# Research Papers — 2026-01 · bundle page 100 of 189

> Full-text markdown of papers #4951–5000 of 9403 published in 2026-01, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 9403-paper 2026-01 archive (50 papers per file).

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### Cross-Domain Object Detection Using Unsupervised Image Translation

Authors: Vinicius F. Arruda, Rodrigo F. Berriel, Thiago M. Paixão, Claudine Badue, Alberto F. De Souza, Nicu Sebe, Thiago Oliveira-Santos
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11779v1

Unsupervised domain adaptation for object detection addresses the adaption of detectors trained in a source domain to work accurately in an unseen target domain. Recently, methods approaching the alignment of the intermediate features proven to be promising, achieving state-of-the-art results. However, these methods are laborious to implement and hard to interpret. Although promising, there is still room for improvements to close the performance gap toward the upper-bound (when training with the target data). In this work, we propose a method to generate an artificial dataset in the target domain to train an object detector. We employed two unsupervised image translators (CycleGAN and an AdaIN-based model) using only annotated data from the source domain and non-annotated data from the target domain. Our key contributions are the proposal of a less complex yet more effective method that also has an improved interpretability. Results on real-world scenarios for autonomous driving show significant improvements, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in most cases, further closing the gap toward the upper-bound.

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### Translation as a Scalable Proxy for Multilingual Evaluation

Authors: Sheriff Issaka, Erick Rosas Gonzalez, Lieqi Liu, Evans Kofi Agyei, Lucas Bandarkar, Nanyun Peng, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Francisco Guzmán, Saadia Gabriel
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11778v1

The rapid proliferation of LLMs has created a critical evaluation paradox: while LLMs claim multilingual proficiency, comprehensive non-machine-translated benchmarks exist for fewer than 30 languages, leaving >98% of the world's 7,000 languages in an empirical void. Traditional benchmark construction faces scaling challenges such as cost, scarcity of domain experts, and data contamination. We evaluate the validity of a simpler alternative: can translation quality alone indicate a model's broader multilingual capabilities? Through systematic evaluation of 14 models (1B-72B parameters) across 9 diverse benchmarks and 7 translation metrics, we find that translation performance is a good indicator of downstream task success (e.g., Phi-4, median Pearson r: MetricX = 0.89, xCOMET = 0.91, SSA-COMET = 0.87). These results suggest that the representational abilities supporting faithful translation overlap with those required for multilingual understanding. Translation quality, thus emerges as a strong, inexpensive first-pass proxy of multilingual performance, enabling a translation-first screening with targeted follow-up for specific tasks.

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### Cleansing the Artificial Mind: A Self-Reflective Detoxification Framework for Large Language Models

Authors: Kaituo Zhang, Zhimeng Jiang, Na Zou
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11776v1

Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revealed remarkable generative capabilities and emerging self-regulatory mechanisms, including self-correction and self-rewarding. However, current detoxification techniques rarely exploit these built-in abilities; instead, they rely on external modules, labor-intensive data annotation, or human intervention --factors that hinder scalability and consistency. In this paper, we introduce a fully self-reflective detoxification framework that harnesses the inherent capacities of LLMs to detect, correct toxic content, and refine LLMs without external modules and data annotation. Specifically, we propose a Toxic Signal Detector --an internal self-identification mechanism, coupled with a systematic intervention process to transform toxic text into its non-toxic counterpart. This iterative procedure yields a contrastive detoxification dataset used to fine-tune the model, enhancing its ability for safe and coherent text generation. Experiments on benchmark datasets such as DetoxLLM and ParaDetox show that our method achieves better detoxification performance than state-of-the-art methods while preserving semantic fidelity. By obviating the need for human intervention or external components, this paper reveals the intrinsic self-detoxification ability of LLMs, offering a consistent and effective approach for mitigating harmful content generation. Ultimately, our findings underscore the potential for truly self-regulated language models, paving the way for more responsible and ethically guided text generation systems.

