning generative models, but its effectiveness is bottlenecked by the conflict between large group sizes and prohibitive computational costs. In this work, we investigate the trade-off through empirical studies, yielding two key observations. First, we discover the reward clustering phenomenon in which many trajectories collapse toward the group-mean reward, offering limited optimization value. Second, we design a heuristic strategy named Optimal Variance Filtering (OVF), and verify that a high-variance subset of trajectories, selected by OVF can outperform the larger, unfiltered group. However, this static, post-sampling OVF approach still necessitates critical computational overhead, as it performs unnecessary sampling for trajectories that are ultimately discarded. To resolve this, we propose Pro-GRPO (Proactive GRPO), a novel dynamic framework that integrates latent feature-based trajectory pruning into the sampling process. Through the early termination of reward-clustered trajectories, Pro-GRPO reduces computational overhead. Leveraging its efficiency, Pro-GRPO employs an "Expand-and-Prune" strategy. This strategy first expands the size of initial sampling group to maximize trajectory diversity, then it applies multi-step OVF to the latents, avoiding prohibitive computational costs. Extensive experiments on both diffusion-based and flow-based models demonstrate the generality and effectiveness of our Pro-GRPO framework.

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### Empirical Investigation of the Impact of Phase Information on Fault Diagnosis of Rotating Machinery

Authors: Hiroyoshi Nagahama, Katsufumi Inoue, Masayoshi Todorokihara, Michifumi Yoshioka
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, eess.SP
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15344v1

Predictive maintenance of rotating machinery increasingly relies on vibration signals, yet most learning-based approaches either discard phase during spectral feature extraction or use raw time-waveforms without explicitly leveraging phase information. This paper introduces two phase-aware preprocessing strategies to address random phase variations in multi-axis vibration data: (1) three-axis independent phase adjustment that aligns each axis individually to zero phase (2) single-axis reference phase adjustment that preserves inter-axis relationships by applying uniform time shifts. Using a newly constructed rotor dataset acquired with a synchronized three-axis sensor, we evaluate six deep learning architectures under a two-stage learning framework. Results demonstrate architecture-independent improvements: the three-axis independent method achieves consistent gains (+2.7\% for Transformer), while the single-axis reference approach delivers superior performance with up to 96.2\% accuracy (+5.4\%) by preserving spatial phase relationships. These findings establish both phase alignment strategies as practical and scalable enhancements for predictive maintenance systems.

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### Exploring User Acceptance and Concerns toward LLM-powered Conversational Agents in Immersive Extended Reality

Authors: Efe Bozkir, Enkelejda Kasneci
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI, cs.CY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15343v1

The rapid development of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs), and the availability of services that make them accessible, have led the general public to begin incorporating them into everyday life. The extended reality (XR) community has also sought to integrate LLMs, particularly in the form of conversational agents, to enhance user experience and task efficiency. When interacting with such conversational agents, users may easily disclose sensitive information due to the naturalistic flow of the conversations, and combining such conversational data with fine-grained sensor data may lead to novel privacy issues. To address these issues, a user-centric understanding of technology acceptance and concerns is essential. Therefore, to this end, we conducted a large-scale crowdsourcing study with 1036 participants, examining user decision-making processes regarding LLM-powered conversational agents in XR, across factors of XR setting type, speech interaction type, and data processing location. We found that while users generally accept these technologies, they express concerns related to security, privacy, social implications, and trust. Our results suggest that familiarity plays a crucial role, as daily generative AI use is associated with greater acceptance. In contrast, previous ownership of XR devices is linked to less acceptance, possibly due to existing familiarity with the settings. We also found that men report higher acceptance with fewer concerns than women. Regarding data type sensitivity, location data elicited the most significant concern, while body temperature and virtual object states were considered least sensitive. Overall, our study highlights the importance of practitioners effectively communicating their measures to users, who may remain distrustful. We conclude with implications and recommendations for LLM-powered XR.

