# Research Papers — 2025-12 · bundle page 9 of 175 > Full-text markdown of papers #401–450 of 8703 published in 2025-12, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 8703-paper 2025-12 archive (50 papers per file). Canonical page: https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-12/page/9 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-12/page/8.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2025-12/page/10.md) ### Think Before You Move: Latent Motion Reasoning for Text-to-Motion Generation Authors: Yijie Qian, Juncheng Wang, Yuxiang Feng, Chao Xu, Wang Lu, Yang Liu, Baigui Sun, Yiqiang Chen, Yong Liu, Shujun Wang Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24100v2 Current state-of-the-art paradigms predominantly treat Text-to-Motion (T2M) generation as a direct translation problem, mapping symbolic language directly to continuous poses. While effective for simple actions, this System 1 approach faces a fundamental theoretical bottleneck we identify as the Semantic-Kinematic Impedance Mismatch: the inherent difficulty of grounding semantically dense, discrete linguistic intent into kinematically dense, high-frequency motion data in a single shot. In this paper, we argue that the solution lies in an architectural shift towards Latent System 2 Reasoning. Drawing inspiration from Hierarchical Motor Control in cognitive science, we propose Latent Motion Reasoning (LMR) that reformulates generation as a two-stage Think-then-Act decision process. Central to LMR is a novel Dual-Granularity Tokenizer that disentangles motion into two distinct manifolds: a compressed, semantically rich Reasoning Latent for planning global topology, and a high-frequency Execution Latent for preserving physical fidelity. By forcing the model to autoregressively reason (plan the coarse trajectory) before it moves (instantiates the frames), we effectively bridge the ineffability gap between language and physics. We demonstrate LMR's versatility by implementing it for two representative baselines: T2M-GPT (discrete) and MotionStreamer (continuous). Extensive experiments show that LMR yields non-trivial improvements in both semantic alignment and physical plausibility, validating that the optimal substrate for motion planning is not natural language, but a learned, motion-aligned concept space. Codes and demos can be found in \hyperlink{https://chenhaoqcdyq.github.io/LMR/}{https://chenhaoqcdyq.github.io/LMR/} --- ### Training a Huggingface Model on AWS Sagemaker (Without Tears) Authors: Liling Tan Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24098v2 The development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has primarily been driven by resource-rich research groups and industry partners. Due to the lack of on-premise computing resources required for increasingly complex models, many researchers are turning to cloud services like AWS SageMaker to train Hugging Face models. However, the steep learning curve of cloud platforms often presents a barrier for researchers accustomed to local environments. Existing documentation frequently leaves knowledge gaps, forcing users to seek fragmented information across the web. This demo paper aims to democratize cloud adoption by centralizing the essential information required for researchers to successfully train their first Hugging Face model on AWS SageMaker from scratch. --- ### Factorized Learning for Temporally Grounded Video-Language Models Authors: Wenzheng Zeng, Difei Gao, Mike Zheng Shou, Hwee Tou Ng Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24097v1 Recent video-language models have shown great potential for video understanding, but still struggle with accurate temporal grounding for event-level perception. We observe that two main factors in video understanding (i.e., temporal grounding and textual response) form a logical hierarchy: accurate temporal evidence grounding lays the foundation for reliable textual response. However, existing works typically handle these two tasks in a coupled manner without a clear logical structure, leading to sub-optimal objectives. We address this from a factorized learning perspective. We first propose D$^2$VLM, a framework that decouples the learning of these two tasks while also emphasizing their inherent dependency. We adopt a "grounding then answering with evidence referencing" paradigm and introduce evidence tokens for evidence grounding, which emphasize event-level visual semantic capture beyond the focus on timestamp representation in existing works. To further facilitate the learning of these two tasks, we introduce a novel factorized preference optimization (FPO) algorithm. Unlike standard preference optimization, FPO explicitly incorporates probabilistic temporal grounding modeling into the optimization objective, enabling preference learning for both temporal grounding and textual response. We also construct a synthetic dataset to address the lack of suitable datasets for factorized preference learning with explicit temporal grounding. Experiments on various tasks demonstrate the clear advantage of our approach. Our source code is available at https://github.com/nusnlp/d2vlm. --- ### HY-MT1.5 Technical Report Authors: Mao Zheng, Zheng Li, Tao Chen, Mingyang Song, Di Wang Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24092v1 In this report, we introduce our latest translation models, HY-MT1.5-1.8B and HY-MT1.5-7B, a new family of machine translation models developed through a holistic training framework tailored for high-performance translation. Our methodology orchestrates a multi-stage pipeline that integrates general and MT-oriented pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, on-policy distillation, and reinforcement learning. HY-MT1.5-1.8B, the 1.8B-parameter model demonstrates remarkable parameter efficiency, comprehensively outperforming significantly larger open-source baselines (e.g., Tower-Plus-72B, Qwen3-32B) and mainstream commercial APIs (e.g., Microsoft Translator, Doubao Translator) in standard Chinese-foreign and English-foreign tasks. It achieves approximately 90% of the performance of ultra-large proprietary models such as Gemini-3.0-Pro, while marginally trailing Gemini-3.0-Pro on WMT25 and Mandarin-minority language benchmarks, it maintains a substantial lead over other competing models. Furthermore, HY-MT1.5-7B establishes a new state-of-the-art for its size class, achieving 95% of Gemini-3.0-Pro's performance on Flores-200 and surpassing it on the challenging WMT25 and Mandarin-minority language test sets. Beyond standard translation, the HY-MT1.5 series supports advanced constraints, including terminology intervention, context-aware translation, and format preservation. Extensive empirical evaluations confirm that both models offer highly competitive, robust solutions for general and specialized translation tasks within their respective parameter scales. --- ### FedLiTeCAN : A Federated Lightweight Transformer for Fast and Robust CAN Bus Intrusion Detection Authors: Devika S, Pratik Narang, Tejasvi Alladi Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24088v1 This work implements a lightweight Transformer model for IDS in the domain of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles --- ### Random Multiplexing Authors: Lei Liu, Yuhao Chi, Shunqi Huang, Zhaoyang Zhang Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.IT, cs.AI, cs.LG, eess.SP, math.ST arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24087v2 As wireless communication applications evolve from traditional multipath environments to high-mobility scenarios like unmanned aerial vehicles, multiplexing techniques have advanced accordingly. Traditional single-carrier frequency-domain equalization (SC-FDE) and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) have given way to emerging orthogonal time-frequency space (OTFS) and affine frequency-division multiplexing (AFDM). These approaches exploit specific channel structures to diagonalize or sparsify the effective channel, thereby enabling low-complexity detection. However, their reliance on these structures significantly limits their robustness in dynamic, real-world environments. To address these challenges, this paper studies a random multiplexing technique that is decoupled from the physical channels, enabling its application to arbitrary norm-bounded and spectrally convergent channel matrices. Random multiplexing achieves statistical fading-channel ergodicity for transmitted signals by constructing an equivalent input-isotropic channel matrix in the random transform domain. It guarantees the asymptotic replica MAP bit-error rate (BER) optimality of AMP-type detectors for linear systems with arbitrary norm-bounded, spectrally convergent channel matrices and signaling configurations, under the unique fixed point assumption. A low-complexity cross-domain memory AMP (CD-MAMP) detector is considered, leveraging the sparsity of the time-domain channel and the randomness of the equivalent channel. Optimal power allocations are derived to minimize the replica MAP BER and maximize the replica constrained capacity of random multiplexing systems. The optimal coding principle and replica constrained-capacity optimality of CD-MAMP detector are investigated for random multiplexing systems. Additionally, the versatility of random multiplexing in diverse wireless applications is explored. --- ### RainFusion2.0: Temporal-Spatial Awareness and Hardware-Efficient Block-wise Sparse Attention Authors: Aiyue Chen, Yaofu Liu, Junjian Huang, Guang Lian, Yiwu Yao, Wangli Lan, Jing Lin, Zhixin Ma, Tingting Zhou Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24086v2 In video and image generation tasks, Diffusion Transformer (DiT) models incur extremely high computational costs due to attention mechanisms, which limits their practical applications. Furthermore, with hardware advancements, a wide range of devices besides graphics processing unit (GPU), such as application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), have been increasingly adopted for model inference. Sparse attention, which leverages the inherent sparsity of attention by skipping computations for insignificant tokens, is an effective approach to mitigate computational costs. However, existing sparse attention methods have two critical limitations: the overhead of sparse pattern prediction and the lack of hardware generality, as most of these methods are designed for GPU. To address these challenges, this study proposes RainFusion2.0, which aims to develop