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### Quantum Kernel Machine Learning for Autonomous Materials Science

Authors: Felix Adams, Daiwei Zhu, David W. Steuerman, A. Gilad Kusne, Ichiro Takeuchi
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cond-mat.mtrl-sci, cs.LG, quant-ph
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11775v1

Autonomous materials science, where active learning is used to navigate large compositional phase space, has emerged as a powerful vehicle to rapidly explore new materials. A crucial aspect of autonomous materials science is exploring new materials using as little data as possible. Gaussian process-based active learning allows effective charting of multi-dimensional parameter space with a limited number of training data, and thus is a common algorithmic choice for autonomous materials science. An integral part of the autonomous workflow is the application of kernel functions for quantifying similarities among measured data points. A recent theoretical breakthrough has shown that quantum kernel models can achieve similar performance with less training data than classical models. This signals the possible advantage of applying quantum kernel machine learning to autonomous materials discovery. In this work, we compare quantum and classical kernels for their utility in sequential phase space navigation for autonomous materials science. Specifically, we compute a quantum kernel and several classical kernels for x-ray diffraction patterns taken from an Fe-Ga-Pd ternary composition spread library. We conduct our study on both IonQ's Aria trapped ion quantum computer hardware and the corresponding classical noisy simulator. We experimentally verify that a quantum kernel model can outperform some classical kernel models. The results highlight the potential of quantum kernel machine learning methods for accelerating materials discovery and suggest complex x-ray diffraction data is a candidate for robust quantum kernel model advantage.

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### studentSplat: Your Student Model Learns Single-view 3D Gaussian Splatting

Authors: Yimu Pan, Hongda Mao, Qingshuang Chen, Yelin Kim
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11772v1

Recent advance in feed-forward 3D Gaussian splatting has enable remarkable multi-view 3D scene reconstruction or single-view 3D object reconstruction but single-view 3D scene reconstruction remain under-explored due to inherited ambiguity in single-view. We present \textbf{studentSplat}, a single-view 3D Gaussian splatting method for scene reconstruction. To overcome the scale ambiguity and extrapolation problems inherent in novel-view supervision from a single input, we introduce two techniques: 1) a teacher-student architecture where a multi-view teacher model provides geometric supervision to the single-view student during training, addressing scale ambiguity and encourage geometric validity; and 2) an extrapolation network that completes missing scene context, enabling high-quality extrapolation. Extensive experiments show studentSplat achieves state-of-the-art single-view novel-view reconstruction quality and comparable performance to multi-view methods at the scene level. Furthermore, studentSplat demonstrates competitive performance as a self-supervised single-view depth estimation method, highlighting its potential for general single-view 3D understanding tasks.

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### From Pixels to Purchase: Building and Evaluating a Taxonomy-Decoupled Visual Search Engine for Home Goods E-commerce

Authors: Cheng Lyu, Jingyue Zhang, Ryan Maunu, Mengwei Li, Vinny DeGenova, Yuanli Pei
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11769v1

Visual search is critical for e-commerce, especially in style-driven domains where user intent is subjective and open-ended. Existing industrial systems typically couple object detection with taxonomy-based classification and rely on catalog data for evaluation, which is prone to noise that limits robustness and scalability. We propose a taxonomy-decoupled architecture that uses classification-free region proposals and unified embeddings for similarity retrieval, enabling a more flexible and generalizable visual search. To overcome the evaluation bottleneck, we propose an LLM-as-a-Judge framework that assesses nuanced visual similarity and category relevance for query-result pairs in a zero-shot manner, removing dependence on human annotations or noise-prone catalog data. Deployed at scale on a global home goods platform, our system improves retrieval quality and yields a measurable uplift in customer engagement, while our offline evaluation metrics strongly correlate with real-world outcomes.

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### Lightweight Self-Supervised Detection of Fundamental Frequency and Accurate Probability of Voicing in Monophonic Music

Authors: Venkat Suprabath Bitra, Homayoon Beigi
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: eess.AS, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.SD, eess.SP
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11768v1

Reliable fundamental frequency (F 0) and voicing estimation is essential for neural synthesis, yet many pitch extractors depend on large labeled corpora and degrade under realistic recording artifacts. We propose a lightweight, fully self-supervised framework for joint F 0 estimation and voicing inference, designed for rapid single-instrument training from limited audio. Using transposition-equivariant learning on CQT features, we introduce an EM-style iterative reweighting scheme that uses Shift Cross-Entropy (SCE) consistency as a reliability signal to suppress uninformative noisy/unvoiced frames. The resulting weights provide confidence scores that enable pseudo-labeling for a separate lightweight voicing classifier without manual annotations. Trained on MedleyDB and evaluated on MDB-stem-synth ground truth, our method achieves competitive cross-corpus performance (RPA 95.84, RCA 96.24) and demonstrates cross-instrument generalization.