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### Towards Seamless Interaction: Causal Turn-Level Modeling of Interactive 3D Conversational Head Dynamics

Authors: Junjie Chen, Fei Wang, Zhihao Huang, Qing Zhou, Kun Li, Dan Guo, Linfeng Zhang, Xun Yang
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15340v2

Human conversation involves continuous exchanges of speech and nonverbal cues such as head nods, gaze shifts, and facial expressions that convey attention and emotion. Modeling these bidirectional dynamics in 3D is essential for building expressive avatars and interactive robots. However, existing frameworks often treat talking and listening as independent processes or rely on non-causal full-sequence modeling, hindering temporal coherence across turns. We present TIMAR (Turn-level Interleaved Masked AutoRegression), a causal framework for 3D conversational head generation that models dialogue as interleaved audio-visual contexts. It fuses multimodal information within each turn and applies turn-level causal attention to accumulate conversational history, while a lightweight diffusion head predicts continuous 3D head dynamics that captures both coordination and expressive variability. Experiments on the DualTalk benchmark show that TIMAR reduces Fréchet Distance and MSE by 15-30% on the test set, and achieves similar gains on out-of-distribution data. The source code has been released at https://github.com/CoderChen01/towards-seamless-interaction.

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### Routing-Led Evolutionary Algorithm for Large-Scale Multi-Objective VNF Placement Problems

Authors: Peili Mao, Joseph Billingsley, Wang Miao, Geyong Mi, Ke Li
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.NE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15339v1

Modern data centers contain thousands of servers making them major consumers of electricity. To minimize their environmental impact, it is critical that we use their resources efficiently. In this paper we study how to discover the optimal placement of virtual network functions in large scale data centers. We propose a novel parallel metaheuristic, fast heuristic objective functions of the QoS and new memory efficient data structures for large networks. We further identify a simple, fast heuristic that can produce competitive solutions to very large problem instances. Using these new concepts, we are able to find high quality solutions for data centres with up to 64,000 servers.

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### Bits for Privacy: Evaluating Post-Training Quantization via Membership Inference

Authors: Chenxiang Zhang, Tongxi Qu, Zhong Li, Tian Zhang, Jun Pang, Sjouke Mauw
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15335v1

Deep neural networks are widely deployed with quantization techniques to reduce memory and computational costs by lowering the numerical precision of their parameters. While quantization alters model parameters and their outputs, existing privacy analyses primarily focus on full-precision models, leaving a gap in understanding how bit-width reduction can affect privacy leakage. We present the first systematic study of the privacy-utility relationship in post-training quantization (PTQ), a versatile family of methods that can be applied to pretrained models without further training. Using membership inference attacks as our evaluation framework, we analyze three popular PTQ algorithms-AdaRound, BRECQ, and OBC-across multiple precision levels (4-bit, 2-bit, and 1.58-bit) on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and TinyImageNet datasets. Our findings consistently show that low-precision PTQs can reduce privacy leakage. In particular, lower-precision models demonstrate up to an order of magnitude reduction in membership inference vulnerability compared to their full-precision counterparts, albeit at the cost of decreased utility. Additional ablation studies on the 1.58-bit quantization level show that quantizing only the last layer at higher precision enables fine-grained control over the privacy-utility trade-off. These results offer actionable insights for practitioners to balance efficiency, utility, and privacy protection in real-world deployments.

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### A Preprocessing Framework for Video Machine Vision under Compression

Authors: Fei Zhao, Mengxi Guo, Shijie Zhao, Junlin Li, Li Zhang, Xiaodong Xie
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.MM, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15331v1

There has been a growing trend in compressing and transmitting videos from terminals for machine vision tasks. Nevertheless, most video coding optimization method focus on minimizing distortion according to human perceptual metrics, overlooking the heightened demands posed by machine vision systems. In this paper, we propose a video preprocessing framework tailored for machine vision tasks to address this challenge. The proposed method incorporates a neural preprocessor which retaining crucial information for subsequent tasks, resulting in the boosting of rate-accuracy performance. We further introduce a differentiable virtual codec to provide constraints on rate and distortion during the training stage. We directly apply widely used standard codecs for testing. Therefore, our solution can be easily applied to real-world scenarios. We conducted extensive experiments evaluating our compression method on two typical downstream tasks with various backbone networks. The experimental results indicate that our approach can save over 15% of bitrate compared to using only the standard codec anchor version.