an online adaptive, hardware-efficient, and low-overhead sparse attention mechanism to accelerate both video and image generative models, with robust performance across diverse hardware platforms. Key technical insights include: (1) leveraging block-wise mean values as representative tokens for sparse mask prediction; (2) implementing spatiotemporal-aware token permutation; and (3) introducing a first-frame sink mechanism specifically designed for video generation scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that RainFusion2.0 can achieve 80% sparsity while achieving an end-to-end speedup of 1.5~1.8x without compromising video quality. Moreover, RainFusion2.0 demonstrates effectiveness across various generative models and validates its generalization across diverse hardware platforms. --- ### LoongFlow: Directed Evolutionary Search via a Cognitive Plan-Execute-Summarize Paradigm Authors: Chunhui Wan, Xunan Dai, Zhuo Wang, Minglei Li, Yanpeng Wang, Yinan Mao, Yu Lan, Zhiwen Xiao Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24077v1 The transition from static Large Language Models (LLMs) to self-improving agents is hindered by the lack of structured reasoning in traditional evolutionary approaches. Existing methods often struggle with premature convergence and inefficient exploration in high-dimensional code spaces. To address these challenges, we introduce LoongFlow, a self-evolving agent framework that achieves state-of-the-art solution quality with significantly reduced computational costs. Unlike "blind" mutation operators, LoongFlow integrates LLMs into a cognitive "Plan-Execute-Summarize" (PES) paradigm, effectively mapping the evolutionary search to a reasoning-heavy process. To sustain long-term architectural coherence, we incorporate a hybrid evolutionary memory system. By synergizing Multi-Island models with MAP-Elites and adaptive Boltzmann selection, this system theoretically balances the exploration-exploitation trade-off, maintaining diverse behavioral niches to prevent optimization stagnation. We instantiate LoongFlow with a General Agent for algorithmic discovery and an ML Agent for pipeline optimization. Extensive evaluations on the AlphaEvolve benchmark and Kaggle competitions demonstrate that LoongFlow outperforms leading baselines (e.g., OpenEvolve, ShinkaEvolve) by up to 60% in evolutionary efficiency while discovering superior solutions. LoongFlow marks a substantial step forward in autonomous scientific discovery, enabling the generation of expert-level solutions with reduced computational overhead. --- ### Evolutionary Physics-Informed Temporal Fusion for Lane-Change Intention Prediction Authors: Jiazhao Shi, Qiyang Xie, Ziyu Wang, Yichen Lin, Di Zhu, Chen Xie, Ziwei Wang, Haoyun Zhang, Enliang Li, Zetong Guan Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24075v6 Early lane-change intention prediction is essential for autonomous driving and ADAS, but it remains challenging because lane-changing behavior depends on evolving traffic risk, surrounding-vehicle interactions, and target-lane feasibility rather than only instantaneous vehicle states. This study proposes an evolutionary physics-informed temporal fusion framework for three-class lane-change intention prediction, including left lane change, right lane change, and no lane change. Instead of using static physics-informed variables alone, the proposed method derives temporal descriptors from conventional traffic signals, including risk evolution, gap persistence, counterfactual lane utility, interaction pressure gradient, maneuver feasibility, and intent consistency. These descriptors are fused with temporal embeddings learned from raw trajectory sequences through a sequence encoder, and the fused representation is used for final classification. Experiments are conducted on the highD and exiD datasets under 1\,s, 2\,s, and 3\,s prediction horizons. The proposed model achieves Macro F1-scores of 0.9514, 0.9256, and 0.8872 on highD, and 0.9386, 0.9070, and 0.8531 on exiD, respectively. The improvement is especially pronounced in exiD ramp-adjacent scenarios, indicating that temporal physical evolution is particularly useful in interaction-rich environments. These results demonstrate that combining evolutionary physics-informed descriptors with learned temporal representations provides a more dynamic and interpretable solution for early lane-change intention prediction. --- ### Balanced Hierarchical Contrastive Learning with Decoupled Queries for Fine-grained Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images Authors: Jingzhou Chen, Dexin Chen, Fengchao Xiong, Yuntao Qian, Liang Xiao Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24074v1 Fine-grained remote sensing datasets often use hierarchical label structures to differentiate objects in a coarse-to-fine manner, with each object annotated across multiple levels. However, embedding this semantic hierarchy into the representation learning space to improve fine-grained detection performance remains challenging. Previous studies have applied supervised contrastive learning at different hierarchical levels to group objects under the same parent class while distinguishing sibling subcategories. Nevertheless, they overlook two critical issues: (1) imbalanced data distribution across the label hierarchy causes high-frequency classes to dominate the learning process, and (2) learning semantic relationships among categories interferes with class-agnostic localization. To address these issues, we propose a balanced hierarchical contrastive loss combined with a decoupled learning strategy within the detection transformer (DETR) framework. The proposed loss introduces learnable class prototypes and equilibrates gradients contributed by different classes at each hierarchical level, ensuring that each hierarchical class contributes equally to the loss computation in every mini-batch. The decoupled strategy separates DETR's object queries into classification and localization sets, enabling task-specific feature extraction and optimization. Experiments on three fine-grained datasets with hierarchical annotations demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. --- ### Time-varying Mixing Matrix Design for Energy-efficient Decentralized Federated Learning Authors: Xusheng Zhang, Tuan Nguyen, Ting He Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.LG, cs.DC, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24069v2 We consider the design of mixing matrices to minimize the operation cost for decentralized federated learning (DFL) in wireless networks, with focus on minimizing the maximum per-node energy consumption. As a critical hyperparameter for DFL, the mixing matrix controls both the convergence rate and the needs of agent-to-agent communications, and has thus been studied extensively. However, existing designs mostly focused on minimizing the communication time, leaving open the minimization of per-node energy consumption that is critical for energy-constrained devices. This work addresses this gap through a theoretically-justified solution for mixing matrix design that aims at minimizing the maximum per-node energy consumption until convergence, while taking into account the broadcast nature of wireless communications. Based on a novel convergence theorem that allows arbitrarily time-varying mixing matrices, we propose a multi-phase design framework that activates time-varying communication topologies under optimized budgets to trade off the per-iteration energy consumption and the convergence rate while balancing the energy consumption across nodes. Our evaluations based on real data have validated the efficacy of the proposed solution in combining the low energy consumption of sparse mixing matrices and the fast convergence of dense mixing matrices. --- ### Pathology Context Recalibration Network for Ocular Disease Recognition Authors: Zunjie Xiao, Xiaoqing Zhang, Risa Higashita, Jiang Liu Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24066v1 Pathology context and expert experience play significant roles in clinical ocular disease diagnosis. Although deep neural networks (DNNs) have good ocular disease recognition results, they often ignore exploring the clinical pathology context and expert experience priors to improve ocular disease recognition performance and decision-making interpretability. To this end, we first develop a novel Pathology Recalibration Module (PRM) to leverage the potential of pathology context prior via the combination of the well-designed pixel-wise context compression operator and pathology distribution concentration operator; then this paper applies a novel expert prior Guidance Adapter (EPGA) to further highlight significant pixel-wise representation regions by fully mining the expert experience prior. By incorporating PRM and EPGA into the modern DNN, the PCRNet is constructed for automated ocular disease recognition. Additionally, we introduce an Integrated Loss (IL) to boost the ocular disease recognition performance of PCRNet by considering the effects of sample-wise loss distributions and training label frequencies. The extensive experiments on three ocular disease datasets demonstrate the superiority of PCRNet with IL over state-of-the-art attention-based networks and advanced loss methods. Further visualization analysis explains the inherent behavior of PRM and EPGA that affects the decision-making process of DNNs. --- ### Neighbor-aware Instance Refining with Noisy Labels for Cross-Modal Retrieval Authors: Yizhi Liu, Ruitao Pu, Shilin Xu, Yingke Chen, Quan-Hui Liu, Yuan Sun Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CV, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24064v1 In recent years, Cross-Modal Retrieval (CMR) has made significant progress in the field of multi-modal analysis. However, since it is time-consuming and labor-intensive to collect large-scale and well-annotated data, the annotation of multi-modal data inevitably contains some noise. This will degrade the retrieval performance of the model. To tackle the problem, numerous robust CMR methods have been developed, including robust learning paradigms, label calibration strategies, and instance selection mechanisms. Unfortunately, they often fail to simultaneously satisfy model performance ceilings, calibration reliability, and data utilization rate. To overcome the limitations, we propose a novel robust cross-modal learning framework, namely Neighbor-aware Instance Refining with Noisy Labels (NIRNL). Specifically, we first propose Cross-modal Margin Preserving (CMP) to adjust the relative distance between positive and negative pairs, thereby enhancing the discrimination between sample pairs. Then, we propose Neighbor-aware Instance Refining (NIR) to identify pure subset, hard subset, and noisy subset through cross-modal neighborhood consensus. Afterward, we construct different tailored optimization strategies for this fine-grained partitioning, thereby maximizing the utilization of all available data while mitigating error propagation. