# Research Papers — 2025-12 · bundle page 72 of 175

> Full-text markdown of papers #3551–3600 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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### Topological Metric for Unsupervised Embedding Quality Evaluation

Authors: Aleksei Shestov, Anton Klenitskiy, Daria Denisova, Amurkhan Dzagkoev, Daniil Petrovich, Andrey Savchenko, Maksim Makarenko
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.LG, cs.IR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15285v1

Modern representation learning increasingly relies on unsupervised and self-supervised methods trained on large-scale unlabeled data. While these approaches achieve impressive generalization across tasks and domains, evaluating embedding quality without labels remains an open challenge. In this work, we propose Persistence, a topology-aware metric based on persistent homology that quantifies the geometric structure and topological richness of embedding spaces in a fully unsupervised manner. Unlike metrics that assume linear separability or rely on covariance structure, Persistence captures global and multi-scale organization. Empirical results across diverse domains show that Persistence consistently achieves top-tier correlations with downstream performance, outperforming existing unsupervised metrics and enabling reliable model and hyperparameter selection.

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### Well Begun, Half Done: Reinforcement Learning with Prefix Optimization for LLM Reasoning

Authors: Yiliu Sun, Zicheng Zhao, Yang Wei, Yanfang Zhang, Chen Gong
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15274v1

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) significantly enhances the reasoning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). Current RLVR approaches typically conduct training across all generated tokens, but neglect to explore which tokens (e.g., prefix tokens) actually contribute to reasoning. This uniform training strategy spends substantial effort on optimizing low-return tokens, which in turn impedes the potential improvement from high-return tokens and reduces overall training effectiveness. To address this issue, we propose a novel RLVR approach called Progressive Prefix-token Policy Optimization (PPPO), which highlights the significance of the prefix segment of generated outputs. Specifically, inspired by the well-established human thinking theory of Path Dependence, where early-stage thoughts substantially constrain subsequent thinking trajectory, we identify an analogous phenomenon in LLM reasoning termed Beginning Lock-in Effect (BLE). PPPO leverages this finding by focusing its optimization objective on the prefix reasoning process of LLMs. This targeted optimization strategy can positively influence subsequent reasoning processes, and ultimately improve final results. To improve the learning effectiveness of LLMs on how to start reasoning with high quality, PPPO introduces two training strategies: (a) Progressive Prefix Retention, which shapes a progressive learning process by increasing the proportion of retained prefix tokens during training; (b) Continuation Accumulated Reward, which mitigates reward bias by sampling multiple continuations for one prefix token sequence, and accumulating their scores as the reward signal. Extensive experimental results on various reasoning tasks demonstrate that our proposed PPPO outperforms representative RLVR methods, with the accuracy improvements of 18.02% on only 26.17% training tokens.

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### Generative Preprocessing for Image Compression with Pre-trained Diffusion Models

Authors: Mengxi Guo, Shijie Zhao, Junlin Li, Li Zhang
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV, cs.MM
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15270v1

Preprocessing is a well-established technique for optimizing compression, yet existing methods are predominantly Rate-Distortion (R-D) optimized and constrained by pixel-level fidelity. This work pioneers a shift towards Rate-Perception (R-P) optimization by, for the first time, adapting a large-scale pre-trained diffusion model for compression preprocessing. We propose a two-stage framework: first, we distill the multi-step Stable Diffusion 2.1 into a compact, one-step image-to-image model using Consistent Score Identity Distillation (CiD). Second, we perform a parameter-efficient fine-tuning of the distilled model's attention modules, guided by a Rate-Perception loss and a differentiable codec surrogate. Our method seamlessly integrates with standard codecs without any modification and leverages the model's powerful generative priors to enhance texture and mitigate artifacts. Experiments show substantial R-P gains, achieving up to a 30.13% BD-rate reduction in DISTS on the Kodak dataset and delivering superior subjective visual quality.

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### Model inference for ranking from pairwise comparisons

Authors: Daniel Sánchez Catalina, George T. Cantwell
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.SI, cs.LG, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15269v1

We consider the problem of ranking objects from noisy pairwise comparisons, for example, ranking tennis players from the outcomes of matches. We follow a standard approach to this problem and assume that each object has an unobserved strength and that the outcome of each comparison depends probabilistically on the strengths of the comparands. However, we do not assume to know a priori how skills affect outcomes. Instead, we present an efficient algorithm for simultaneously inferring both the unobserved strengths and the function that maps strengths to probabilities. Despite this problem being under-constrained, we present experimental evidence that the conclusions of our Bayesian approach are robust to different model specifications. We include several case studies to exemplify the method on real-world data sets.

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### Distillation-Guided Structural Transfer for Continual Learning Beyond Sparse Distributed Memory

Authors: Huiyan Xue, Xuming Ran, Yaxin Li, Qi Xu, Enhui Li, Yi Xu, Qiang Zhang
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15267v1

Sparse neural systems are gaining traction for efficient continual learning due to their modularity and low interference. Architectures such as Sparse Distributed Memory Multi-Layer Perceptrons (SDMLP) construct task-specific subnetworks via Top-K activation and have shown resilience against catastrophic forgetting. However, their rigid modularity limits cross-task knowledge reuse and leads to performance degradation under high sparsity. We propose Selective Subnetwork Distillation (SSD), a structurally guided continual learning framework that treats distillation not as a regularizer but as a topology-aligned information conduit. SSD identifies neurons with high activation frequency and selectively distills knowledge within previous Top-K subnetworks and output logits, without requiring replay or task labels. This enables structural realignment while preserving sparse modularity. Experiments on Split CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and MNIST demonstrate that SSD improves accuracy, retention, and representation coverage, offering a structurally grounded solution for sparse continual learning.

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### MMMamba: A Versatile Cross-Modal In Context Fusion Framework for Pan-Sharpening and Zero-Shot Image Enhancement

Authors: Yingying Wang, Xuanhua He, Chen Wu, Jialing Huang, Suiyun Zhang, Rui Liu, Xinghao Ding, Haoxuan Che
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15261v1

Pan-sharpening aims to generate high-resolution multispectral (HRMS) images by integrating a high-resolution panchromatic (PAN) image with its corresponding low-resolution multispectral (MS) image. To achieve effective fusion, it is crucial to fully exploit the complementary information between the two modalities. Traditional CNN-based methods typically rely on channel-wise concatenation with fixed convolutional operators, which limits their adaptability to diverse spatial and spectral variations. While cross-attention mechanisms enable global interactions, they are computationally inefficient and may dilute fine-grained correspondences, making it difficult to capture complex semantic relationships. Recent advances in the Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (MMDiT) architecture have demonstrated impressive success in image generation and editing tasks. Unlike cross-attention, MMDiT employs in-context conditioning to facilitate more direct and efficient cross-modal information exchange. In this paper, we propose MMMamba, a cross-modal in-context fusion framework for pan-sharpening, with the flexibility to support image super-resolution in a zero-shot manner. Built upon the Mamba architecture, our design ensures linear computational complexity while maintaining strong cross-modal interaction capacity. Furthermore, we introduce a novel multimodal interleaved (MI) scanning mechanism that facilitates effective information exchange between the PAN and MS modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques across multiple tasks and benchmarks.

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### SynGP500: A Clinically-Grounded Synthetic Dataset of Australian General Practice Medical Notes

Authors: Piyawoot Songsiritat
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15259v1

We introduce SynGP500, a clinician-curated collection of 500 synthetic Australian general practice medical notes. The dataset integrates curriculum-based clinical breadth (RACGP 2022 Curriculum), epidemiologically-calibrated prevalence (BEACH study), and diverse consultation contexts. This approach systematically includes both common presentations and less-common curriculum-specified conditions that GPs must recognize but appear infrequently in single practice populations, potentially supporting more generalizable model training than datasets constrained by naturally occurring case distributions. SynGP500 is messy by design, reflecting the authentic complexity of healthcare delivery: telegraphic documentation, typos, patient non-adherence, socioeconomic barriers, and clinician-patient disagreements, unlike sanitized synthetic datasets that obscure clinical realities. Multi-faceted validation demonstrates dataset quality through epidemiological alignment with real Australian GP consultation patterns (BEACH study), stylometric analysis confirming high linguistic variation, semantic diversity analysis demonstrating broad coverage, and exploratory downstream evaluation using self-supervised medical concept extraction, showing F1 improvements. SynGP500 addresses a critical national gap, providing researchers and educators with a resource for developing and evaluating clinical NLP methods for Australian general practice while inherently protecting patient privacy.