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### Industry-Aligned Granular Topic Modeling

Authors: Sae Young Moon, Myeongjun Erik Jang, Haoyan Luo, Chunyang Xiao, Antonios Georgiadis, Fran Silavong
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11762v1

Topic modeling has extensive applications in text mining and data analysis across various industrial sectors. Although the concept of granularity holds significant value for business applications by providing deeper insights, the capability of topic modeling methods to produce granular topics has not been thoroughly explored. In this context, this paper introduces a framework called TIDE, which primarily provides a novel granular topic modeling method based on large language models (LLMs) as a core feature, along with other useful functionalities for business applications, such as summarizing long documents, topic parenting, and distillation. Through extensive experiments on a variety of public and real-world business datasets, we demonstrate that TIDE's topic modeling approach outperforms modern topic modeling methods, and our auxiliary components provide valuable support for dealing with industrial business scenarios. The TIDE framework is currently undergoing the process of being open sourced.

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### Early Linguistic Pattern of Anxiety from Social Media Using Interpretable Linguistic Features: A Multi-Faceted Validation Study with Author-Disjoint Evaluation

Authors: Arnab Das Utsa
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11758v1

Anxiety affects hundreds of millions of individuals globally, yet large-scale screening remains limited. Social media language provides an opportunity for scalable detection, but current models often lack interpretability, keyword-robustness validation, and rigorous user-level data integrity. This work presents a transparent approach to social media-based anxiety detection through linguistically interpretable feature-grounded modeling and cross-domain validation. Using a substantial dataset of Reddit posts, we trained a logistic regression classifier on carefully curated subreddits for training, validation, and test splits. Comprehensive evaluation included feature ablation, keyword masking experiments, and varying-density difference analyses comparing anxious and control groups, along with external validation using clinically interviewed participants with diagnosed anxiety disorders. The model achieved strong performance while maintaining high accuracy even after sentiment removal or keyword masking. Early detection using minimal post history significantly outperformed random classification, and cross-domain analysis demonstrated strong consistency with clinical interview data. Results indicate that transparent linguistic features can support reliable, generalizable, and keyword-robust anxiety detection. The proposed framework provides a reproducible baseline for interpretable mental health screening across diverse online contexts.

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### PRISM: Learning Design Knowledge from Data for Stylistic Design Improvement

Authors: Huaxiaoyue Wang, Sunav Choudhary, Franck Dernoncourt, Yu Shen, Stefano Petrangeli
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11747v1

Graphic design often involves exploring different stylistic directions, which can be time-consuming for non-experts. We address this problem of stylistically improving designs based on natural language instructions. While VLMs have shown initial success in graphic design, their pretrained knowledge on styles is often too general and misaligned with specific domain data. For example, VLMs may associate minimalism with abstract designs, whereas designers emphasize shape and color choices. Our key insight is to leverage design data -- a collection of real-world designs that implicitly capture designer's principles -- to learn design knowledge and guide stylistic improvement. We propose PRISM (PRior-Informed Stylistic Modification) that constructs and applies a design knowledge base through three stages: (1) clustering high-variance designs to capture diversity within a style, (2) summarizing each cluster into actionable design knowledge, and (3) retrieving relevant knowledge during inference to enable style-aware improvement. Experiments on the Crello dataset show that PRISM achieves the highest average rank of 1.49 (closer to 1 is better) over baselines in style alignment. User studies further validate these results, showing that PRISM is consistently preferred by designers.