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that NIRNL achieves state-of-the-art performance, exhibiting remarkable robustness, especially under high noise rates. --- ### How and Why LLMs Generalize: A Fine-Grained Analysis of LLM Reasoning from Cognitive Behaviors to Low-Level Patterns Authors: Haoyue Bai, Yiyou Sun, Wenjie Hu, Shi Qiu, Maggie Ziyu Huan, Peiyang Song, Robert Nowak, Dawn Song Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24063v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) display strikingly different generalization behaviors: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) often narrows capability, whereas reinforcement-learning (RL) tuning tends to preserve it. The reasons behind this divergence remain unclear, as prior studies have largely relied on coarse accuracy metrics. We address this gap by introducing a novel benchmark that decomposes reasoning into atomic core skills such as calculation, fact retrieval, simulation, enumeration, and diagnostic, providing a concrete framework for addressing the fundamental question of what constitutes reasoning in LLMs. By isolating and measuring these core skills, the benchmark offers a more granular view of how specific cognitive abilities emerge, transfer, and sometimes collapse during post-training. Combined with analyses of low-level statistical patterns such as distributional divergence and parameter statistics, it enables a fine-grained study of how generalization evolves under SFT and RL across mathematical, scientific reasoning, and non-reasoning tasks. Our meta-probing framework tracks model behavior at different training stages and reveals that RL-tuned models maintain more stable behavioral profiles and resist collapse in reasoning skills, whereas SFT models exhibit sharper drift and overfit to surface patterns. This work provides new insights into the nature of reasoning in LLMs and points toward principles for designing training strategies that foster broad, robust generalization. --- ### Energy-Balanced Hyperspherical Graph Representation Learning via Structural Binding and Entropic Dispersion Authors: Rui Chen, Junjun Guo, Hongbin Wang, Yan Xiang, Yantuan Xian, Zhengtao Yu Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24062v2 Graph Representation Learning (GRL) can be fundamentally modeled as a physical process of seeking an energy equilibrium state for a node system on a latent manifold. However, existing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) often suffer from uncontrolled energy dissipation during message passing, driving the system towards a state of Thermal Death--manifested as feature collapse or over-smoothing--due to the absence of explicit thermodynamic constraints. To address this, we propose HyperGRL, a thermodynamics-driven framework that embeds nodes on a unit hypersphere by minimizing a Helmholtz free energy objective composed of two competing potentials. First, we introduce Structural Binding Energy (via Neighbor-Mean Alignment), which functions as a local binding force to strengthen structural cohesion, encouraging structurally related nodes to form compact local clusters. Second, to counteract representation collapse, we impose a Mean-Field Repulsive Potential (via Sampling-Free Uniformity), which acts as a global entropic force to maximize representation dispersion without the need for negative sampling. Crucially, to govern the trade-off between local alignment and global uniformity, we devise an Adaptive Thermostat. This entropy-guided strategy dynamically regulates the system's "temperature" during training, guiding the representation towards a robust metastable state that balances local cohesion with global discriminability. Extensive experiments on node classification, node clustering, and link prediction show that HyperGRL consistently achieves strong performance across diverse benchmark datasets, yielding more discriminative and robust representations while alleviating over-smoothing. --- ### Beyond Hallucinations: A Composite Score for Measuring Reliability in Open-Source Large Language Models Authors: Rohit Kumar Salla, Manoj Saravanan, Shrikar Reddy Kota Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24058v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) like LLaMA, Mistral, and Gemma are increasingly used in decision-critical domains such as healthcare, law, and finance, yet their reliability remains uncertain. They often make overconfident errors, degrade under input shifts, and lack clear uncertainty estimates. Existing evaluations are fragmented, addressing only isolated aspects. We introduce the Composite Reliability Score (CRS), a unified framework that integrates calibration, robustness, and uncertainty quantification into a single interpretable metric. Through experiments on ten leading open-source LLMs across five QA datasets, we assess performance under baselines, perturbations, and calibration methods. CRS delivers stable model rankings, uncovers hidden failure modes missed by single metrics, and highlights that the most dependable systems balance accuracy, robustness, and calibrated uncertainty. --- ### Policy Mirror Descent with Temporal Difference Learning: Sample Complexity under Online Markov Data Authors: Wenye Li, Hongxu Chen, Jiacai Liu, Ke Wei Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: math.OC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24056v1 This paper studies the policy mirror descent (PMD) method, which is a general policy optimization framework in reinforcement learning and can cover a wide range of policy gradient methods by specifying difference mirror maps. Existing sample complexity analysis for policy mirror descent either focuses on the generative sampling model, or the Markovian sampling model but with the action values being explicitly approximated to certain pre-specified accuracy. In contrast, we consider the sample complexity of policy mirror descent with temporal difference (TD) learning under the Markovian sampling model. Two algorithms called Expected TD-PMD and Approximate TD-PMD have been presented, which are off-policy and mixed policy algorithms respectively. Under a small enough constant policy update step size, the $\tilde{O}(\varepsilon^{-2})$ (a logarithm factor about $\varepsilon$ is hidden in $\tilde{O}(\cdot)$) sample complexity can be established for them to achieve average-time $\varepsilon$-optimality. The sample complexity is further improved to $O(\varepsilon^{-2})$ (without the hidden logarithm factor) to achieve the last-iterate $\varepsilon$-optimality based on adaptive policy update step sizes. --- ### AHA: Aligning Large Audio-Language Models for Reasoning Hallucinations via Counterfactual Hard Negatives Authors: Yanxi Chen, Wenhui Zhu, Xiwen Chen, Zhipeng Wang, Xin Li, Peijie Qiu, Hao Wang, Xuanzhao Dong, Yujian Xiong, Anderson Schneider, Yuriy Nevmyvaka, Yalin Wang Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24052v2 Although Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) deliver state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, they frequently suffer from hallucinations, e.g. generating text not grounded in the audio input. We analyze these grounding failures and identify a distinct taxonomy: Event Omission, False Event Identity, Temporal Relation Error, and Quantitative Temporal Error. To address this, we introduce the AHA (Audio Hallucination Alignment) framework. By leveraging counterfactual hard negative mining, our pipeline constructs a high-quality preference dataset that forces models to distinguish strict acoustic evidence from linguistically plausible fabrications. Additionally, we establish AHA-Eval, a diagnostic benchmark designed to rigorously test these fine-grained temporal reasoning capabilities. We apply this data to align Qwen2.5-Omni. The resulting model, Qwen-Audio-AHA, achieves a 13.7% improvement on AHA-Eval. Crucially, this benefit generalizes beyond our diagnostic set. Our model shows substantial gains on public benchmarks, including 1.3% on MMAU-Test and 1.6% on MMAR, outperforming latest SOTA methods. The model and dataset are open-sourced at https://github.com/LLM-VLM-GSL/AHA. --- ### Jailbreaking Attacks vs. Content Safety Filters: How Far Are We in the LLM Safety Arms Race? Authors: Yuan Xin, Dingfan Chen, Linyi Yang, Michael Backes, Xiao Zhang Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24044v1 As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed, ensuring their safe use is paramount. Jailbreaking, adversarial prompts that bypass model alignment to trigger harmful outputs, present significant risks, with existing studies reporting high success rates in evading common LLMs. However, previous evaluations have focused solely on the models, neglecting the full deployment pipeline, which typically incorporates additional safety mechanisms like content moderation filters. To address this gap, we present the first systematic evaluation of jailbreak attacks targeting LLM safety alignment, assessing their success across the full inference pipeline, including both input and output filtering stages. Our findings yield two key insights: first, nearly all evaluated jailbreak techniques can be detected by at least one safety filter, suggesting that prior assessments may have overestimated the practical success of these attacks; second, while safety filters are effective in detection, there remains room to better balance recall and precision to further optimize protection and user experience. We highlight critical gaps and call for further refinement of detection accuracy and usability in LLM safety systems. --- ### ROAD: Reflective Optimization via Automated Debugging for Zero-Shot Agent Alignment Authors: Natchaya Temyingyong, Daman Jain, Neeraj Kumarsahu, Prabhat Kumar, Rachata Phondi, Wachiravit Modecrua, Krittanon Kaewtawee, Krittin Pachtrachai, Touchapon Kraisingkorn Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24040v1 Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO) has emerged