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### VLA-AN: An Efficient and Onboard Vision-Language-Action Framework for Aerial Navigation in Complex Environments

Authors: Yuze Wu, Mo Zhu, Xingxing Li, Yuheng Du, Yuxin Fan, Wenjun Li, Zhichao Han, Xin Zhou, Fei Gao
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15258v2

This paper proposes VLA-AN, an efficient and onboard Vision-Language-Action (VLA) framework dedicated to autonomous drone navigation in complex environments. VLA-AN addresses four major limitations of existing large aerial navigation models: the data domain gap, insufficient temporal navigation with reasoning, safety issues with generative action policies, and onboard deployment constraints. First, we construct a high-fidelity dataset utilizing 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) to effectively bridge the domain gap. Second, we introduce a progressive three-stage training framework that sequentially reinforces scene comprehension, core flight skills, and complex navigation capabilities. Third, we design a lightweight, real-time action module coupled with geometric safety correction. This module ensures fast, collision-free, and stable command generation, mitigating the safety risks inherent in stochastic generative policies. Finally, through deep optimization of the onboard deployment pipeline, VLA-AN achieves a robust real-time 8.3x improvement in inference throughput on resource-constrained UAVs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VLA-AN significantly improves spatial grounding, scene reasoning, and long-horizon navigation, achieving a maximum single-task success rate of 98.1%, and providing an efficient, practical solution for realizing full-chain closed-loop autonomy in lightweight aerial robots.

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### Assessing the Visual Enumeration Abilities of Specialized Counting Architectures and Vision-Language Models

Authors: Kuinan Hou, Jing Mi, Marco Zorzi, Lamberto Ballan, Alberto Testolin
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15254v1

Counting the number of items in a visual scene remains a fundamental yet challenging task in computer vision. Traditional approaches to solving this problem rely on domain-specific counting architectures, which are trained using datasets annotated with a predefined set of object categories. However, recent progress in creating large-scale multimodal vision-language models (VLMs) suggests that these domain-general architectures may offer a flexible alternative for open-set object counting. In this study, we therefore systematically compare the performance of state-of-the-art specialized counting architectures against VLMs on two popular counting datasets, as well as on a novel benchmark specifically created to have a finer-grained control over the visual properties of test images. Our findings show that most VLMs can approximately enumerate the number of items in a visual scene, matching or even surpassing the performance of specialized computer vision architectures. Notably, enumeration accuracy significantly improves when VLMs are prompted to generate intermediate representations (i.e., locations and verbal labels) of each object to be counted. Nevertheless, none of the models can reliably count the number of objects in complex visual scenes, showing that further research is still needed to create AI systems that can reliably deploy counting procedures in realistic environments.

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### Leveraging Foundational Models and Simple Fusion for Multi-modal Physiological Signal Analysis

Authors: Youssef Ghallab, Omar Iraqy, Mohamed Kandil, Mohamed Ashraf, Saadeldine Eletter, Morougue Ghazal, Ayman Khalafallah, Nagwa El-Makky
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15250v1

Physiological signals such as electrocardiograms (ECG) and electroencephalograms (EEG) provide complementary insights into human health and cognition, yet multi-modal integration is challenging due to limited multi-modal labeled data, and modality-specific differences . In this work, we adapt the CBraMod encoder for large-scale self-supervised ECG pretraining, introducing a dual-masking strategy to capture intra- and inter-lead dependencies. To overcome the above challenges, we utilize a pre-trained CBraMod encoder for EEG and pre-train a symmetric ECG encoder, equipping each modality with a rich foundational representation. These representations are then fused via simple embedding concatenation, allowing the classification head to learn cross-modal interactions, together enabling effective downstream learning despite limited multi-modal supervision. Evaluated on emotion recognition, our approach achieves near state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating that carefully designed physiological encoders, even with straightforward fusion, substantially improve downstream performance. These results highlight the potential of foundation-model approaches to harness the holistic nature of physiological signals, enabling scalable, label-efficient, and generalizable solutions for healthcare and affective computing.

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### Intersectional Fairness in Vision-Language Models for Medical Image Disease Classification

Authors: Yupeng Zhang, Adam G. Dunn, Usman Naseem, Jinman Kim
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15249v2

Medical artificial intelligence (AI) systems, particularly multimodal vision-language models (VLM), often exhibit intersectional biases where models are systematically less confident in diagnosing marginalised patient subgroups. Such bias can lead to higher rates of inaccurate and missed diagnoses due to demographically skewed data and divergent distributions of diagnostic certainty. Current fairness interventions frequently fail to address these gaps or compromise overall diagnostic performance to achieve statistical parity among the subgroups. In this study, we developed Cross-Modal Alignment Consistency (CMAC-MMD), a training framework that standardises diagnostic certainty across intersectional patient subgroups. Unlike traditional debiasing methods, this approach equalises the model's decision confidence without requiring sensitive demographic data during clinical inference. We evaluated this approach using 10,015 skin lesion images (HAM10000) with external validation on 12,000 images (BCN20000), and 10,000 fundus images for glaucoma detection (Harvard-FairVLMed), stratifying performance by intersectional age, gender, and race attributes. In the dermatology cohort, the proposed method reduced the overall intersectional missed diagnosis gap (difference in True Positive Rate, $Δ$TPR) from 0.50 to 0.26 while improving the overall Area Under the Curve (AUC) from 0.94 to 0.97 compared to standard training. Similarly, for glaucoma screening, the method reduced $Δ$TPR from 0.41 to 0.31, achieving a better AUC of 0.72 (vs. 0.71 baseline). This establishes a scalable framework for developing high-stakes clinical decision support systems that are both accurate and can perform equitably across diverse patient subgroups, ensuring reliable performance without increasing privacy risks.

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### The Moralization Corpus: Frame-Based Annotation and Analysis of Moralizing Speech Acts across Diverse Text Genres

Authors: Maria Becker, Mirko Sommer, Lars Tapken, Yi Wan Teh, Bruno Brocai
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15248v2

Moralizations - arguments that invoke moral values to justify demands or positions - are a yet underexplored form of persuasive communication. We present the Moralization Corpus, a novel multi-genre dataset designed to analyze how moral values are strategically used in argumentative discourse. Moralizations are pragmatically complex and often implicit, posing significant challenges for both human annotators and NLP systems. We develop a frame-based annotation scheme that captures the constitutive elements of moralizations - moral values, demands, and discourse protagonists - and apply it to a diverse set of German texts, including political debates, news articles, and online discussions. The corpus enables fine-grained analysis of moralizing language across communicative formats and domains. We further evaluate several large language models (LLMs) under varied prompting conditions for the task of moralization detection and moralization component extraction and compare it to human annotations in order to investigate the challenges of automatic and manual analysis of moralizations. Results show that detailed prompt instructions has a greater effect than few-shot or explanation-based prompting, and that moralization remains a highly subjective and context-sensitive task. We release all data, annotation guidelines, and code to foster future interdisciplinary research on moral discourse and moral reasoning in NLP.