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### Thematic Dispersion in Arabic Applied Linguistics: A Bibliometric Analysis using Brookes' Measure

Authors: Ayman Eddakrouri, Amani Ramadan
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15328v2

This study applies Brookes' Measure of Categorical Dispersion (Δ) to analyze the thematic structure of contemporary Arabic Applied Linguistics research. Using a comprehensive, real-world dataset of 1,564 publications from 2019 to 2025, classified into eight core sub-disciplines, we calculate a dispersion index of Δ = 0.194. This remarkably low value indicates extreme thematic dispersion, revealing that the field is characterized by pronounced heterogeneity rather than concentration. The analysis identifies Computational Linguistics as a dominant but non-hegemonic force, coexisting with robust research in Sociolinguistics, Language Teaching, and other subfields. This study clarifies the correct application of Brookes' original formula, demonstrates its utility for field characterization, and provides a replicable bibliometric methodology for assessing disciplinary structure across domains.

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### Vision-based module for accurately reading linear scales in a laboratory

Authors: Parvesh Saini, Soumyadipta Maiti, Beena Rai
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15327v1

Capabilities and the number of vision-based models are increasing rapidly. And these vision models are now able to do more tasks like object detection, image classification, instance segmentation etc. with great accuracy. But models which can take accurate quantitative measurements form an image, as a human can do by just looking at it, are rare. For a robot to work with complete autonomy in a Laboratory environment, it needs to have some basic skills like navigation, handling objects, preparing samples etc. to match human-like capabilities in an unstructured environment. Another important capability is to read measurements from instruments and apparatus. Here, we tried to mimic a human inspired approach to read measurements from a linear scale. As a test case we have picked reading level from a syringe and a measuring cylinder. For a randomly oriented syringe we carry out transformations to correct the orientation. To make the system efficient and robust, the area of interest is reduced to just the linear scale containing part of the image. After that, a series of features were extracted like the major makers, the corresponding digits, and the level indicator location, from which the final reading was calculated. Readings obtained using this system were also compared against human read values of the same instances and an accurate correspondence was observed.

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### A Masked Reverse Knowledge Distillation Method Incorporating Global and Local Information for Image Anomaly Detection

Authors: Yuxin Jiang, Yunkang Can, Weiming Shen
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15326v1

Knowledge distillation is an effective image anomaly detection and localization scheme. However, a major drawback of this scheme is its tendency to overly generalize, primarily due to the similarities between input and supervisory signals. In order to address this issue, this paper introduces a novel technique called masked reverse knowledge distillation (MRKD). By employing image-level masking (ILM) and feature-level masking (FLM), MRKD transforms the task of image reconstruction into image restoration. Specifically, ILM helps to capture global information by differentiating input signals from supervisory signals. On the other hand, FLM incorporates synthetic feature-level anomalies to ensure that the learned representations contain sufficient local information. With these two strategies, MRKD is endowed with stronger image context capture capacity and is less likely to be overgeneralized. Experiments on the widely-used MVTec anomaly detection dataset demonstrate that MRKD achieves impressive performance: image-level 98.9% AU-ROC, pixel-level 98.4% AU-ROC, and 95.3% AU-PRO. In addition, extensive ablation experiments have validated the superiority of MRKD in mitigating the overgeneralization problem.

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### Managing Ambiguity: A Proof of Concept of Human-AI Symbiotic Sense-making based on Quantum-Inspired Cognitive Mechanism of Rogue Variable Detection

Authors: Agnieszka Bienkowska, Jacek Malecki, Alexander Mathiesen-Ohman, Katarzyna Tworek
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15325v1