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### LIME-LLM: Probing Models with Fluent Counterfactuals, Not Broken Text

Authors: George Mihaila, Suleyman Olcay Polat, Poli Nemkova, Himanshu Sharma, Namratha V. Urs, Mark V. Albert
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11746v1

Local explanation methods such as LIME (Ribeiro et al., 2016) remain fundamental to trustworthy AI, yet their application to NLP is limited by a reliance on random token masking. These heuristic perturbations frequently generate semantically invalid, out-of-distribution inputs that weaken the fidelity of local surrogate models. While recent generative approaches such as LLiMe (Angiulli et al., 2025b) attempt to mitigate this by employing Large Language Models for neighborhood generation, they rely on unconstrained paraphrasing that introduces confounding variables, making it difficult to isolate specific feature contributions. We introduce LIME-LLM, a framework that replaces random noise with hypothesis-driven, controlled perturbations. By enforcing a strict "Single Mask-Single Sample" protocol and employing distinct neutral infill and boundary infill strategies, LIME-LLM constructs fluent, on-manifold neighborhoods that rigorously isolate feature effects. We evaluate our method against established baselines (LIME, SHAP, Integrated Gradients) and the generative LLiMe baseline across three diverse benchmarks: CoLA, SST-2, and HateXplain using human-annotated rationales as ground truth. Empirical results demonstrate that LIME-LLM establishes a new benchmark for black-box NLP explainability, achieving significant improvements in local explanation fidelity compared to both traditional perturbation-based methods and recent generative alternatives.

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### On Nonasymptotic Confidence Intervals for Treatment Effects in Randomized Experiments

Authors: Ricardo J. Sandoval, Sivaraman Balakrishnan, Avi Feller, Michael I. Jordan, Ian Waudby-Smith
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: stat.ME, math.ST, stat.AP, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11744v2

We study nonasymptotic (finite-sample) confidence intervals for treatment effects in randomized experiments. In the existing literature, the effective sample sizes of nonasymptotic confidence intervals tend to be looser than the corresponding central-limit-theorem-based confidence intervals by a factor depending on the square root of the propensity score. We show that this performance gap can be closed, designing nonasymptotic confidence intervals that have the same effective sample size as their asymptotic counterparts. Our approach involves systematic exploitation of negative dependence or variance adaptivity (or both). We also show that the nonasymptotic rates that we achieve are unimprovable in an information-theoretic sense.

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### Bridging Human Interpretation and Machine Representation: A Landscape of Qualitative Data Analysis in the LLM Era

Authors: Xinyu Pi, Qisen Yang, Chuong Nguyen, Hua Shen
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11739v1

LLMs are increasingly used to support qualitative research, yet existing systems produce outputs that vary widely--from trace-faithful summaries to theory-mediated explanations and system models. To make these differences explicit, we introduce a 4$\times$4 landscape crossing four levels of meaning-making (descriptive, categorical, interpretive, theoretical) with four levels of modeling (static structure, stages/timelines, causal pathways, feedback dynamics). Applying the landscape to prior LLM-based automation highlights a strong skew toward low-level meaning and low-commitment representations, with few reliable attempts at interpretive/theoretical inference or dynamical modeling. Based on the revealed gap, we outline an agenda for applying and building LLM-systems that make their interpretive and modeling commitments explicit, selectable, and governable.

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### SpaRRTa: A Synthetic Benchmark for Evaluating Spatial Intelligence in Visual Foundation Models

Authors: Turhan Can Kargin, Wojciech Jasiński, Adam Pardyl, Bartosz Zieliński, Marcin Przewięźlikowski
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11729v3

Visual Foundation Models (VFMs), such as DINO and CLIP, excel in semantic understanding of images but exhibit limited spatial reasoning capabilities, which limits their applicability to embodied systems. As a result, recent work incorporates some 3D tasks (such as depth estimation) into VFM training. However, VFM performance remains inconsistent across other spatial tasks, raising the question of whether these models truly have spatial awareness or overfit to specific 3D objectives. To address this question, we introduce the Spatial Relation Recognition Task (SpaRRTa) benchmark, which evaluates the ability of VFMs to identify relative positions of objects in the image. Unlike traditional 3D objectives that focus on precise metric prediction (e.g., surface normal estimation), SpaRRTa probes a fundamental capability underpinning more advanced forms of human-like spatial understanding. SpaRRTa generates an arbitrary number of photorealistic images with diverse scenes and fully controllable object arrangements, along with freely accessible spatial annotations. Evaluating a range of state-of-the-art VFMs, we reveal significant disparities between their spatial reasoning abilities. Through our analysis, we provide insights into the mechanisms that support or hinder spatial awareness in modern VFMs. We hope that SpaRRTa will serve as a useful tool for guiding the development of future spatially aware visual models.