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### FAME: Fictional Actors for Multilingual Erasure

Authors: Claudio Savelli, Moreno La Quatra, Alkis Koudounas, Flavio Giobergia
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15235v1

LLMs trained on web-scale data raise concerns about privacy and the right to be forgotten. To address these issues, Machine Unlearning provides techniques to remove specific information from trained models without retraining from scratch. However, existing benchmarks for evaluating unlearning in LLMs face two major limitations: they focus only on English and support only entity-level forgetting (removing all information about a person). We introduce FAME (Fictional Actors for Multilingual Erasure), a synthetic benchmark for evaluating Machine Unlearning across five languages: English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. FAME contains 1,000 fictional actor biographies and 20,000 question-answer pairs. Each biography includes information on 20 topics organized into structured categories (biography, career, achievements, personal information). This design enables both entity-level unlearning (i.e., forgetting entire identities) and instance-level unlearning (i.e., forgetting specific facts while retaining others). We provide two dataset splits to support these two different unlearning scenarios and enable systematic comparison of unlearning techniques across languages. Since FAME uses entirely fictional data, it ensures that the information was never encountered during model pretraining, allowing for a controlled evaluation of unlearning methods.

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### Null-LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation on Null Space

Authors: Yi Zhang, Yulei Kang, Haoxuan Chen, Jinxuan Li, Jian-Fang Hu
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15233v2

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods have gained considerable popularity for adapting large-scale models to downstream tasks, particularly LoRA and its variants. Existing methods perform low-rank adaptation over the full parameter space. However, fine-tuning within a subspace can achieve comparable effectiveness. Inspired by the observation that pre-trained models possess non-trivial null spaces, we propose Null-space based Low-Rank Adaptation (Null-LoRA). Null-LoRA effectively reduces redundancy and enhances effective rank by freezing portions of the low-rank matrices. To further improve parameter efficiency, Null-LoRA constrains the entire incremental update within the null space, maximizing the utilization of incremental updates to adapt to new task paradigms. Null-LoRA surpasses the state of the art with fewer parameters in extensive experiments across image-text retrieval and visual question answering tasks.

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### CangLing-KnowFlow: A Unified Knowledge-and-Flow-fused Agent for Comprehensive Remote Sensing Applications

Authors: Zhengchao Chen, Haoran Wang, Jing Yao, Jianshe Zhang, Pedram Ghamisi, Jun Zhou, Peter M. Atkinson, Bing Zhang
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15231v3

The automated and intelligent processing of massive remote sensing (RS) datasets is critical in Earth observation (EO). Existing automated systems are normally task-specific, lacking a unified framework to manage diverse, end-to-end workflows--from data preprocessing to advanced interpretation--across diverse RS applications. To address this gap, this paper introduces CangLing-KnowFlow, a unified intelligent agent framework that integrates a Procedural Knowledge Base (PKB), Dynamic Workflow Adjustment, and an Evolutionary Memory Module. The PKB, comprising 1,008 expert-validated workflow cases across 162 practical RS tasks, guides planning and substantially reduces hallucinations common in general-purpose agents. During runtime failures, the Dynamic Workflow Adjustment autonomously diagnoses and replans recovery strategies, while the Evolutionary Memory Module continuously learns from these events, iteratively enhancing the agent's knowledge and performance. This synergy enables CangLing-KnowFlow to adapt, learn, and operate reliably across diverse, complex tasks. We evaluated CangLing-KnowFlow on the KnowFlow-Bench, a novel benchmark of 324 workflows inspired by real-world applications, testing its performance across 13 top Large Language Model (LLM) backbones, from open-source to commercial. Across all complex tasks, CangLing-KnowFlow surpassed the Reflexion baseline by at least 4% in Task Success Rate. As the first most comprehensive validation along this emerging field, this research demonstrates the great potential of CangLing-KnowFlow as a robust, efficient, and scalable automated solution for complex EO challenges by leveraging expert knowledge (Knowledge) into adaptive and verifiable procedures (Flow).

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### ColliderML: The First Release of an OpenDataDetector High-Luminosity Physics Benchmark Dataset

Authors: Doğa Elitez, Paul Gessinger, Daniel Murnane, Marcus Selchou Raaholt, Andreas Salzburger, Stine Kofoed Skov, Andreas Stefl, Anna Zaborowska
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: hep-ex, cs.LG, physics.data-an, physics.ins-det
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15230v1

We introduce ColliderML - a large, open, experiment-agnostic dataset of fully simulated and digitised proton-proton collisions in High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider conditions ($\sqrt{s}=14$ TeV, mean pile-up $μ= 200$). ColliderML provides one million events across ten Standard Model and Beyond Standard Model processes, plus extensive single-particle samples, all produced with modern next-to-leading order matrix element calculation and showering, realistic per-event pile-up overlay, a validated OpenDataDetector geometry, and standard reconstructions. The release fills a major gap for machine learning (ML) research on detector-level data, provided on the ML-friendly Hugging Face platform. We present physics coverage and the generation, simulation, digitisation and reconstruction pipeline, describe format and access, and initial collider physics benchmarks.

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### O-EENC-SD: Efficient Online End-to-End Neural Clustering for Speaker Diarization

Authors: Elio Gruttadauria, Mathieu Fontaine, Jonathan Le Roux, Slim Essid
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.LG, cs.SD, eess.SP
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15229v1

We introduce O-EENC-SD: an end-to-end online speaker diarization system based on EEND-EDA, featuring a novel RNN-based stitching mechanism for online prediction. In particular, we develop a novel centroid refinement decoder whose usefulness is assessed through a rigorous ablation study. Our system provides key advantages over existing methods: a hyperparameter-free solution compared to unsupervised clustering approaches, and a more efficient alternative to current online end-to-end methods, which are computationally costly. We demonstrate that O-EENC-SD is competitive with the state of the art in the two-speaker conversational telephone speech domain, as tested on the CallHome dataset. Our results show that O-EENC-SD provides a great trade-off between DER and complexity, even when working on independent chunks with no overlap, making the system extremely efficient.

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### Accelerating High-Throughput Catalyst Screening by Direct Generation of Equilibrium Adsorption Structures

Authors: Songze Huo, Xiao-Ming Cao
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15228v1

The adsorption energy serves as a crucial descriptor for the large-scale screening of catalysts. Nevertheless, the limited distribution of training data for the extensively utilised machine learning interatomic potential (MLIP), predominantly sourced from near-equilibrium structures, results in unreliable adsorption structures and consequent adsorption energy predictions. In this context, we present DBCata, a deep generative model that integrates a periodic Brownian-bridge framework with an equivariant graph neural network to establish a low-dimensional transition manifold between unrelaxed and DFT-relaxed structures, without requiring explicit energy or force information. Upon training, DBCata effectively generates high-fidelity adsorption geometries, achieving an interatomic distance mean absolute error (DMAE) of 0.035 \textÅ on the Catalysis-Hub dataset, which is nearly three times superior to that of the current state-of-the-art machine learning potential models. Moreover, the corresponding DFT accuracy can be improved within 0.1 eV in 94\% of instances by identifying and refining anomalous predictions through a hybrid chemical-heuristic and self-supervised outlier detection approach. We demonstrate that the remarkable performance of DBCata facilitates accelerated high-throughput computational screening for efficient alloy catalysts in the oxygen reduction reaction, highlighting the potential of DBCata as a powerful tool for catalyst design and optimisation.

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### Yes-MT's Submission to the Low-Resource Indic Language Translation Shared Task in WMT 2024

Authors: Yash Bhaskar, Parameswari Krishnamurthy
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15226v1

This paper presents the systems submitted by the Yes-MT team for the Low-Resource Indic Language Translation Shared Task at WMT 2024 (Pakray et al., 2024), focusing on translating between English and the Assamese, Mizo, Khasi, and Manipuri languages. The experiments explored various approaches, including fine-tuning pre-trained models like mT5 (Xue et al., 2020) and IndicBart (Dabre et al., 2021) in both multilingual and monolingual settings, LoRA (Hu et al., 2021) fine-tuning IndicTrans2 (Gala et al., 2023), zero-shot and few-shot prompting (Brown, 2020) with large language models (LLMs) like Llama 3 (Dubey et al., 2024) and Mixtral 8x7b (Jiang et al., 2024), LoRA supervised fine-tuning of Llama 3 (Mecklenburg et al., 2024), and training Transformer models (Vaswani, 2017) from scratch. The results were evaluated on the WMT23 Low-Resource Indic Language Translation Shared Task test data using SacreBLEU (Post, 2018) and CHRF (Popovic, 2015), highlighting the challenges of low-resource translation and the potential of LLMs for these tasks, particularly with fine-tuning.