Organizations increasingly operate in environments characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA), where early indicators of change often emerge as weak, fragmented signals. Although artificial intelligence (AI) is widely used to support managerial decision-making, most AI-based systems remain optimized for prediction and resolution, leading to premature interpretive closure under conditions of high ambiguity. This creates a gap in management science regarding how human-AI systems can responsibly manage ambiguity before it crystallizes into error or crisis. This study addresses this gap by presenting a proof of concept (PoC) of the LAIZA human-AI augmented symbiotic intelligence system and its patented process: Systems and Methods for Quantum-Inspired Rogue Variable Modeling (QRVM), Human-in-the-Loop Decoherence, and Collective Cognitive Inference. The mechanism operationalizes ambiguity as a non-collapsed cognitive state, detects persistent interpretive breakdowns (rogue variables), and activates structured human-in-the-loop clarification when autonomous inference becomes unreliable. Empirically, the article draws on a three-month case study conducted in 2025 within the AI development, involving prolonged ambiguity surrounding employee intentions and intellectual property boundaries. The findings show that preserving interpretive plurality enabled early scenario-based preparation, including proactive patent protection, allowing decisive and disruption-free action once ambiguity collapsed. The study contributes to management theory by reframing ambiguity as a first-class construct and demonstrates the practical value of human-AI symbiosis for organizational resilience in VUCA environments.

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### MECAD: A multi-expert architecture for continual anomaly detection

Authors: Malihe Dahmardeh, Francesco Setti
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15323v1

In this paper we propose MECAD, a novel approach for continual anomaly detection using a multi-expert architecture. Our system dynamically assigns experts to object classes based on feature similarity and employs efficient memory management to preserve the knowledge of previously seen classes. By leveraging an optimized coreset selection and a specialized replay buffer mechanism, we enable incremental learning without requiring full model retraining. Our experimental evaluation on the MVTec AD dataset demonstrates that the optimal 5-expert configuration achieves an average AUROC of 0.8259 across 15 diverse object categories while significantly reducing knowledge degradation compared to single-expert approaches. This framework balances computational efficiency, specialized knowledge retention, and adaptability, making it well-suited for industrial environments with evolving product types.

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### Prototypical Learning Guided Context-Aware Segmentation Network for Few-Shot Anomaly Detection

Authors: Yuxin Jiang, Yunkang Cao, Weiming Shen
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15319v1

Few-shot anomaly detection (FSAD) denotes the identification of anomalies within a target category with a limited number of normal samples. Existing FSAD methods largely rely on pre-trained feature representations to detect anomalies, but the inherent domain gap between pre-trained representations and target FSAD scenarios is often overlooked. This study proposes a Prototypical Learning Guided Context-Aware Segmentation Network (PCSNet) to address the domain gap, thereby improving feature descriptiveness in target scenarios and enhancing FSAD performance. In particular, PCSNet comprises a prototypical feature adaption (PFA) sub-network and a context-aware segmentation (CAS) sub-network. PFA extracts prototypical features as guidance to ensure better feature compactness for normal data while distinct separation from anomalies. A pixel-level disparity classification loss is also designed to make subtle anomalies more distinguishable. Then a CAS sub-network is introduced for pixel-level anomaly localization, where pseudo anomalies are exploited to facilitate the training process. Experimental results on MVTec and MPDD demonstrate the superior FSAD performance of PCSNet, with 94.9% and 80.2% image-level AUROC in an 8-shot scenario, respectively. Real-world applications on automotive plastic part inspection further demonstrate that PCSNet can achieve promising results with limited training samples. Code is available at https://github.com/yuxin-jiang/PCSNet.

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### Automated Motion Artifact Check for MRI (AutoMAC-MRI): An Interpretable Framework for Motion Artifact Detection and Severity Assessment

Authors: Antony Jerald, Dattesh Shanbhag, Sudhanya Chatterjee
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15315v1

Motion artifacts degrade MRI image quality and increase patient recalls. Existing automated quality assessment methods are largely limited to binary decisions and provide little interpretability. We introduce AutoMAC-MRI, an explainable framework for grading motion artifacts across heterogeneous MR contrasts and orientations. The approach uses supervised contrastive learning to learn a discriminative representation of motion severity. Within this feature space, we compute grade-specific affinity scores that quantify an image's proximity to each motion grade, thereby making grade assignments transparent and interpretable. We evaluate AutoMAC-MRI on more than 5000 expert-annotated brain MRI slices spanning multiple contrasts and views. Experiments assessing affinity scores against expert labels show that the scores align well with expert judgment, supporting their use as an interpretable measure of motion severity. By coupling accurate grade detection with per-grade affinity scoring, AutoMAC-MRI enables inline MRI quality control, with the potential to reduce unnecessary rescans and improve workflow efficiency.