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### SemAlign: Language Guided Semi-supervised Domain Generalization

Authors: Muditha Fernando, Kajhanan Kailainathan, Krishnakanth Nagaratnam, Isuranga Udaravi Bandara Senavirathne, Ranga Rodrigo
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11724v1

Semi-supervised Domain Generalization (SSDG) addresses the challenge of generalizing to unseen target domains with limited labeled data. Existing SSDG methods highlight the importance of achieving high pseudo-labeling (PL) accuracy and preventing model overfitting as the main challenges in SSDG. In this light, we show that the SSDG literature's excessive focus on PL accuracy, without consideration for maximum data utilization during training, limits potential performance improvements. We propose a novel approach to the SSDG problem by aligning the intermediate features of our model with the semantically rich and generalized feature space of a Vision Language Model (VLM) in a way that promotes domain-invariance. The above approach is enhanced with effective image-level augmentation and output-level regularization strategies to improve data utilization and minimize overfitting. Extensive experimentation across four benchmarks against existing SSDG baselines suggests that our method achieves SOTA results both qualitatively and quantitatively. The code will be made publicly available.

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### A Proof of Concept for a Digital Twin of an Ultrasonic Fermentation System

Authors: Francesco Saverio Sconocchia Pisoni, Andrea Vitaletti, Davide Appolloni, Federico Ortenzi, Blasco Morozzo della Rocca, Mariano José Guillén, Alessandro Contaldo
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.ET, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11723v1

This paper presents the design and implementation of a proof of concept digital twin for an innovative ultrasonic-enhanced beer-fermentation system, developed to enable intelligent monitoring, prediction, and actuation in yeast-growth environments. A traditional fermentation tank is equipped with a piezoelectric transducer able to irradiate the tank with ultrasonic waves, providing an external abiotic stimulus to enhance the growth of yeast and accelerate the fermentation process. At its core, the digital twin incorporates a predictive model that estimates yeast's culture density over time based on the surrounding environmental conditions. To this end, we implement, tailor and extend the model proposed in Palacios et al., allowing us to effectively handle the limited number of available training samples by using temperature, ultrasonic frequency, and duty cycle as inputs. The results obtained along with the assessment of model performance demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.

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### RAC: Retrieval-Augmented Clarification for Faithful Conversational Search

Authors: Ahmed Rayane Kebir, Vincent Guigue, Lynda Said Lhadj, Laure Soulier
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.CL, cs.IR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11722v1

Clarification questions help conversational search systems resolve ambiguous or underspecified user queries. While prior work has focused on fluency and alignment with user intent, especially through facet extraction, much less attention has been paid to grounding clarifications in the underlying corpus. Without such grounding, systems risk asking questions that cannot be answered from the available documents. We introduce RAC (Retrieval-Augmented Clarification), a framework for generating corpus-faithful clarification questions. After comparing several indexing strategies for retrieval, we fine-tune a large language model to make optimal use of research context and to encourage the generation of evidence-based question. We then apply contrastive preference optimization to favor questions supported by retrieved passages over ungrounded alternatives. Evaluated on four benchmarks, RAC demonstrate significant improvements over baselines. In addition to LLM-as-Judge assessments, we introduce novel metrics derived from NLI and data-to-text to assess how well questions are anchored in the context, and we demonstrate that our approach consistently enhances faithfulness.

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### jBOT: Semantic Jet Representation Clustering Emerges from Self-Distillation

Authors: Ho Fung Tsoi, Dylan Rankin
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.LG, hep-ex
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11719v4

Self-supervised learning, in the context of foundation model training, is a powerful pre-training method for learning feature representations without labels, which often capture generic underlying semantics from the data and can later be fine-tuned for downstream tasks. In this work, we introduce jBOT, a pre-training method based on self-distillation for jet data from the CERN Large Hadron Collider, which combines local particle-level distillation with global jet-level distillation to learn jet representations that support downstream tasks such as anomaly detection and classification. We observe that pre-training on unlabeled jets leads to emergent semantic class clustering in the representation space. The clustering in the frozen embedding, when pre-trained on background jets only, enables anomaly detection via simple distance-based metrics, and the learned embedding can be fine-tuned for classification with improved performance compared to supervised models trained from scratch.