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### SLCFormer: Spectral-Local Context Transformer with Physics-Grounded Flare Synthesis for Nighttime Flare Removal

Authors: Xiyu Zhu, Wei Wang, Xin Yuan, Xiao Wang
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15221v1

Lens flare is a common nighttime artifact caused by strong light sources scattering within camera lenses, leading to hazy streaks, halos, and glare that degrade visual quality. However, existing methods usually fail to effectively address nonuniform scattered flares, which severely reduces their applicability to complex real-world scenarios with diverse lighting conditions. To address this issue, we propose SLCFormer, a novel spectral-local context transformer framework for effective nighttime lens flare removal. SLCFormer integrates two key modules: the Frequency Fourier and Excitation Module (FFEM), which captures efficient global contextual representations in the frequency domain to model flare characteristics, and the Directionally-Enhanced Spatial Module (DESM) for local structural enhancement and directional features in the spatial domain for precise flare removal. Furthermore, we introduce a ZernikeVAE-based scatter flare generation pipeline to synthesize physically realistic scatter flares with spatially varying PSFs, bridging optical physics and data-driven training. Extensive experiments on the Flare7K++ dataset demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing approaches in both quantitative metrics and perceptual visual quality, and generalizing robustly to real nighttime scenes with complex flare artifacts.

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### RFKG-CoT: Relation-Driven Adaptive Hop-count Selection and Few-Shot Path Guidance for Knowledge-Aware QA

Authors: Chao Zhang, Minghan Li, Tianrui Lv, Guodong Zhou
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15219v1

Large language models (LLMs) often generate hallucinations in knowledge-intensive QA due to parametric knowledge limitations. While existing methods like KG-CoT improve reliability by integrating knowledge graph (KG) paths, they suffer from rigid hop-count selection (solely question-driven) and underutilization of reasoning paths (lack of guidance). To address this, we propose RFKG-CoT: First, it replaces the rigid hop-count selector with a relation-driven adaptive hop-count selector that dynamically adjusts reasoning steps by activating KG relations (e.g., 1-hop for direct "brother" relations, 2-hop for indirect "father-son" chains), formalized via a relation mask. Second, it introduces a few-shot in-context learning path guidance mechanism with CoT (think) that constructs examples in a "question-paths-answer" format to enhance LLMs' ability to understand reasoning paths. Experiments on four KGQA benchmarks show RFKG-CoT improves accuracy by up to 14.7 pp (Llama2-7B on WebQSP) over KG-CoT. Ablations confirm the hop-count selector and the path prompt are complementary, jointly transforming KG evidence into more faithful answers.

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### From Camera to World: A Plug-and-Play Module for Human Mesh Transformation

Authors: Changhai Ma, Ziyu Wu, Yunkang Zhang, Qijun Ying, Boyan Liu, Xiaohui Cai
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15212v1

Reconstructing accurate 3D human meshes in the world coordinate system from in-the-wild images remains challenging due to the lack of camera rotation information. While existing methods achieve promising results in the camera coordinate system by assuming zero camera rotation, this simplification leads to significant errors when transforming the reconstructed mesh to the world coordinate system. To address this challenge, we propose Mesh-Plug, a plug-and-play module that accurately transforms human meshes from camera coordinates to world coordinates. Our key innovation lies in a human-centered approach that leverages both RGB images and depth maps rendered from the initial mesh to estimate camera rotation parameters, eliminating the dependency on environmental cues. Specifically, we first train a camera rotation prediction module that focuses on the human body's spatial configuration to estimate camera pitch angle. Then, by integrating the predicted camera parameters with the initial mesh, we design a mesh adjustment module that simultaneously refines the root joint orientation and body pose. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the benchmark datasets SPEC-SYN and SPEC-MTP.

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### WLC: Weber-Inspired Local Contrast Metric for Low-Altitude Image Fusion

Authors: Cong Wang, Yufeng Xie
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15211v4

Infrared and visible image fusion is a pivotal technology in low-altitude Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) reconnaissance missions, enabling robust target detection and tracking by integrating thermal saliency with environmental textures. However, the advancement of fusion algorithms is hindered by a critical evaluation bottleneck. In this paper, we identify a systematic failure in traditional no-reference metrics (specifically Statistics-based and Gradient-based metrics) within complex low-light environments, termed as ``Noise Trap''. It is mathematically proven that these metrics are positively correlated with high-frequency sensor noise, paradoxically assigning higher scores to degraded images and misguiding algorithm optimization. To resolve this dilemma, this paper proposes the Weber-inspired Local Contrast (WLC) metric. Grounded in the psychophysical principle of Weber's Law, WLC shifts the evaluation paradigm from global statistical distribution to local semantic contrast. By leveraging infrared priors, it effectively decouples target saliency from global background noise. Extensive experiments on the DroneVehicle dataset demonstrate that WLC exhibits high ``Semantic Discriminability'' in distinguishing thermal targets from background clutter. Furthermore, it achieves remarkable computational efficiency, thus, establishing itself as a reliable and real-time standard for intelligent UAV systems

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### Label-consistent clustering for evolving data

Authors: Ameet Gadekar, Aristides Gionis, Thibault Marette
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.DS, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15210v1

Data analysis often involves an iterative process, where solutions must be continuously refined in response to new data. Typically, as new data becomes available, an existing solution must be updated to incorporate the latest information. In addition to seeking a high-quality solution for the task at hand, it is also crucial to ensure consistency by minimizing drastic changes from previous solutions. Applying this approach across many iterations, ensures that the solution evolves gradually and smoothly. In this paper, we study the above problem in the context of clustering, specifically focusing on the $k$-center problem. More precisely, we study the following problem: Given a set of points $X$, parameters $k$ and $b$, and a prior clustering solution $H$ for $X$, our goal is to compute a new solution $C$ for $X$, consisting of $k$ centers, which minimizes the clustering cost while introducing at most $b$ changes from $H$. We refer to this problem as label-consistent $k$-center, and we propose two constant-factor approximation algorithms for it. We complement our theoretical findings with an experimental evaluation demonstrating the effectiveness of our methods on real-world datasets.

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### Chorus: Harmonizing Context and Sensing Signals for Data-Free Model Customization in IoT

Authors: Liyu Zhang, Yejia Liu, Kwun Ho Liu, Runxi Huang, Xiaomin Ouyang
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15206v3

A key bottleneck toward scalable IoT sensing is efficiently adapting trained AI models to new deployment conditions. Context shifts, such as changes in sensor placement or ambient environments, can substantially alter sensing patterns and degrade model performance. We present Chorus, a context-bridged, data-free post-deployment model customization approach that adapts sensing models to unseen contexts without requiring target-domain sensor data or post-deployment retraining. Chorus learns compact, transferable context representations and aligns them with the sensor latent space using unlabeled sensor-context pairs, bridging context generalization with sensing-data generalization. It then uses a lightweight gated prediction head to integrate context priors at inference and an adaptive caching mechanism to reuse context representations when no context shift is detected, reducing on-device overhead. Experiments on IMU sensing, speech enhancement, and WiFi sensing under diverse context shifts show that Chorus outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by up to 20.2% in unseen contexts, achieves inference latency comparable to sensor-only deployment, and remains stable under continuous context transitions and varied context descriptions. A video demonstration is available at https://youtu.be/yANTZsk0TVU.