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### Time-Varying Audio Effect Modeling by End-to-End Adversarial Training

Authors: Yann Bourdin, Pierrick Legrand, Fanny Roche
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.SD, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15313v2

Deep learning has become a standard approach for the modeling of audio effects, yet strictly black-box modeling remains problematic for time-varying systems. Unlike time-invariant effects, training models on devices with internal modulation typically requires the recording or extraction of control signals to ensure the time-alignment required by standard loss functions. This paper introduces a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework to model such effects using only input-output audio recordings, without requiring a modulation signal extraction. We propose a convolutional-recurrent architecture trained via a two-stage strategy: an initial adversarial phase allows the model to learn the distribution of the modulation behavior without strict phase constraints, followed by a supervised fine-tuning phase where a State Prediction Network (SPN) estimates the initial internal states required to synchronize the model with the target. Additionally, a new metric based on chirp-train signals is developed to quantify modulation accuracy. Experiments modeling a vintage hardware phaser demonstrate the method's ability to capture time-varying dynamics in a fully black-box context.

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### Evaluating LLMs for Zeolite Synthesis Event Extraction (ZSEE): A Systematic Analysis of Prompting Strategies

Authors: Charan Prakash Rathore, Saumi Ray, Dhruv Kumar
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15312v1

Extracting structured information from zeolite synthesis experimental procedures is critical for materials discovery, yet existing methods have not systematically evaluated Large Language Models (LLMs) for this domain-specific task. This work addresses a fundamental question: what is the efficacy of different prompting strategies when applying LLMs to scientific information extraction? We focus on four key subtasks: event type classification (identifying synthesis steps), trigger text identification (locating event mentions), argument role extraction (recognizing parameter types), and argument text extraction (extracting parameter values). We evaluate four prompting strategies - zero-shot, few-shot, event-specific, and reflection-based - across six state-of-the-art LLMs (Gemma-3-12b-it, GPT-5-mini, O4-mini, Claude-Haiku-3.5, DeepSeek reasoning and non-reasoning) using the ZSEE dataset of 1,530 annotated sentences. Results demonstrate strong performance on event type classification (80-90\% F1) but modest performance on fine-grained extraction tasks, particularly argument role and argument text extraction (50-65\% F1). GPT-5-mini exhibits extreme prompt sensitivity with 11-79\% F1 variation. Notably, advanced prompting strategies provide minimal improvements over zero-shot approaches, revealing fundamental architectural limitations. Error analysis identifies systematic hallucination, over-generalization, and inability to capture synthesis-specific nuances. Our findings demonstrate that while LLMs achieve high-level understanding, precise extraction of experimental parameters requires domain-adapted models, providing quantitative benchmarks for scientific information extraction.

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### KD360-VoxelBEV: LiDAR and 360-degree Camera Cross Modality Knowledge Distillation for Bird's-Eye-View Segmentation

Authors: Wenke E, Yixin Sun, Jiaxu Liu, Hubert P. H. Shum, Amir Atapour-Abarghouei, Toby P. Breckon
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15311v1

We present the first cross-modality distillation framework specifically tailored for single-panoramic-camera Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) segmentation. Our approach leverages a novel LiDAR image representation fused from range, intensity and ambient channels, together with a voxel-aligned view transformer that preserves spatial fidelity while enabling efficient BEV processing. During training, a high-capacity LiDAR and camera fusion Teacher network extracts both rich spatial and semantic features for cross-modality knowledge distillation into a lightweight Student network that relies solely on a single 360-degree panoramic camera image. Extensive experiments on the Dur360BEV dataset demonstrate that our teacher model significantly outperforms existing camera-based BEV segmentation methods, achieving a 25.6\% IoU improvement. Meanwhile, the distilled Student network attains competitive performance with an 8.5\% IoU gain and state-of-the-art inference speed of 31.2 FPS. Moreover, evaluations on KITTI-360 (two fisheye cameras) confirm that our distillation framework generalises to diverse camera setups, underscoring its feasibility and robustness. This approach reduces sensor complexity and deployment costs while providing a practical solution for efficient, low-cost BEV segmentation in real-world autonomous driving.