as a critical technique for enhancing Large Language Model (LLM) performance, yet current state-of-the-art methods typically rely on large, labeled gold-standard development sets to compute fitness scores for evolutionary or Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches. In real-world software engineering, however, such curated datasets are rarely available during the initial cold start of agent development, where engineers instead face messy production logs and evolving failure modes. We present ROAD (Reflective Optimization via Automated Debugging), a novel framework that bypasses the need for refined datasets by treating optimization as a dynamic debugging investigation rather than a stochastic search. Unlike traditional mutation strategies, ROAD utilizes a specialized multi-agent architecture, comprising an Analyzer for root-cause analysis, an Optimizer for pattern aggregation, and a Coach for strategy integration, to convert unstructured failure logs into robust, structured Decision Tree Protocols. We evaluated ROAD across both a standardized academic benchmark and a live production Knowledge Management engine. Experimental results demonstrate that ROAD is highly sample-efficient, achieving a 5.6 percent increase in success rate (73.6 percent to 79.2 percent) and a 3.8 percent increase in search accuracy within just three automated iterations. Furthermore, on complex reasoning tasks in the retail domain, ROAD improved agent performance by approximately 19 percent relative to the baseline. These findings suggest that mimicking the human engineering loop of failure analysis and patching offers a viable, data-efficient alternative to resource-intensive RL training for deploying reliable LLM agents. --- ### Kidney Exchange: Faster Parameterized Algorithms and Tighter Lower Bounds Authors: Aritra Banik, Sujoy Bhore, Palash Dey, Abhishek Sahu Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.DS, cs.AI, cs.CC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24037v1 The kidney exchange mechanism allows many patient-donor pairs who are otherwise incompatible with each other to come together and exchange kidneys along a cycle. However, due to infrastructure and legal constraints, kidney exchange can only be performed in small cycles in practice. In reality, there are also some altruistic donors who do not have any paired patients. This allows us to also perform kidney exchange along paths that start from some altruistic donor. Unfortunately, the computational task is NP-complete. To overcome this computational barrier, an important line of research focuses on designing faster algorithms, both exact and using the framework of parameterized complexity. The standard parameter for the kidney exchange problem is the number $t$ of patients that receive a healthy kidney. The current fastest known deterministic FPT algorithm for this problem, parameterized by $t$, is $O^\star\left(14^t\right)$. In this work, we improve this by presenting a deterministic FPT algorithm that runs in time $O^\star\left((4e)^t\right)\approx O^\star\left(10.88^t\right)$. This problem is also known to be W(1)-hard parameterized by the treewidth of the underlying undirected graph. A natural question here is whether the kidney exchange problem admits an FPT algorithm parameterized by the pathwidth of the underlying undirected graph. We answer this negatively in this paper by proving that this problem is W(1)-hard parameterized by the pathwidth of the underlying undirected graph. We also present some parameterized intractability results improving the current understanding of the problem under the framework of parameterized complexity. --- ### Reinforced Diffusion: Learning to Push the Limits of Anisotropic Diffusion for Image Denoising Authors: Xinran Qin, Yuhui Quan, Ruotao Xu, Hui Ji Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24035v1 Image denoising is an important problem in low-level vision and serves as a critical module for many image recovery tasks. Anisotropic diffusion is a wide family of image denoising approaches with promising performance. However, traditional anisotropic diffusion approaches use explicit diffusion operators which are not well adapted to complex image structures. As a result, their performance is limited compared to recent learning-based approaches. In this work, we describe a trainable anisotropic diffusion framework based on reinforcement learning. By modeling the denoising process as a series of naive diffusion actions with order learned by deep Q-learning, we propose an effective diffusion-based image denoiser. The diffusion actions selected by deep Q-learning at different iterations indeed composite a stochastic anisotropic diffusion process with strong adaptivity to different image structures, which enjoys improvement over the traditional ones. The proposed denoiser is applied to removing three types of often-seen noise. The experiments show that it outperforms existing diffusion-based methods and competes with the representative deep CNN-based methods. --- ### PipeFlow: Pipelined Processing and Motion-Aware Frame Selection for Long-Form Video Editing Authors: Mustafa Munir, Md Mostafijur Rahman, Kartikeya Bhardwaj, Paul Whatmough, Radu Marculescu Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24026v1 Long-form video editing poses unique challenges due to the exponential increase in the computational cost from joint editing and Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models (DDIM) inversion across extended sequences. To address these limitations, we propose PipeFlow, a scalable, pipelined video editing method that introduces three key innovations: First, based on a motion analysis using Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) and Optical Flow, we identify and propose to skip editing of frames with low motion. Second, we propose a pipelined task scheduling algorithm that splits a video into multiple segments and performs DDIM inversion and joint editing in parallel based on available GPU memory. Lastly, we leverage a neural network-based interpolation technique to smooth out the border frames between segments and interpolate the previously skipped frames. Our method uniquely scales to longer videos by dividing them into smaller segments, allowing PipeFlow's editing time to increase linearly with video length. In principle, this enables editing of infinitely long videos without the growing per-frame computational overhead encountered by other methods. PipeFlow achieves up to a 9.6X speedup compared to TokenFlow and a 31.7X speedup over Diffusion Motion Transfer (DMT). --- ### RSAgent: Learning to Reason and Act for Text-Guided Segmentation via Multi-Turn Tool Invocations Authors: Xingqi He, Yujie Zhang, Shuyong Gao, Wenjie Li, Lingyi Hong, Mingxi Chen, Kaixun Jiang, Jiyuan Fu, Wenqiang Zhang Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24023v1 Text-guided object segmentation requires both cross-modal reasoning and pixel grounding abilities. Most recent methods treat text-guided segmentation as one-shot grounding, where the model predicts pixel prompts in a single forward pass to drive an external segmentor, which limits verification, refocusing and refinement when initial localization is wrong. To address this limitation, we propose RSAgent, an agentic Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) which interleaves reasoning and action for segmentation via multi-turn tool invocations. RSAgent queries a segmentation toolbox, observes visual feedback, and revises its spatial hypothesis using historical observations to re-localize targets and iteratively refine masks. We further build a data pipeline to synthesize multi-turn reasoning segmentation trajectories, and train RSAgent with a two-stage framework: cold-start supervised fine-tuning followed by agentic reinforcement learning with fine-grained, task-specific rewards. Extensive experiments show that RSAgent achieves a zero-shot performance of 66.5% gIoU on ReasonSeg test, improving over Seg-Zero-7B by 9%, and reaches 81.5% cIoU on RefCOCOg, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance on both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks. --- ### FUSE-RSVLM: Feature Fusion Vision-Language Model for Remote Sensing Authors: Yunkai Dang, Donghao Wang, Jiacheng Yang, Yifan Jiang, Meiyi Zhu, Yuekun Yang, Cong Wang, Qi Fan, Wenbin Li, Yang Gao Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24022v1 Large vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit strong performance across various tasks. However, these VLMs encounter significant challenges when applied to the remote sensing domain due to the inherent differences between remote sensing images and natural images. Existing remote sensing VLMs often fail to extract fine-grained visual features and suffer from visual forgetting during deep language processing. To address this, we introduce MF-RSVLM, a Multi-Feature Fusion Remote Sensing Vision--Language Model that effectively extracts and fuses visual features for RS understanding. MF-RSVLM learns multi-scale visual representations and combines global context with local details, improving the capture of small and complex structures in RS scenes. A recurrent visual feature injection scheme ensures the language model remains grounded in visual evidence and reduces visual forgetting during generation. Extensive experiments on diverse RS benchmarks show that MF-RSVLM achieves state-of-the-art or highly competitive performance across remote sensing classification, image captioning, and VQA tasks. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Yunkaidang/RSVLM. --- ### One-Shot Structured Pruning of Quantum Neural Networks via $q$-Group Engineering and Quantum Geometric Metrics Authors: Haijian Shao, Wei Liu, Xing Deng, Yingtao Jiang Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: quant-ph, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24019v1 Quantum neural networks (QNNs) suffer from severe gate-level redundancy, which hinders their deployment on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. In this work, we propose q-iPrune, a one-shot structured pruning framework grounded in the algebraic structure of $q$-deformed groups and task-conditioned quantum geometry. Unlike prior heuristic or gradient-based pruning methods, q-iPrune formulates redundancy directly at the gate level. Each gate is compared within an algebraically consistent subgroup using a task-conditioned $q$-overlap distance, which measures functional similarity through state overlaps on a task-relevant ensemble. A gate is removed only when its replacement by a subgroup representative provably induces a bounded deviation on all task observables. We establish three rigorous theoretical guarantees. First, we prove completeness of redundancy pruning: no gate that violates the prescribed similarity threshold is removed. Second, we show that the pruned circuit is functionally equivalent up to an explicit, task-conditioned error bound, with a closed-form dependence on the redundancy tolerance and the number of replaced gates. Third, we prove that the pruning procedure is computationally feasible, requiring only polynomial-time comparisons and avoiding exponential enumeration over the Hilbert space. To adapt pruning decisions to hardware imperfections, we introduce a noise-calibrated deformation parameter $λ$ that modulates the $q$-geometry and redundancy tolerance. Experiments on standard quantum machine learning benchmarks demonstrate that q-iPrune achieves substantial gate reduction while maintaining bounded task performance degradation, consistent with our theoretical guarantees. --- ### Structure-Guided Allocation of 2D Gaussians for Image Representation and Compression Authors: Huanxiong Liang, Yunuo Chen, Yicheng Pan, Sixian Wang, Jincheng Dai, Guo Lu, Wenjun Zhang Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24018v1 Recent advances in 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) have demonstrated its potential as a compact image representation with millisecond-level decoding. However, existing 2DGS-based pipelines allocate representation capacity and parameter precision largely oblivious to image structure, limiting their rate-distortion (RD) efficiency at low bitrates. To address this, we propose a structure-guided allocation principle for 2DGS, which explicitly couples image structure with both representation capacity and quantization precision, while preserving native decoding speed. First, we introduce a structure-guided initialization that assigns 2D Gaussians according to spatial structural priors inherent in natural images, yielding a localized and semantically meaningful distribution. Second, during quantization-aware fine-tuning, we propose adaptive bitwidth quantization of covariance parameters, which grants higher precision to small-scale Gaussians in complex regions and lower precision elsewhere, enabling RD-aware optimization, thereby reducing redundancy without degrading edge quality. Third, we impose a geometry-consistent regularization that aligns Gaussian orientations with local gradient directions to better preserve structural details. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach substantially improves both the representational power and the RD performance of 2DGS while maintaining over 1000 FPS decoding. Compared with the baseline GSImage, we reduce BD-rate by 43.44% on Kodak and 29.91% on DIV2K. --- ### FitControler: Toward Fit-Aware Virtual Try-On Authors: Lu Yang, Yicheng Liu, Letian Zhou, Yanan Li, Xiang Bai, Hao Lu Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24016v2 Realistic virtual try-on (VTON) concerns not only faithful rendering of garment details but also coordination of the style. Prior art typically pursues the former, but neglects a key factor that shapes the holistic style -- garment fit. Garment fit delineates how a garment aligns with the body of a wearer and is a fundamental element in fashion design. In this work, we introduce fit-aware VTON and present FitControler, a learnable plug-in that can seamlessly integrate into modern VTON models to enable customized fit control. To achieve this, we highlight two challenges: i) how to delineate layouts of different fits and ii) how to render the garment that matches the layout. FitControler first features a fit-aware layout generator to redraw the body-garment layout conditioned on a set of delicately processed garment-agnostic representations, and a multi-scale fit injector is then used to deliver layout cues to enable layout-driven VTON. In particular, we build a fit-aware VTON dataset termed Fit4Men, including 13,000 body-garment pairs of different fits, covering both tops and bottoms, and featuring varying camera distances and body poses. Two fit consistency metrics are also introduced to assess the fitness of generations. Extensive experiments show that FitControler can work with various VTON models and achieve accurate fit control. Code and data will be released. --- ### On Exact Editing of Flow-Based Diffusion Models Authors: Zixiang Li, Yue Song, Jianing Peng, Ting Liu, Jun Huang, Xiaochao Qu, Luoqi Liu, Wei Wang, Yao Zhao, Yunchao Wei Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24015v2 Recent methods in flow-based diffusion editing have enabled direct transformations between source and target image distribution without explicit inversion. However, the latent trajectories in these methods often exhibit accumulated velocity errors, leading to semantic inconsistency and loss of structural fidelity. We propose Conditioned Velocity Correction (CVC), a principled framework that reformulates flow-based editing as a distribution transformation problem driven by a known source prior. CVC rethinks the role of velocity in inter-distribution transformation by introducing a dual-perspective velocity conversion mechanism. This mechanism explicitly decomposes the latent evolution into two components: a structure-preserving branch that remains consistent with the source trajectory, and a semantically-guided branch that drives a controlled deviation toward the target distribution. The conditional velocity field exhibits an absolute velocity error relative to the true underlying distribution trajectory, which inherently introduces potential instability and trajectory drift in the latent space. To address this quantifiable deviation and maintain fidelity to the true flow, we apply a posterior-consistent update to the resulting conditional velocity field. This update is derived from Empirical Bayes Inference and Tweedie correction, which ensures a mathematically grounded error compensation over time. Our method yields stable and interpretable latent dynamics, achieving faithful reconstruction alongside smooth local semantic conversion. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that CVC consistently achieves superior fidelity, better semantic alignment, and more reliable editing behavior across diverse tasks. --- ### iCLP: Large Language Model Reasoning with Implicit Cognition Latent Planning Authors: Sijia Chen, Di Niu Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24014v1 Large language models (LLMs), when guided by explicit textual plans, can perform reliable step-by-step reasoning during problem-solving. However, generating accurate and effective textual plans remains challenging due to LLM hallucinations and the high diversity of task-specific questions. To address this, we draw inspiration from human Implicit Cognition (IC), the subconscious process by which decisions are guided by compact, generalized patterns learned from past experiences without requiring explicit verbalization. We propose iCLP, a novel framework that enables LLMs to adaptively generate latent plans (LPs), which are compact encodings of effective reasoning instructions. iCLP first distills explicit plans from existing step-by-step reasoning trajectories. It then learns discrete representations of these plans via a vector-quantized autoencoder coupled with a codebook. Finally, by fine-tuning LLMs on paired latent plans and corresponding reasoning steps, the models learn to perform implicit planning during reasoning. Experimental results on mathematical reasoning and code generation tasks demonstrate that, with iCLP, LLMs can plan in latent space while reasoning in language space. This approach yields significant improvements in both accuracy and efficiency and, crucially, demonstrates strong cross-domain generalization while preserving the interpretability of chain-of-thought reasoning. --- ### Bridging the Perception-Cognition Gap:Re-engineering SAM2 with Hilbert-Mamba for Robust VLM-based Medical Diagnosis Authors: Hao Wu, Hui Li, Yiyun Su Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24013v1 Recent studies suggest that Visual Language Models (VLMs) hold great potential for tasks such as automated medical diagnosis. However, processing complex three-dimensional (3D) multimodal medical images poses significant challenges - specifically, the effective integration of complementary information and the occasional oversight of subtle yet critical pathological features. To address these issues, we present a novel two-stage fusion framework termed Hilbert-VLM. This framework leverages the HilbertMed-SAM module for precise lesion segmentation, with the generated multimodal enhanced prompts then guiding the VLM toward accurate disease classification. Our key innovation lies in the systematic redesign of the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) architecture: we incorporate Hilbert space-filling curves into the scanning mechanism of the Mamba State Space Model (SSM) to maximize the preservation of spatial locality in 3D data, a property critical for medical image analysis. We also introduce a novel Hilbert-Mamba Cross-Attention (HMCA) mechanism and a scale-aware decoder to capture fine-grained details. Meanwhile, the prompt enhancement module unifies segmentation masks and their corresponding textual attributes into an information-dense prompt to support VLM inference. Extensive experiments were conducted to validate the effectiveness of the Hilbert-VLM model. On the BraTS2021 segmentation benchmark, it achieves a Dice score of 82.35 percent, with a diagnostic classification accuracy (ACC) of 78.85 percent. These results demonstrate that the proposed model offers substantial potential to improve the accuracy and reliability of medical VLM-based analysis. --- ### SPARK: Search Personalization via Agent-Driven Retrieval and Knowledge-sharing Authors: Gaurab Chhetri, Subasish Das, Tausif Islam Chowdhury Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24008v3 Personalized search demands the ability to model users' evolving, multi-dimensional information needs; a challenge for systems constrained by static profiles or monolithic retrieval pipelines. We present SPARK (Search Personalization via Agent-Driven Retrieval and Knowledge-sharing), a framework in which coordinated persona-based large language model (LLM) agents deliver task-specific retrieval and emergent