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### A Clustering-Based Variable Ordering Framework for Relaxed Decision Diagrams for Maximum Weighted Independent Set Problem

Authors: Mohsen Nafar, Michael Römer, Lin Xie
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.AI, math.OC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15198v1

Efficient exact algorithms for Discrete Optimization (DO) rely heavily on strong primal and dual bounds. Relaxed Decision Diagrams (DDs) provide a versatile mechanism for deriving such dual bounds by compactly over-approximating the solution space through node merging. However, the quality of these relaxed diagrams, i.e. the tightness of the resulting dual bounds, depends critically on the variable ordering and the merging decisions executed during compilation. While dynamic variable ordering heuristics effectively tighten bounds, they often incur computational overhead when evaluated globally across the entire variable set. To mitigate this trade-off, this work introduces a novel clustering-based framework for variable ordering. Instead of applying dynamic ordering heuristics to the full set of unfixed variables, we first partition variables into clusters. We then leverage this structural decomposition to guide the ordering process, significantly reducing the heuristic's search space. Within this framework, we investigate two distinct strategies: Cluster-to-Cluster, which processes clusters sequentially using problem-specific aggregate criteria (such as cumulative vertex weights in the Maximum Weighted Independent Set Problem (MWISP)), and Pick-and-Sort, which iteratively selects and sorts representative variables from each cluster to balance local diversity with heuristic guidance. Later on, developing some theoretical results on the growth of the size of DDs for MWISP we propose two different policies for setting the number of clusters within the proposed framework. We embed these strategies into a DD-based branch-and-bound algorithm and evaluate them on the MWISP. Across benchmark instances, the proposed methodology consistently reduces computational costs compared to standard dynamic variable ordering baseline.

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### Governing rapid technological change: Policy Delphi on the future of European AI governance

Authors: Atte Ojanen, Johannes Anttila, Thilo H. K. Thelitz, Anna Bjork
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15196v1

The rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) present unique challenges for policymakers that seek to govern the technology. In this context, the Delphi method has become an established way to identify consensus and disagreement on emerging technological issues among experts in the field of futures studies and foresight. The aim of this article is twofold: first, it examines key tensions experts see in the development of AI governance in Europe, and second, it reflects on the Delphi method's capacity to inform anticipatory governance of emerging technologies like AI based on these insights. The analysis is based on the results of a two-round Policy Delphi study on the future of AI governance with European policymakers, researchers and NGOs, conducted in mid-2024. The Policy Delphi proved useful in revealing diverse perspectives on European AI governance, drawing out a consensus that future-proof AI regulation will likely depend more on practical implementation and enforcement of legislation than on its technical specifics or scope. Furthermore, the study identified a desirability-probability gap in AI governance: desirable policy directions, like greater citizen participation, were perceived as less probable and feasible. This highlights a tension between desirable regulatory oversight and the practical difficulty for regulation to keep up with technological change.

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### EPSM: A Novel Metric to Evaluate the Safety of Environmental Perception in Autonomous Driving

Authors: Jörg Gamerdinger, Sven Teufel, Stephan Amann, Lukas Marc Listl, Oliver Bringmann
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15195v1

Extensive evaluation of perception systems is crucial for ensuring the safety of intelligent vehicles in complex driving scenarios. Conventional performance metrics such as precision, recall and the F1-score assess the overall detection accuracy, but they do not consider the safety-relevant aspects of perception. Consequently, perception systems that achieve high scores in these metrics may still cause misdetections that could lead to severe accidents. Therefore, it is important to evaluate not only the overall performance of perception systems, but also their safety. We therefore introduce a novel safety metric for jointly evaluating the most critical perception tasks, object and lane detection. Our proposed framework integrates a new, lightweight object safety metric that quantifies the potential risk associated with object detection errors, as well as an lane safety metric including the interdependence between both tasks that can occur in safety evaluation. The resulting combined safety score provides a unified, interpretable measure of perception safety performance. Using the DeepAccident dataset, we demonstrate that our approach identifies safety critical perception errors that conventional performance metrics fail to capture. Our findings emphasize the importance of safety-centric evaluation methods for perception systems in autonomous driving.

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### ERIENet: An Efficient RAW Image Enhancement Network under Low-Light Environment

Authors: Jianan Wang, Yang Hong, Hesong Li, Tao Wang, Songrong Liu, Ying Fu
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15186v1

RAW images have shown superior performance than sRGB images in many image processing tasks, especially for low-light image enhancement. However, most existing methods for RAW-based low-light enhancement usually sequentially process multi-scale information, which makes it difficult to achieve lightweight models and high processing speeds. Besides, they usually ignore the green channel superiority of RAW images, and fail to achieve better reconstruction performance with good use of green channel information. In this work, we propose an efficient RAW Image Enhancement Network (ERIENet), which parallelly processes multi-scale information with efficient convolution modules, and takes advantage of rich information in green channels to guide the reconstruction of images. Firstly, we introduce an efficient multi-scale fully-parallel architecture with a novel channel-aware residual dense block to extract feature maps, which reduces computational costs and achieves real-time processing speed. Secondly, we introduce a green channel guidance branch to exploit the rich information within the green channels of the input RAW image. It increases the quality of reconstruction results with few parameters and computations. Experiments on commonly used low-light image enhancement datasets show that ERIENet outperforms state-of-the-art methods in enhancing low-light RAW images with higher effiency. It also achieves an optimal speed of over 146 frame-per-second (FPS) for 4K-resolution images on a single NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 with 24G memory.

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### From NLG Evaluation to Modern Student Assessment in the Era of ChatGPT: The Great Misalignment Problem and Pedagogical Multi-Factor Assessment (P-MFA)

Authors: Mika Hämäläinen, Kimmo Leiviskä
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15183v1

This paper explores the growing epistemic parallel between NLG evaluation and grading of students in a Finnish University. We argue that both domains are experiencing a Great Misalignment Problem. As students increasingly use tools like ChatGPT to produce sophisticated outputs, traditional assessment methods that focus on final products rather than learning processes have lost their validity. To address this, we introduce the Pedagogical Multi-Factor Assessment (P-MFA) model, a process-based, multi-evidence framework inspired by the logic of multi-factor authentication.

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### Robust and Calibrated Detection of Authentic Multimedia Content

Authors: Sarim Hashmi, Abdelrahman Elsayed, Mohammed Talha Alam, Samuele Poppi, Nils Lukas
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15182v1

Generative models can synthesize highly realistic content, so-called deepfakes, that are already being misused at scale to undermine digital media authenticity. Current deepfake detection methods are unreliable for two reasons: (i) distinguishing inauthentic content post-hoc is often impossible (e.g., with memorized samples), leading to an unbounded false positive rate (FPR); and (ii) detection lacks robustness, as adversaries can adapt to known detectors with near-perfect accuracy using minimal computational resources. To address these limitations, we propose a resynthesis framework to determine if a sample is authentic or if its authenticity can be plausibly denied. We make two key contributions focusing on the high-precision, low-recall setting against efficient (i.e., compute-restricted) adversaries. First, we demonstrate that our calibrated resynthesis method is the most reliable approach for verifying authentic samples while maintaining controllable, low FPRs. Second, we show that our method achieves adversarial robustness against efficient adversaries, whereas prior methods are easily evaded under identical compute budgets. Our approach supports multiple modalities and leverages state-of-the-art inversion techniques.