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### SynthSeg-Agents: Multi-Agent Synthetic Data Generation for Zero-Shot Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Authors: Wangyu Wu, Zhenhong Chen, Xiaowei Huang, Fei Ma, Jimin Xiao
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15310v1

Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) with image level labels aims to produce pixel level predictions without requiring dense annotations. While recent approaches have leveraged generative models to augment existing data, they remain dependent on real world training samples. In this paper, we introduce a novel direction, Zero Shot Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (ZSWSSS), and propose SynthSeg Agents, a multi agent framework driven by Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate synthetic training data entirely without real images. SynthSeg Agents comprises two key modules, a Self Refine Prompt Agent and an Image Generation Agent. The Self Refine Prompt Agent autonomously crafts diverse and semantically rich image prompts via iterative refinement, memory mechanisms, and prompt space exploration, guided by CLIP based similarity and nearest neighbor diversity filtering. These prompts are then passed to the Image Generation Agent, which leverages Vision Language Models (VLMs) to synthesize candidate images. A frozen CLIP scoring model is employed to select high quality samples, and a ViT based classifier is further trained to relabel the entire synthetic dataset with improved semantic precision. Our framework produces high quality training data without any real image supervision. Experiments on PASCAL VOC 2012 and COCO 2014 show that SynthSeg Agents achieves competitive performance without using real training images. This highlights the potential of LLM driven agents in enabling cost efficient and scalable semantic segmentation.

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### Graph Pattern-based Association Rules Evaluated Under No-repeated-anything Semantics in the Graph Transactional Setting

Authors: Basil Ell
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.DB, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15308v1

We introduce graph pattern-based association rules (GPARs) for directed labeled multigraphs such as RDF graphs. GPARs support both generative tasks, where a graph is extended, and evaluative tasks, where the plausibility of a graph is assessed. The framework goes beyond related formalisms such as graph functional dependencies, graph entity dependencies, relational association rules, graph association rules, multi-relation and path association rules, and Horn rules. Given a collection of graphs, we evaluate graph patterns under no-repeated-anything semantics, which allows the topology of a graph to be taken into account more effectively. We define a probability space and derive confidence, lift, leverage, and conviction in a probabilistic setting. We further analyze how these metrics relate to their classical itemset-based counterparts and identify conditions under which their characteristic properties are preserved.

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### LLMQ: Efficient Lower-Precision Pretraining for Consumer GPUs

Authors: Erik Schultheis, Dan Alistarh
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.DC, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15306v1

We present LLMQ, an end-to-end CUDA/C++ implementation for medium-sized language-model training, e.g. 3B to 32B parameters, on affordable, commodity GPUs. These devices are characterized by low memory availability and slow communication compared to datacentre-grade GPUs. Consequently, we showcase a range of optimizations that target these bottlenecks, including activation checkpointing, offloading, and copy-engine based collectives. LLMQ is able to train or fine-tune a 7B model on a single 16GB mid-range gaming card, or a 32B model on a workstation equipped with 4 RTX 4090s. This is achieved while executing a standard 8-bit training pipeline, without additional algorithmic approximations, and maintaining FLOP utilization of around 50%. The efficiency of LLMQ rivals that of production-scale systems on much more expensive cloud-grade GPUs.

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### Towards Proactive Personalization through Profile Customization for Individual Users in Dialogues

Authors: Xiaotian Zhang, Yuan Wang, Ruizhe Chen, Zeya Wang, Runchen Hou, Zuozhu Liu
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15302v1

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in interactive systems necessitates a deep alignment with the nuanced and dynamic preferences of individual users. Current alignment techniques predominantly address universal human values or static, single-turn preferences, thereby failing to address the critical needs of long-term personalization and the initial user cold-start problem. To bridge this gap, we propose PersonalAgent, a novel user-centric lifelong agent designed to continuously infer and adapt to user preferences. PersonalAgent constructs and dynamically refines a unified user profile by decomposing dialogues into single-turn interactions, framing preference inference as a sequential decision-making task. Experiments show that PersonalAgent achieves superior performance over strong prompt-based and policy optimization baselines, not only in idealized but also in noisy conversational contexts, while preserving cross-session preference consistency. Furthermore, human evaluation confirms that PersonalAgent excels at capturing user preferences naturally and coherently. Our findings underscore the importance of lifelong personalization for developing more inclusive and adaptive conversational agents. Our code is available here.