personalization. SPARK formalizes a persona space defined by role, expertise, task context, and domain, and introduces a Persona Coordinator that dynamically interprets incoming queries to activate the most relevant specialized agents. Each agent executes an independent retrieval-augmented generation process, supported by dedicated long- and short-term memory stores and context-aware reasoning modules. Inter-agent collaboration is facilitated through structured communication protocols, including shared memory repositories, iterative debate, and relay-style knowledge transfer. Drawing on principles from cognitive architectures, multi-agent coordination theory, and information retrieval, SPARK models how emergent personalization properties arise from distributed agent behaviors governed by minimal coordination rules. The framework yields testable predictions regarding coordination efficiency, personalization quality, and cognitive load distribution, while incorporating adaptive learning mechanisms for continuous persona refinement. By integrating fine-grained agent specialization with cooperative retrieval, SPARK provides insights for next-generation search systems capable of capturing the complexity, fluidity, and context sensitivity of human information-seeking behavior. --- ### TESO Tabu Enhanced Simulation Optimization for Noisy Black Box Problems Authors: Bulent Soykan, Sean Mondesire, Ghaith Rabadi Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.NE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24007v1 Simulation optimization (SO) is frequently challenged by noisy evaluations, high computational costs, and complex, multimodal search landscapes. This paper introduces Tabu-Enhanced Simulation Optimization (TESO), a novel metaheuristic framework integrating adaptive search with memory-based strategies. TESO leverages a short-term Tabu List to prevent cycling and encourage diversification, and a long-term Elite Memory to guide intensification by perturbing high-performing solutions. An aspiration criterion allows overriding tabu restrictions for exceptional candidates. This combination facilitates a dynamic balance between exploration and exploitation in stochastic environments. We demonstrate TESO's effectiveness and reliability using an queue optimization problem, showing improved performance compared to benchmarks and validating the contribution of its memory components. Source code and data are available at: https://github.com/bulentsoykan/TESO. --- ### Tracing the Heart's Pathways: ECG Representation Learning from a Cardiac Conduction Perspective Authors: Tan Pan, Yixuan Sun, Chen Jiang, Qiong Gao, Rui Sun, Xingmeng Zhang, Zhenqi Yang, Limei Han, Yixiu Liang, Yuan Cheng, Kaiyu Guo Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24002v1 The multi-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) stands as a cornerstone of cardiac diagnosis. Recent strides in electrocardiogram self-supervised learning (eSSL) have brightened prospects for enhancing representation learning without relying on high-quality annotations. Yet earlier eSSL methods suffer a key limitation: they focus on consistent patterns across leads and beats, overlooking the inherent differences in heartbeats rooted in cardiac conduction processes, while subtle but significant variations carry unique physiological signatures. Moreover, representation learning for ECG analysis should align with ECG diagnostic guidelines, which progress from individual heartbeats to single leads and ultimately to lead combinations. This sequential logic, however, is often neglected when applying pre-trained models to downstream tasks. To address these gaps, we propose CLEAR-HUG, a two-stage framework designed to capture subtle variations in cardiac conduction across leads while adhering to ECG diagnostic guidelines. In the first stage, we introduce an eSSL model termed Conduction-LEAd Reconstructor (CLEAR), which captures both specific variations and general commonalities across heartbeats. Treating each heartbeat as a distinct entity, CLEAR employs a simple yet effective sparse attention mechanism to reconstruct signals without interference from other heartbeats. In the second stage, we implement a Hierarchical lead-Unified Group head (HUG) for disease diagnosis, mirroring clinical workflow. Experimental results across six tasks show a 6.84% improvement, validating the effectiveness of CLEAR-HUG. This highlights its ability to enhance representations of cardiac conduction and align patterns with expert diagnostic guidelines. --- ### WISE: Web Information Satire and Fakeness Evaluation Authors: Gaurab Chhetri, Subasish Das, Tausif Islam Chowdhury Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24000v3 Distinguishing fake or untrue news from satire or humor poses a unique challenge due to their overlapping linguistic features and divergent intent. This study develops WISE (Web Information Satire and Fakeness Evaluation) framework which benchmarks eight lightweight transformer models alongside two baseline models on a balanced dataset of 20,000 samples from Fakeddit, annotated as either fake news or satire. Using stratified 5-fold cross-validation, we evaluate models across comprehensive metrics including accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, ROC-AUC, PR-AUC, MCC, Brier score, and Expected Calibration Error. Our evaluation reveals that MiniLM, a lightweight model, achieves the highest accuracy (87.58%) among all models, while RoBERTa-base achieves the highest ROC-AUC (95.42%) and strong accuracy (87.36%). DistilBERT offers an excellent efficiency-accuracy trade-off with 86.28\% accuracy and 93.90\% ROC-AUC. Statistical tests confirm significant performance differences between models, with paired t-tests and McNemar tests providing rigorous comparisons. Our findings highlight that lightweight models can match or exceed baseline performance, offering actionable insights for deploying misinformation detection systems in real-world, resource-constrained settings. --- ### Improved 3D Gaussian Splatting of Unknown Spacecraft Structure Using Space Environment Illumination Knowledge Authors: Tae Ha Park, Simone D'Amico Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23998v1 This work presents a novel pipeline to recover the 3D structure of an unknown target spacecraft from a sequence of images captured during Rendezvous and Proximity Operations (RPO) in space. The target's geometry and appearance are represented as a 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) model. However, learning 3DGS requires static scenes, an assumption in contrast to dynamic lighting conditions encountered in spaceborne imagery. The trained 3DGS model can also be used for camera pose estimation through photometric optimization. Therefore, in addition to recovering a geometrically accurate 3DGS model, the photometric accuracy of the rendered images is imperative to downstream pose estimation tasks during the RPO process. This work proposes to incorporate the prior knowledge of the Sun's position, estimated and maintained by the servicer spacecraft, into the training pipeline for improved photometric quality of 3DGS rasterization. Experimental studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution, as 3DGS models trained on a sequence of images learn to adapt to rapidly changing illumination conditions in space and reflect global shadowing and self-occlusion. --- ### MSSSeg: Learning Multi-Scale Structural Complexity for Self-Supervised Segmentation Authors: Haotang Li, Zhenyu Qi, Hao Qin, Huanrui Yang, Kebin Peng, Qing Guo, Sen He Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23997v2 Self-supervised semantic segmentation methods often suffer from structural errors, including merging distinct objects or fragmenting coherent regions, because they rely primarily on low-level appearance cues such as color and texture. These cues lack structural discriminability: they carry no information about the structural organization of a region, making it difficult to distinguish boundaries between similar-looking objects or maintain coherence within internally varying regions. Recent approaches attempt to address this by incorporating depth priors, yet remain limited by not explicitly modeling structural complexity that persists even when appearance cues are ambiguous. To bridge this gap, we present MSSSeg, a framework that explicitly learns multi-scale structural complexity from both semantic and depth domains, via three coupled components: (1) a Differentiable Box-Counting (DBC) module that captures and aligns multi-scale structural complexity features with semantic features; (2) a Learnable Structural Augmentation (StructAug) that corrupts pixel-intensity patterns, forcing the network to rely on structural complexity features from DBC; and (3) a Persistent Homology Loss (PHLoss) that directly supervises the structural complexity of predicted segmentations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MSSSeg achieves new state-of-the-art performance on COCO-Stuff-27, Cityscapes, and Potsdam without excessive computational overhead, validating that explicit structural complexity learning is crucial for self-supervised segmentation. --- ### RepetitionCurse: Measuring and Understanding Router Imbalance in Mixture-of-Experts LLMs under DoS Stress Authors: Ruixuan Huang, Qingyue Wang, Hantao Huang, Yudong Gao, Dong Chen, Shuai Wang, Wei Wang Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23995v2 Mixture-of-Experts architectures have become the standard for scaling large language models due to their superior parameter efficiency. To accommodate the growing number of experts in practice, modern inference systems commonly adopt expert parallelism to distribute experts across devices. However, the absence of explicit load balancing constraints during inference allows adversarial inputs to trigger severe routing concentration. We demonstrate that out-of-distribution prompts can manipulate the routing strategy such that all tokens are consistently routed to the same set of top-$k$ experts, which creates computational bottlenecks on certain devices while forcing others to idle. This converts an efficiency mechanism into a denial-of-service attack vector, leading to violations of service-level agreements for time to first token. We propose RepetitionCurse, a low-cost black-box strategy to exploit this vulnerability. By identifying a universal flaw in MoE router behavior, RepetitionCurse constructs adversarial prompts using simple repetitive token patterns in a model-agnostic manner. On widely deployed MoE models like Mixtral-8x7B, our method increases end-to-end inference latency by 3.063x, degrading service availability significantly. --- ### PhyAVBench: A Challenging Audio Physics-Sensitivity Benchmark for Physically Grounded Text-to-Audio-Video Generation Authors: Tianxin Xie, Wentao Lei, Kai Jiang, Guanjie Huang, Pengfei Zhang, Chunhui Zhang, Fengji Ma, Haoyu He, Han Zhang, Jiangshan He, Jinting Wang, Linghan Fang et al. Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23994v5 Text-to-audio-video (T2AV) generation is central to applications such as filmmaking and world modeling. However, current models often fail to produce physically plausible sounds. Previous benchmarks primarily focus on audio-video temporal synchronization, while largely overlooking explicit evaluation of audio-physics grounding, thereby limiting the study of physically plausible audio-visual generation. To address this issue, we present PhyAVBench, the first benchmark that systematically evaluates the audio-physics grounding capabilities of T2AV, image-to-audio-video (I2AV), and video-to-audio (V2A) models. PhyAVBench offers PhyAV-Sound-11K, a new dataset of 25.5 hours of 11,605 audible videos collected from 184 participants to ensure diversity and avoid data leakage. It contains 337 paired-prompt groups with controlled physical variations that drive sound differences, each grounded with an average of 17 videos and spanning 6 audio-physics dimensions and 41 fine-grained test points. Each prompt pair is annotated with the physical factors underlying their acoustic differences. Importantly, PhyAVBench leverages paired text prompts to evaluate this capability. We term this evaluation paradigm the Audio-Physics Sensitivity Test (APST) and introduce a novel metric, the Contrastive Physical Response Score (CPRS), which quantifies the acoustic consistency between generated videos and their real-world counterparts. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 17 state-of-the-art models. Our results reveal that even leading commercial models struggle with fundamental audio-physical phenomena, exposing a critical gap beyond audio-visual synchronization and pointing to future research directions. We hope PhyAVBench will serve as a foundation for advancing physically grounded audio-visual generation. Prompts, ground-truth, and generated video samples are available at https://github.com/imxtx/PhyAVBench. --- ### GCA-ResUNet: Medical Image Segmentation Using Grouped Coordinate Attention Authors: Jun Ding, Shang Gao Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23990v1 Accurate segmentation of heterogeneous anatomical structures is pivotal for computer-aided diagnosis and subsequent clinical decision-making. Although U-Net based convolutional neural networks have achieved remarkable progress, their intrinsic locality and largely homogeneous attention formulations often limit the modeling of long-range contextual dependencies, especially in multi-organ scenarios and low-contrast regions. Transformer-based architectures mitigate this issue by leveraging global self-attention, but they usually require higher computational resources and larger training data, which may impede deployment in resource-constrained clinical environments.In this paper, we propose GCA-ResUNet, an efficient medical image segmentation framework equipped with a lightweight and plug-and-play Grouped Coordinate Attention (GCA) module. The proposed GCA decouples channel-wise context modeling into multiple groups to explicitly account for semantic heterogeneity across channels, and integrates direction-aware coordinate encoding to capture structured spatial dependencies along horizontal and vertical axes. This design enhances global representation capability while preserving the efficiency advantages of CNN backbones. Extensive experiments on two widely used benchmarks, Synapse and ACDC, demonstrate that GCA-ResUNet achieves Dice scores of 86.11% and 92.64%, respectively, outperforming a range of representative CNN and Transformer-based methods, including Swin-UNet and TransUNet. In particular, GCA-ResUNet yields consistent improvements in delineating small anatomical structures with complex boundaries. These results indicate that the proposed approach provides a favorable trade-off between segmentation accuracy and computational efficiency, offering a practical and scalable solution for clinical deployment. --- ### Fantastic Reasoning Behaviors and Where to Find Them: Unsupervised Discovery of the Reasoning Process Authors: Zhenyu Zhang, Shujian Zhang, John Lambert, Wenxuan Zhou, Zhangyang Wang, Mingqing Chen, Andrew Hard, Rajiv Mathews, Lun Wang Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23988v1 Despite the growing reasoning capabilities of recent large language models (LLMs), their internal mechanisms during the reasoning process remain underexplored. Prior approaches often rely on human-defined concepts (e.g., overthinking, reflection) at the word level to analyze reasoning in a supervised manner. However, such methods are limited, as it is infeasible to capture the full spectrum of potential reasoning behaviors, many of which are difficult to define in token space. In this work, we propose an unsupervised framework (namely, RISE: Reasoning behavior Interpretability via Sparse auto-Encoder) for discovering reasoning vectors, which we define as directions in the activation space that encode distinct reasoning behaviors. By segmenting chain-of-thought traces into sentence-level 'steps' and training sparse auto-encoders (SAEs) on step-level activations, we uncover disentangled features corresponding to interpretable behaviors such as reflection and backtracking. Visualization and clustering analyses show that these behaviors occupy separable regions in the decoder column space. Moreover, targeted interventions on SAE-derived vectors can controllably amplify or suppress specific reasoning behaviors, altering inference trajectories without retraining. Beyond behavior-specific disentanglement, SAEs capture structural properties such as response length, revealing clusters of long versus short reasoning traces. More interestingly, SAEs enable the discovery of novel behaviors beyond human supervision. We demonstrate the ability to control response confidence by identifying confidence-related vectors in the SAE decoder space. These findings underscore the potential of unsupervised latent discovery for both interpreting and controllably steering reasoning in LLMs. --- ### MeLeMaD: Adaptive Malware Detection via Chunk-wise Feature Selection and Meta-Learning Authors: Ajvad Haneef K, Karan Kuwar Singh, Madhu Kumar S D Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23987v1 Confronting the substantial challenges of malware detection in cybersecurity necessitates solutions that are both robust and adaptable to the ever-evolving threat environment. The paper introduces Meta Learning Malware Detection (MeLeMaD), a novel framework leveraging the adaptability and generalization capabilities of Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) for malware detection. MeLeMaD incorporates a novel feature selection technique, Chunk-wise Feature Selection based on Gradient Boosting (CFSGB), tailored for handling large-scale, high-dimensional malware datasets, significantly enhancing the detection efficiency. Two benchmark malware datasets (CIC-AndMal2020 and BODMAS) and a custom dataset (EMBOD) were used for rigorously validating the MeLeMaD, achieving a remarkable performance in terms of key evaluation measures, including accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, MCC, and AUC. With accuracies of 98.04\% on CIC-AndMal2020 and 99.97\% on BODMAS, MeLeMaD outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches. The custom dataset, EMBOD, also achieves a commendable accuracy of 97.85\%. The results underscore the MeLeMaD's potential to address the challenges of robustness, adaptability, and large-scale, high-dimensional datasets in malware detection, paving the way for more effective and efficient cybersecurity solutions. --- ### Anomaly detection in satellite imagery through temporal inpainting Authors: Bertrand Rouet-Leduc, Claudia Hulbert Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CV, physics.geo-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23986v1 Detecting surface changes from satellite imagery is critical for rapid disaster response and environmental monitoring, yet remains challenging due to the complex interplay between atmospheric noise, seasonal variations, and sensor artifacts. Here we show that deep learning can leverage the temporal redundancy of satellite time series to detect anomalies at unprecedented sensitivity, by learning to predict what the surface should look like in the absence of change. We train an inpainting model built upon the SATLAS foundation model to reconstruct the last frame of a Sentinel-2 time series from preceding acquisitions, using globally distributed training data spanning diverse climate zones and land cover types. When applied to regions affected by sudden surface changes, the discrepancy between prediction and observation reveals anomalies that traditional change detection methods miss. We validate our approach on earthquake-triggered surface ruptures from the 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquake sequence, demonstrating detection of a rift feature in Tepehan with higher sensitivity and specificity than temporal median or Reed-Xiaoli anomaly detectors. Our method reaches detection thresholds approximately three times lower than baseline approaches, providing a path towards automated, global-scale monitoring of surface changes from freely available multi-spectral satellite data. --- ### DriveExplorer: Images-Only Decoupled 4D Reconstruction with Progressive Restoration for Driving View Extrapolation Authors: Yuang Jia, Jinlong Wang, Jiayi Zhao, Chunlam Li, Shunzhou Wang, Wei Gao Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23983v1 This paper presents an effective solution for view extrapolation in autonomous driving scenarios. Recent approaches focus on generating shifted novel view images from given viewpoints using diffusion models. However, these methods heavily rely on priors such as LiDAR point clouds, 3D bounding boxes, and lane annotations, which demand expensive sensors or labor-intensive labeling, limiting applicability in real-world deployment. In this work, with only images and optional