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### Criticality Metrics for Relevance Classification in Safety Evaluation of Object Detection in Automated Driving

Authors: Jörg Gamerdinger, Sven Teufel, Stephan Amann, Oliver Bringmann
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15181v1

Ensuring safety is the primary objective of automated driving, which necessitates a comprehensive and accurate perception of the environment. While numerous performance evaluation metrics exist for assessing perception capabilities, incorporating safety-specific metrics is essential to reliably evaluate object detection systems. A key component for safety evaluation is the ability to distinguish between relevant and non-relevant objects - a challenge addressed by criticality or relevance metrics. This paper presents the first in-depth analysis of criticality metrics for safety evaluation of object detection systems. Through a comprehensive review of existing literature, we identify and assess a range of applicable metrics. Their effectiveness is empirically validated using the DeepAccident dataset, which features a variety of safety-critical scenarios. To enhance evaluation accuracy, we propose two novel application strategies: bidirectional criticality rating and multi-metric aggregation. Our approach demonstrates up to a 100% improvement in terms of criticality classification accuracy, highlighting its potential to significantly advance the safety evaluation of object detection systems in automated vehicles.

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### BEAT2AASIST model with layer fusion for ESDD 2026 Challenge

Authors: Sanghyeok Chung, Eujin Kim, Donggun Kim, Gaeun Heo, Jeongbin You, Nahyun Lee, Sunmook Choi, Soyul Han, Seungsang Oh, Il-Youp Kwak
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.SD, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15180v1

Recent advances in audio generation have increased the risk of realistic environmental sound manipulation, motivating the ESDD 2026 Challenge as the first large-scale benchmark for Environmental Sound Deepfake Detection (ESDD). We propose BEAT2AASIST which extends BEATs-AASIST by splitting BEATs-derived representations along frequency or channel dimension and processing them with dual AASIST branches. To enrich feature representations, we incorporate top-k transformer layer fusion using concatenation, CNN-gated, and SE-gated strategies. In addition, vocoder-based data augmentation is applied to improve robustness against unseen spoofing methods. Experimental results on the official test sets demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves competitive performance across the challenge tracks.

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### DEER: Draft with Diffusion, Verify with Autoregressive Models

Authors: Zicong Cheng, Guo-Wei Yang, Jia Li, Zhijie Deng, Meng-Hao Guo, Shi-Min Hu
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15176v1

Efficiency, as a critical practical challenge for LLM-driven agentic and reasoning systems, is increasingly constrained by the inherent latency of autoregressive (AR) decoding. Speculative decoding mitigates this cost through a draft-verify scheme, yet existing approaches rely on AR draft models (a.k.a., drafters), which introduce two fundamental issues: (1) step-wise uncertainty accumulation leads to a progressive collapse of trust between the target model and the drafter, and (2) inherently sequential decoding of AR drafters. Together, these factors cause limited speedups. In this paper, we show that a diffusion large language model (dLLM) drafters can naturally overcome these issues through its fundamentally different probabilistic modeling and efficient parallel decoding strategy. Building on this insight, we introduce DEER, an efficient speculative decoding framework that drafts with diffusion and verifies with AR models. To enable high-quality drafting, DEER employs a two-stage training pipeline to align the dLLM-based drafters with the target AR model, and further adopts single-step decoding to generate long draft segments. Experiments show DEER reaches draft acceptance lengths of up to 32 tokens, far surpassing the 10 tokens achieved by EAGLE-3. Moreover, on HumanEval with Qwen3-30B-A3B, DEER attains a 5.54x speedup, while EAGLE-3 achieves only 2.41x. Code, model, demo, etc, will be available at https://czc726.github.io/DEER/

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### Cross-modal ultra-scale learning with tri-modalities of renal biopsy images for glomerular multi-disease auxiliary diagnosis

Authors: Kaixing Long, Danyi Weng, Yun Mi, Zhentai Zhang, Yanmeng Lu, Jian Geng, Zhitao Zhou, Liming Zhong, Qianjin Feng, Wei Yang, Lei Cao
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15171v1

Constructing a multi-modal automatic classification model based on three types of renal biopsy images can assist pathologists in glomerular multi-disease identification. However, the substantial scale difference between transmission electron microscopy (TEM) image features at the nanoscale and optical microscopy (OM) or immunofluorescence microscopy (IM) images at the microscale poses a challenge for existing multi-modal and multi-scale models in achieving effective feature fusion and improving classification accuracy. To address this issue, we propose a cross-modal ultra-scale learning network (CMUS-Net) for the auxiliary diagnosis of multiple glomerular diseases. CMUS-Net utilizes multiple ultrastructural information to bridge the scale difference between nanometer and micrometer images. Specifically, we introduce a sparse multi-instance learning module to aggregate features from TEM images. Furthermore, we design a cross-modal scale attention module to facilitate feature interaction, enhancing pathological semantic information. Finally, multiple loss functions are combined, allowing the model to weigh the importance among different modalities and achieve precise classification of glomerular diseases. Our method follows the conventional process of renal biopsy pathology diagnosis and, for the first time, performs automatic classification of multiple glomerular diseases including IgA nephropathy (IgAN), membranous nephropathy (MN), and lupus nephritis (LN) based on images from three modalities and two scales. On an in-house dataset, CMUS-Net achieves an ACC of 95.37+/-2.41%, an AUC of 99.05+/-0.53%, and an F1-score of 95.32+/-2.41%. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CMUS-Net outperforms other well-known multi-modal or multi-scale methods and show its generalization capability in staging MN. Code is available at https://github.com/SMU-GL-Group/MultiModal_lkx/tree/main.

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### Understanding NTK Variance in Implicit Neural Representations

Authors: Chengguang Ou, Yixin Zhuang
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15169v1

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) often converge slowly and struggle to recover high-frequency details due to spectral bias. While prior work links this behavior to the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK), how specific architectural choices affect NTK conditioning remains unclear. We show that many INR mechanisms can be understood through their impact on a small set of pairwise similarity factors and scaling terms that jointly determine NTK eigenvalue variance. For standard coordinate MLPs, limited input-feature interactions induce large eigenvalue dispersion and poor conditioning. We derive closed-form variance decompositions for common INR components and show that positional encoding reshapes input similarity, spherical normalization reduces variance via layerwise scaling, and Hadamard modulation introduces additional similarity factors strictly below one, yielding multiplicative variance reduction. This unified view explains how diverse INR architectures mitigate spectral bias by improving NTK conditioning. Experiments across multiple tasks confirm the predicted variance reductions and demonstrate faster, more stable convergence with improved reconstruction quality.

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### MCP-SafetyBench: A Benchmark for Safety Evaluation of Large Language Models with Real-World MCP Servers

Authors: Xuanjun Zong, Zhiqi Shen, Lei Wang, Yunshi Lan, Chao Yang
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15163v2

Large language models (LLMs) are evolving into agentic systems that reason, plan, and operate external tools. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a key enabler of this transition, offering a standardized interface for connecting LLMs with heterogeneous tools and services. Yet MCP's openness and multi-server workflows introduce new safety risks that existing benchmarks fail to capture, as they focus on isolated attacks or lack real-world coverage. We present MCP-SafetyBench, a comprehensive benchmark built on real MCP servers that supports realistic multi-turn evaluation across five domains: browser automation, financial analysis, location navigation, repository management, and web search. It incorporates a unified taxonomy of 20 MCP attack types spanning server, host, and user sides, and includes tasks requiring multi-step reasoning and cross-server coordination under uncertainty. Using MCP-SafetyBench, we systematically evaluate leading open- and closed-source LLMs, revealing that all models remain vulnerable to MCP attacks, with a notable safety-utility trade-off. Our results highlight the urgent need for stronger defenses and establish MCP-SafetyBench as a foundation for diagnosing and mitigating safety risks in real-world MCP deployments.