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### AllShowers: One model for all calorimeter showers

Authors: Thorsten Buss, Henry Day-Hall, Frank Gaede, Gregor Kasieczka, Katja Krüger
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: physics.ins-det, cs.LG, hep-ex, hep-ph
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11716v2

Accurate and efficient detector simulation is essential for modern collider experiments. To reduce the high computational cost, various fast machine learning surrogate models have been proposed. Traditional surrogate models for calorimeter shower modeling train separate networks for each particle species, limiting scalability and reuse. We introduce AllShowers, a unified generative model that simulates calorimeter showers across multiple particle types using a single generative model. AllShowers is a continuous normalizing flow model with a Transformer architecture, enabling it to generate complex spatial and energy correlations in variable-length point cloud representations of showers. Trained on a diverse dataset of simulated showers in the highly granular ILD detector, the model demonstrates the ability to generate realistic showers for electrons, photons, and charged and neutral hadrons across a wide range of incident energies and angles without retraining. In addition to unifying shower generation for multiple particle types, AllShowers surpasses the fidelity of previous single-particle-type models for hadronic showers. Key innovations include the use of a layer embedding, allowing the model to learn all relevant calorimeter layer properties; a custom attention masking scheme to reduce computational demands and introduce a helpful inductive bias; and a shower- and layer-wise optimal transport mapping to improve training convergence and sample quality. AllShowers marks a significant step towards a universal model for calorimeter shower simulations in collider experiments.

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### Inter-Cell Interference Rejection Based on Ultrawideband Walsh-Domain Wireless Autoencoding

Authors: Rodney Martinez Alonso, Cel Thys, Cedric Dehos, Yuneisy Esthela Garcia Guzman, Sofie Pollin
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: eess.SP, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.NI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11713v1

This paper proposes a novel technique for rejecting partial-in-band inter-cell interference (ICI) in ultrawideband communication systems. We present the design of an end-to-end wireless autoencoder architecture that jointly optimizes the transmitter and receiver encoding/decoding in the Walsh domain to mitigate interference from coexisting narrower-band 5G base stations. By exploiting the orthogonality and self-inverse properties of Walsh functions, the system distributes and learns to encode bit-words across parallel Walsh branches. Through analytical modeling and simulation, we characterize how 5G CPOFDM interference maps into the Walsh domain and identify optimal ratios of transmission frequencies and sampling rate where the end-to-end autoencoder achieves the highest rejection. Experimental results show that the proposed autoencoder achieves up to 12 dB of ICI rejection while maintaining a low block error rate (BLER) for the same baseline channel noise, i.e., baseline Signal-to-Noise-Ratio (SNR) without the interference.

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### PASTA: A Scalable Framework for Multi-Policy AI Compliance Evaluation

Authors: Yu Yang, Ig-Jae Kim, Dongwook Yoon
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11702v3

AI compliance is becoming increasingly critical as AI systems grow more powerful and pervasive. Yet the rapid expansion of AI policies creates substantial burdens for resource-constrained practitioners lacking policy expertise. Existing approaches typically address one policy at a time, making multi-policy compliance costly. We present PASTA, a scalable compliance tool integrating four innovations: (1) a comprehensive model-card format supporting descriptive inputs across development stages; (2) a policy normalization scheme; (3) an efficient LLM-powered pairwise evaluation engine with cost-saving strategies; and (4) an interface delivering interpretable evaluations via compliance heatmaps and actionable recommendations. Expert evaluation shows PASTA's judgments closely align with human experts ($ρ\geq .626$). The system evaluates five major policies in under two minutes at approximately \$3. A user study (N = 12) confirms practitioners found outputs easy-to-understand and actionable, introducing a novel framework for scalable automated AI governance.