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### ChatGPT and Gemini participated in the Korean College Scholastic Ability Test -- Earth Science I

Authors: Seok-Hyun Ga, Chun-Yen Chang
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15298v1

The rapid development of Generative AI is bringing innovative changes to education and assessment. As the prevalence of students utilizing AI for assignments increases, concerns regarding academic integrity and the validity of assessments are growing. This study utilizes the Earth Science I section of the 2025 Korean College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) to deeply analyze the multimodal scientific reasoning capabilities and cognitive limitations of state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs), including GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Flash, and Gemini 2.5 Pro. Three experimental conditions (full-page input, individual item input, and optimized multimodal input) were designed to evaluate model performance across different data structures. Quantitative results indicated that unstructured inputs led to significant performance degradation due to segmentation and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) failures. Even under optimized conditions, models exhibited fundamental reasoning flaws. Qualitative analysis revealed that "Perception Errors" were dominant, highlighting a "Perception-Cognition Gap" where models failed to interpret symbolic meanings in schematic diagrams despite recognizing visual data. Furthermore, models demonstrated a "Calculation-Conceptualization Discrepancy," successfully performing calculations while failing to apply the underlying scientific concepts, and "Process Hallucination," where models skipped visual verification in favor of plausible but unfounded background knowledge. Addressing the challenge of unauthorized AI use in coursework, this study provides actionable cues for designing "AI-resistant questions" that target these specific cognitive vulnerabilities. By exploiting AI's weaknesses, such as the gap between perception and cognition, educators can distinguish genuine student competency from AI-generated responses, thereby ensuring assessment fairness.

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### Graph Contextual Reinforcement Learning for Efficient Directed Controller Synthesis

Authors: Toshihide Ubukata, Enhong Mu, Takuto Yamauchi, Mingyue Zhang, Jialong Li, Kenji Tei
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15295v1

Controller synthesis is a formal method approach for automatically generating Labeled Transition System (LTS) controllers that satisfy specified properties. The efficiency of the synthesis process, however, is critically dependent on exploration policies. These policies often rely on fixed rules or strategies learned through reinforcement learning (RL) that consider only a limited set of current features. To address this limitation, this paper introduces GCRL, an approach that enhances RL-based methods by integrating Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). GCRL encodes the history of LTS exploration into a graph structure, allowing it to capture a broader, non-current-based context. In a comparative experiment against state-of-the-art methods, GCRL exhibited superior learning efficiency and generalization across four out of five benchmark domains, except one particular domain characterized by high symmetry and strictly local interactions.

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### Quantum Machine Learning for Cybersecurity: A Taxonomy and Future Directions

Authors: Siva Sai, Ishika Goyal, Shubham Sharma, Sri Harshita Manuri, Vinay Chamola, Rajkumar Buyya
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15286v1

The increasing number of cyber threats and rapidly evolving tactics, as well as the high volume of data in recent years, have caused classical machine learning, rules, and signature-based defence strategies to fail, rendering them unable to keep up. An alternative, Quantum Machine Learning (QML), has recently emerged, making use of computations based on quantum mechanics. It offers better encoding and processing of high-dimensional structures for certain problems. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of QML techniques relevant to the domain of security, such as Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs), Quantum Support Vector Machines (QSVMs), Variational Quantum Circuits (VQCs), and Quantum Generative Adversarial Networks (QGANs), and discusses the contributions of this paper in relation to existing research in the field and how it improves over them. It also maps these methods across supervised, unsupervised, and generative learning paradigms, and to core cybersecurity tasks, including intrusion and anomaly detection, malware and botnet classification, and encrypted-traffic analytics. It also discusses their application in the domain of cloud computing security, where QML can enhance secure and scalable operations. Many limitations of QML in the domain of cybersecurity have also been discussed, along with the directions for addressing them.

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