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### EagleVision: A Dual-Stage Framework with BEV-grounding-based Chain-of-Thought for Spatial Intelligence

Authors: Jiaxu Wan, Xu Wang, Mengwei Xie, Hang Zhang, Mu Xu, Yang Han, Hong Zhang, Ding Yuan, Yifan Yang
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15160v2

Video-based spatial reasoning -- such as estimating distances, judging directions, or understanding layouts from multiple views -- requires selecting informative frames and, when needed, actively seeking additional viewpoints during inference. Existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) consume a fixed set of uniformly sampled frames and cannot request new views once reasoning begins, often missing the geometric cues necessary for reliable spatial judgments. We present EagleVision, a dual-stage framework that combines geometry-aware frame selection with active, Bird's-Eye-View (BEV)-grounded reasoning. In the first stage (macro perception), a semantics-perspective-fusion determinantal point process (SPF-DPP) selects a compact set of keyframes that jointly maximize semantic relevance and viewpoint diversity under a fixed token budget. In the second stage (micro verification), the model performs iterative spatial Chain-of-Thought: at each step it can either reason in text or predict a pose on the BEV plane to retrieve the nearest real frame, forming a closed-loop hypothesize-look-verify cycle. The querying policy is trained purely via reinforcement learning with a spatial grounding reward, requiring no human-annotated reasoning traces. On VSI-Bench and SQA3D, EagleVision achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source vision-language models.

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### Explainable Action Form Assessment by Exploiting Multimodal Chain-of-Thoughts Reasoning

Authors: Mengshi Qi, Yeteng Wu, Wulian Yun, Xianlin Zhang, Huadong Ma
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15153v2

Evaluating whether human action is standard or not and providing reasonable feedback to improve action standardization is very crucial but challenging in real-world scenarios. However, current video understanding methods are mainly concerned with what and where the action is, which is unable to meet the requirements. Meanwhile, most of the existing datasets lack the labels indicating the degree of action standardization, and the action quality assessment datasets lack explainability and detailed feedback. Therefore, we define a new Human Action Form Assessment (AFA) task, and introduce a new diverse dataset CoT-AFA, which contains a large scale of fitness and martial arts videos with multi-level annotations for comprehensive video analysis. We enrich the CoT-AFA dataset with a novel Chain-of-Thought explanation paradigm. Instead of offering isolated feedback, our explanations provide a complete reasoning process--from identifying an action step to analyzing its outcome and proposing a concrete solution. Furthermore, we propose a framework named Explainable Fitness Assessor, which can not only judge an action but also explain why and provide a solution. This framework employs two parallel processing streams and a dynamic gating mechanism to fuse visual and semantic information, thereby boosting its analytical capabilities. The experimental results demonstrate that our method has achieved improvements in explanation generation (e.g., +16.0% in CIDEr), action classification (+2.7% in accuracy) and quality assessment (+2.1% in accuracy), revealing great potential of CoT-AFA for future studies. Our dataset and source code is available at https://github.com/MICLAB-BUPT/EFA.

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### Rakuten Data Release: A Large-Scale and Long-Term Reviews Corpus for Hotel Domain

Authors: Yuki Nakayama, Koki Hikichi, Yun Ching Liu, Yu Hirate
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15151v4

This paper presents a large-scale corpus of Rakuten Travel Reviews. Our collection contains 7.29 million customer reviews for 16 years, ranging from 2009 to 2024. Each record in the dataset contains the review text, its response from an accommodation, an anonymized reviewer ID, review date, accommodation ID, plan ID, plan title, room type, room name, purpose, accompanying group, and user ratings from six aspect categories, as well as an overall score. We present statistical information about our corpus and provide insights into factors driving data drift between 2019 and 2024 using statistical approaches.

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### Offline Multi-Task Multi-Objective Data-Driven Evolutionary Algorithm with Language Surrogate Model and Implicit Q-Learning

Authors: Xian-Rong Zhang, Yue-Jiao Gong, Zeyuan Ma, Jun Zhang
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.NE, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15149v1

Data-driven evolutionary algorithms has shown surprising results in addressing expensive optimization problems through robust surrogate modeling. Though promising, existing surrogate modeling schemes may encounter limitations in complex optimization problems with many sub-objectives, which rely on repeated and tedious approximation. To address such technical gap, we propose Q-MetaSur as a plug-and-play surrogate modeling scheme capable of providing unified and generalized surrogate learning. Specifically, we consider multi-task-multi-objective optimization~(MTMOO) in offline setting. Several key designs are proposed: 1) we transform objective approximation into sequence-to-sequence modeling where MTMOO problem can be represented by tenxual tokenization. To operate under such auto-regressive modeling, we introduce a Large Language Model-based surrogate model that first encodes a MTMOO instance and then decodes objective values of unseen decision variables. To ensure stability in training the proposed model, we propose a two-stage offline training strategy that operates as a synergy of supervised tuning and RL fine-tuning, which first exploits offline dataset to fit existing knowledge and then leverages RL to enhance model's generalization performance. Extensive empirical results on the CEC2019 benchmark demonstrate that Q-MetaSur not only outperforms representative surrogate baselines in objective approximation accuracy, but also helps underlying evolutionary algorithms achieve both desired optimization convergence and improved pareto optimality.

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### Beyond Majority Voting: Towards Fine-grained and More Reliable Reward Signal for Test-Time Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Weiqin Wang, Yile Wang, Kehao Chen, Hui Huang
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15146v4

Test-time reinforcement learning mitigates the reliance on annotated data by using majority voting results as pseudo-labels, emerging as a complementary direction to reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for improving reasoning ability. However, this voting strategy often induces confirmation bias and suffers from sparse rewards, limiting the overall performance. In this work, we propose subgroup-specific step-wise confidence-weighted pseudo-label estimation (SCOPE), a framework integrating model confidence and dynamic subgroup partitioning to address these issues. Specifically, SCOPE integrates the proposed step-wise confidence into pseudo label estimation, prioritizing high-quality reasoning paths over simple frequency count. Furthermore, it dynamically partitions the candidate outputs pool into independent subgroups by balancing reasoning quality against exploration diversity. By deriving local consensus via repeat sampling for each sub group, SCOPE provides diverse supervision targets to encourage broader exploration. We conduct experiments across various models and benchmarks, experimental results show that SCOPE consistently outperforms recent baselines. Notably, SCOPE achieving relative improvements of 13.1% on challenging AIME 2025 and 8.1% on AMC. The code is released at https://github.com/szu-tera/SCOPE.

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### An Efficient Gradient-Based Inference Attack for Federated Learning

Authors: Pablo Montaña-Fernández, Ines Ortega-Fernandez
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15143v1

Federated Learning is a machine learning setting that reduces direct data exposure, improving the privacy guarantees of machine learning models. Yet, the exchange of model updates between the participants and the aggregator can still leak sensitive information. In this work, we present a new gradient-based membership inference attack for federated learning scenarios that exploits the temporal evolution of last-layer gradients across multiple federated rounds. Our method uses the shadow technique to learn round-wise gradient patterns of the training records, requiring no access to the private dataset, and is designed to consider both semi-honest and malicious adversaries (aggregators or data owners). Beyond membership inference, we also provide a natural extension of the proposed attack to discrete attribute inference by contrasting gradient responses under alternative attribute hypotheses. The proposed attacks are model-agnostic, and therefore applicable to any gradient-based model and can be applied to both classification and regression settings. We evaluate the attack on CIFAR-100 and Purchase100 datasets for membership inference and on Breast Cancer Wisconsin for attribute inference. Our findings reveal strong attack performance and comparable computational and memory overhead in membership inference when compared to another attack from the literature. The obtained results emphasize that multi-round federated learning can increase the vulnerability to inference attacks, that aggregators pose a more substantial threat than data owners, and that attack performance is strongly influenced by the nature of the training dataset, with richer, high-dimensional data leading to stronger leakage than simpler tabular data.