camera poses, we first estimate a global static point cloud and per-frame dynamic point clouds, fusing them into a unified representation. We then employ a deformable 4D Gaussian framework to reconstruct the scene. The initially trained 4D Gaussian model renders degraded and pseudo-images to train a video diffusion model. Subsequently, progressively shifted Gaussian renderings are iteratively refined by the diffusion model,and the enhanced results are incorporated back as training data for 4DGS. This process continues until extrapolation reaches the target viewpoints. Compared with baselines, our method produces higher-quality images at novel extrapolated viewpoints. --- ### Coding With AI: From a Reflection on Industrial Practices to Future Computer Science and Software Engineering Education Authors: Hung-Fu Chang, MohammadShokrolah Shirazi, Lizhou Cao, Supannika Koolmanojwong Mobasser Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23982v1 Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have introduced new paradigms in software development, including vibe coding, AI-assisted coding, and agentic coding, fundamentally reshaping how software is designed, implemented, and maintained. Prior research has primarily examined AI-based coding at the individual level or in educational settings, leaving industrial practitioners' perspectives underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by investigating how LLM coding tools are used in professional practice, the associated concerns and risks, and the resulting transformations in development workflows, with particular attention to implications for computing education. We conducted a qualitative analysis of 57 curated YouTube videos published between late 2024 and 2025, capturing reflections and experiences shared by practitioners. Following a filtering and quality assessment process, the selected sources were analyzed to compare LLM-based and traditional programming, identify emerging risks, and characterize evolving workflows. Our findings reveal definitions of AI-based coding practices, notable productivity gains, and lowered barriers to entry. Practitioners also report a shift in development bottlenecks toward code review and concerns regarding code quality, maintainability, security vulnerabilities, ethical issues, erosion of foundational problem-solving skills, and insufficient preparation of entry-level engineers. Building on these insights, we discuss implications for computer science and software engineering education and argue for curricular shifts toward problem-solving, architectural thinking, code review, and early project-based learning that integrates LLM tools. This study offers an industry-grounded perspective on AI-based coding and provides guidance for aligning educational practices with rapidly evolving professional realities. --- ### Information-Theoretic Quality Metric of Low-Dimensional Embeddings Authors: Sebastián Gutiérrez-Bernal, Hector Medel Cobaxin, Abiel Galindo González Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23981v2 In this work we study the quality of low-dimensional embeddings from an explicitly information-theoretic perspective. We begin by noting that classical evaluation metrics such as stress, rank-based neighborhood criteria, or Local Procrustes quantify distortions in distances or in local geometries, but do not directly assess how much information is preserved when projecting high-dimensional data onto a lower-dimensional space. To address this limitation, we introduce the Entropy Rank Preservation Measure (ERPM), a local metric based on the Shannon entropy of the singular-value spectrum of neighborhood matrices and on the stable rank, which quantifies changes in uncertainty between the original representation and its reduced projection, providing neighborhood-level indicators and a global summary statistic. To validate the results of the metric, we compare its outcomes with the Mean Relative Rank Error (MRRE), which is distance-based, and with Local Procrustes, which is based on geometric properties, using a financial time series and a manifold commonly studied in the literature. We observe that distance-based criteria exhibit very low correlation with geometric and spectral measures, while ERPM and Local Procrustes show strong average correlation but display significant discrepancies in local regimes, leading to the conclusion that ERPM complements existing metrics by identifying neighborhoods with severe information loss, thereby enabling a more comprehensive assessment of embeddings, particularly in information-sensitive applications such as the construction of early-warning indicators. --- ### Fundamental limits for weighted empirical approximations of tilted distributions Authors: Sarvesh Ravichandran Iyer, Himadri Mandal, Dhruman Gupta, Rushil Gupta, Agniv Bandhyopadhyay, Achal Bassamboo, Varun Gupta, Sandeep Juneja Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: math.ST, cs.LG, math.PR, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23979v1 Consider the task of generating samples from a tilted distribution of a random vector whose underlying distribution is unknown, but samples from it are available. This finds applications in fields such as finance and climate science, and in rare event simulation. In this article, we discuss the asymptotic efficiency of a self-normalized importance sampler of the tilted distribution. We provide a sharp characterization of its accuracy, given the number of samples and the degree of tilt. Our findings reveal a surprising dichotomy: while the number of samples needed to accurately tilt a bounded random vector increases polynomially in the tilt amount, it increases at a super polynomial rate for unbounded distributions. --- ### Assured autonomy: How operations research powers and orchestrates generative AI systems Authors: Tinglong Dai, David Simchi-Levi, Michelle Xiao Wu, Yao Xie Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.LG, math.OC, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23978v2 Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is shifting from conversational assistants toward agentic systems -- autonomous decision-making systems that sense, decide, and act within operational workflows. This shift creates an autonomy paradox: as GenAI systems are granted greater operational autonomy, they should, by design, embody more formal structure, more explicit constraints, and stronger tail-risk discipline. We argue that stochastic generative models can be fragile in operational domains unless paired with mechanisms that provide verifiable feasibility, robustness to distribution shift, and stress testing under high-consequence scenarios. To address this challenge, we develop a conceptual framework for assured autonomy grounded in operations research (OR), built on two complementary approaches. First, flow-based generative models frame generation as deterministic transport characterized by an ordinary differential equation, enabling auditability, constraint-aware generation, and connections to optimal transport, robust optimization, and sequential decision control. Second, operational safety is formulated through an adversarial robustness lens: decision rules are evaluated against worst-case perturbations within uncertainty or ambiguity sets, making unmodeled risks part of the design. This framework clarifies how increasing autonomy shifts OR's role from solver to guardrail to system architect, with responsibility for control logic, incentive protocols, monitoring regimes, and safety boundaries. These elements define a research agenda for assured autonomy in safety-critical, reliability-sensitive operational domains. --- ### Causify DataFlow: A Framework For High-performance Machine Learning Stream Computing Authors: Giacinto Paolo Saggese, Paul Smith Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23977v1 We present DataFlow, a computational framework for building, testing, and deploying high-performance machine learning systems on unbounded time-series data. Traditional data science workflows assume finite datasets and require substantial reimplementation when moving from batch prototypes to streaming production systems. This gap introduces causality violations, batch boundary artifacts, and poor reproducibility of real-time failures. DataFlow resolves these issues through a unified execution model based on directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) with point-in-time idempotency: outputs at any time t depend only on a fixed-length context window preceding t. This guarantee ensures that models developed in batch mode execute identically in streaming production without code changes. The framework enforces strict causality by automatically tracking knowledge time across all transformations, eliminating future-peeking bugs. DataFlow supports flexible tiling across temporal and feature dimensions, allowing the same model to operate at different frequencies and memory profiles via configuration alone. It integrates natively with the Python data science stack and provides fit/predict semantics for online learning, caching and incremental computation, and automatic parallelization through DAG-based scheduling. We demonstrate its effectiveness across domains including financial trading, IoT, fraud detection, and real-time analytics. --- ### Exploring the Potential of Spiking Neural Networks in UWB Channel Estimation Authors: Youdong Zhang, Xu He, Xiaolin Meng Published: 2025-12-30 Categories: cs.ET, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23975v1 Although existing deep learning-based Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) channel estimation methods achieve high accuracy, their computational intensity clashes sharply with the resource constraints of low-cost edge devices. Motivated by this, this letter explores the potential of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) for this task and develops a fully unsupervised SNN solution. To enable a comprehensive performance analysis, we devise an extensive set of comparative strategies and evaluate them on a compelling public benchmark. Experimental results show that our unsupervised approach still attains 80% test accuracy, on par with several supervised deep learning-based strategies. Moreover, compared with complex deep learning methods, our SNN implementation is inherently suited to neuromorphic deployment and offers a drastic reduction in model complexity, bringing significant advantages for future neuromorphic practice. ---