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### Generalization and Feature Attribution in Machine Learning Models for Crop Yield and Anomaly Prediction in Germany

Authors: Roland Baatz
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15140v1

This study examines the generalization performance and interpretability of machine learning (ML) models used for predicting crop yield and yield anomalies in Germany's NUTS-3 regions. Using a high-quality, long-term dataset, the study systematically compares the evaluation and temporal validation behavior of ensemble tree-based models (XGBoost, Random Forest) and deep learning approaches (LSTM, TCN). While all models perform well on spatially split, conventional test sets, their performance degrades substantially on temporally independent validation years, revealing persistent limitations in generalization. Notably, models with strong test-set accuracy, but weak temporal validation performance can still produce seemingly credible SHAP feature importance values. This exposes a critical vulnerability in post hoc explainability methods: interpretability may appear reliable even when the underlying model fails to generalize. These findings underscore the need for validation-aware interpretation of ML predictions in agricultural and environmental systems. Feature importance should not be accepted at face value unless models are explicitly shown to generalize to unseen temporal and spatial conditions. The study advocates for domain-aware validation, hybrid modeling strategies, and more rigorous scrutiny of explainability methods in data-driven agriculture. Ultimately, this work addresses a growing challenge in environmental data science: how can we evaluate generalization robustly enough to trust model explanations?

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### Borrowing from anything: A generalizable framework for reference-guided instance editing

Authors: Shengxiao Zhou, Chenghua Li, Jianhao Huang, Qinghao Hu, Yifan Zhang
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15138v3

Reference-guided instance editing is fundamentally limited by semantic entanglement, where a reference's intrinsic appearance is intertwined with its extrinsic attributes. The key challenge lies in disentangling what information should be borrowed from the reference, and determining how to apply it appropriately to the target. To tackle this challenge, we propose GENIE, a Generalizable Instance Editing framework capable of achieving explicit disentanglement. GENIE first corrects spatial misalignments with a Spatial Alignment Module (SAM). Then, an Adaptive Residual Scaling Module (ARSM) learns what to borrow by amplifying salient intrinsic cues while suppressing extrinsic attributes, while a Progressive Attention Fusion (PAF) mechanism learns how to render this appearance onto the target, preserving its structure. Extensive experiments on the challenging AnyInsertion dataset demonstrate that GENIE achieves state-of-the-art fidelity and robustness, setting a new standard for disentanglement-based instance editing.

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### From Isolation to Entanglement: When Do Interpretability Methods Identify and Disentangle Known Concepts?

Authors: Aaron Mueller, Andrew Lee, Shruti Joshi, Ekdeep Singh Lubana, Dhanya Sridhar, Patrik Reizinger
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15134v2

A goal of interpretability is to recover disentangled representations of latent concepts (features) from the activations of neural networks. The quality of features is typically evaluated in isolation, and under implicit independence assumptions that may not hold in practice. Thus, it is unclear to what extent common featurization methods such as sparse autoencoders (SAEs) and probes disentangle one concept from another. We propose a multi-concept evaluation setting using concepts including sentiment, domain, voice, and tense. We evaluate how well featurizers produce disentangled representations of each concept, observing that features are typically sensitive to only one concept, but also that concepts are distributed across many features. Then, we steer these features, measuring whether each concept is independently manipulable, and whether features interact. Even in idealized settings, steering a feature often affects many concepts, despite a near absence of interaction effects. These results suggest that correlational metrics are insufficient to establish steering selectivity, and that demonstrating that two features operate in separate spaces is insufficient to claim that they will be selective for one concept. These results underscore the importance of multi-concept evaluations in interpretability research.

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### HD-Prot: A Protein Language Model for Joint Sequence-Structure Modeling with Continuous Structure Tokens

Authors: Yi Zhou, Haohao Qu, Yunqing Liu, Shanru Lin, Le Song, Wenqi Fan
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CE, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15133v3

Proteins inherently possess a consistent sequence-structure duality. The abundance of protein sequence data, which can be readily represented as discrete tokens, has driven fruitful developments in protein language models (pLMs). A key remaining challenge, however, is how to effectively integrate continuous structural knowledge into pLMs. Current methods often discretize protein structures to accommodate the language modeling framework, which inevitably results in the loss of fine-grained information and limits the performance potential of multimodal pLMs. In this paper, we argue that such concerns can be circumvented: a sequence-based pLM can be extended to incorporate the structure modality through continuous tokens, i.e., high-fidelity protein structure latents that avoid vector quantization. Specifically, we propose a hybrid diffusion protein language model, HD-Prot, which embeds a continuous-valued diffusion head atop a discrete pLM, enabling seamless operation with both discrete and continuous tokens for joint sequence-structure modeling. It captures inter-token dependencies across modalities through a unified absorbing diffusion process, and estimates per-token distributions via categorical prediction for sequences and continuous diffusion for structures. Extensive results demonstrate that HD-Prot achieves competitive performance in unconditional sequence-structure co-generation, motif-scaffolding, protein structure prediction, and inverse folding tasks. Furthermore, our method can perform on par with state-of-the-art multimodal pLMs, despite being developed under limited computational resources (i.e., less than one-tenth the budget for modality extension fine-tuning). It highlights the viability of simultaneously estimating categorical and continuous distributions within a unified language model architecture, offering a promising alternative direction for multimodal pLMs.

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### 3DProxyImg: Controllable 3D-Aware Animation Synthesis from Single Image via 2D-3D Aligned Proxy Embedding

Authors: Yupeng Zhu, Xiongzhen Zhang, Ye Chen, Bingbing Ni
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15126v2

3D animation is central to modern visual media, yet traditional production pipelines remain labor-intensive, expertise-demanding, and computationally expensive. Recent AIGC-based approaches partially automate asset creation and rigging, but they either inherit the heavy costs of full 3D pipelines or rely on video-synthesis paradigms that sacrifice 3D controllability and interactivity. We focus on single-image 3D animation generation and argue that progress is fundamentally constrained by a trade-off between rendering quality and 3D control. To address this limitation, we propose a lightweight 3D animation framework that decouples geometric control from appearance synthesis. The core idea is a 2D-3D aligned proxy representation that uses a coarse 3D estimate as a structural carrier, while delegating high-fidelity appearance and view synthesis to learned image-space generative priors. This proxy formulation enables 3D-aware motion control and interaction comparable to classical pipelines, without requiring accurate geometry or expensive optimization, and naturally extends to coherent background animation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves efficient animation generation on low-power platforms and outperforms video-based 3D animation generation in identity preservation, geometric and textural consistency, and the level of precise, interactive control it offers to users.

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### TrajSyn: Privacy-Preserving Dataset Distillation from Federated Model Trajectories for Server-Side Adversarial Training

Authors: Mukur Gupta, Niharika Gupta, Saifur Rahman, Shantanu Pal, Chandan Karmakar
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15123v1

Deep learning models deployed on edge devices are increasingly used in safety-critical applications. However, their vulnerability to adversarial perturbations poses significant risks, especially in Federated Learning (FL) settings where identical models are distributed across thousands of clients. While adversarial training is a strong defense, it is difficult to apply in FL due to strict client-data privacy constraints and the limited compute available on edge devices. In this work, we introduce TrajSyn, a privacy-preserving framework that enables effective server-side adversarial training by synthesizing a proxy dataset from the trajectories of client model updates, without accessing raw client data. We show that TrajSyn consistently improves adversarial robustness on image classification benchmarks with no extra compute burden on the client device.

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### Automatic Reward Shaping from Multi-Objective Human Heuristics

Authors: Yuqing Xie, Jiayu Chen, Wenhao Tang, Ya Zhang, Chao Yu, Yu Wang
Published: 2025-12-17
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15120v1

Designing effective reward functions remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning, especially in multi-objective environments. In this work, we propose Multi-Objective Reward Shaping with Exploration (MORSE), a general framework that automatically combines multiple human-designed heuristic rewards into a unified reward function. MORSE formulates the shaping process as a bi-level optimization problem: the inner loop trains a policy to maximize the current shaped reward, while the outer loop updates the reward function to optimize task performance. To encourage exploration in the reward space and avoid suboptimal local minima, MORSE introduces stochasticity into the shaping process, injecting noise guided by task performance and the prediction error of a fixed, randomly initialized neural network. Experimental results in MuJoCo and Isaac Sim environments show that MORSE effectively balances multiple objectives across various robotic tasks, achieving task performance comparable to those obtained with manually tuned reward functions.

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