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### Stability and Accuracy Trade-offs in Statistical Estimation

Authors: Abhinav Chakraborty, Yuetian Luo, Rina Foygel Barber
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: math.ST, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11701v2

Algorithmic stability is a central concept in statistics and learning theory that measures how sensitive an algorithm's output is to small changes in the training data. Stability plays a crucial role in understanding generalization, robustness, and replicability, and a variety of stability notions have been proposed in different learning settings. However, while stability entails desirable properties, it is typically not sufficient on its own for statistical learning -- and indeed, it may be at odds with accuracy, since an algorithm that always outputs a constant function is perfectly stable but statistically meaningless. Thus, it is essential to understand the potential statistical cost of stability. In this work, we address this question by adopting a statistical decision-theoretic perspective, treating stability as a constraint in estimation. Focusing on two representative notions-worst-case stability and average-case stability-we first establish general lower bounds on the achievable estimation accuracy under each type of stability constraint. We then develop optimal stable estimators for four canonical estimation problems, including several mean estimation and regression settings. Together, these results characterize the optimal trade-offs between stability and accuracy across these tasks. Our findings formalize the intuition that average-case stability imposes a qualitatively weaker restriction than worst-case stability, and they further reveal that the gap between these two can vary substantially across different estimation problems.

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### Telling Human and Machine Handwriting Apart

Authors: Luis A. Leiva, Moises Diaz, Nuwan T. Attygalle, Miguel A. Ferrer, Rejean Plamondon
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11700v1

Handwriting movements can be leveraged as a unique form of behavioral biometrics, to verify whether a real user is operating a device or application. This task can be framed as a reverse Turing test in which a computer has to detect if an input instance has been generated by a human or artificially. To tackle this task, we study ten public datasets of handwritten symbols (isolated characters, digits, gestures, pointing traces, and signatures) that are artificially reproduced using seven different synthesizers, including, among others, the Kinematic Theory (Sigma h model), generative adversarial networks, Transformers, and Diffusion models. We train a shallow recurrent neural network that achieves excellent performance (98.3 percent Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) score and 1.4 percent equal error rate on average across all synthesizers and datasets) using nonfeaturized trajectory data as input. In few-shot settings, we show that our classifier achieves such an excellent performance when trained on just 10 percent of the data, as evaluated on the remaining 90% of the data as a test set. We further challenge our classifier in out-of-domain settings, and observe very competitive results as well. Our work has implications for computerized systems that need to verify human presence, and adds an additional layer of security to keep attackers at bay.

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### Anisotropic Tensor Deconvolution of Hyperspectral Images

Authors: Xinjue Wang, Xiuheng Wang, Esa Ollila, Sergiy A. Vorobyov
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV, cs.LG, eess.SP
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11694v1

Hyperspectral image (HSI) deconvolution is a challenging ill-posed inverse problem, made difficult by the data's high dimensionality.We propose a parameter-parsimonious framework based on a low-rank Canonical Polyadic Decomposition (CPD) of the entire latent HSI $\mathbf{\mathcal{X}} \in \mathbb{R}^{P\times Q \times N}$.This approach recasts the problem from recovering a large-scale image with $PQN$ variables to estimating the CPD factors with $(P+Q+N)R$ variables.This model also enables a structure-aware, anisotropic Total Variation (TV) regularization applied only to the spatial factors, preserving the smooth spectral signatures.An efficient algorithm based on the Proximal Alternating Linearized Minimization (PALM) framework is developed to solve the resulting non-convex optimization problem.Experiments confirm the model's efficiency, showing a numerous parameter reduction of over two orders of magnitude and a compelling trade-off between model compactness and reconstruction accuracy.

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### Explainable histomorphology-based survival prediction of glioblastoma, IDH-wildtype

Authors: Jan-Philipp Redlich, Friedrich Feuerhake, Stefan Nikolin, Nadine Sarah Schaadt, Sarah Teuber-Hanselmann, Joachim Weis, Sabine Luttmann, Andrea Eberle, Christoph Buck, Timm Intemann, Pascal Birnstill, Klaus Kraywinkel et al.
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: eess.IV, cs.LG, q-bio.QM
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11691v3

Glioblastoma, IDH-wildtype (GBM-IDHwt) is the most common malignant brain tumor. While histomorphology is a crucial component of GBM-IDHwt diagnosis, it is not further considered for prognosis. Here, we present an explainable artificial intelligence (AI) framework to identify and interpret histomorphological features associated with patient survival. The framework combines an explainable multiple instance learning (MIL) architecture that directly identifies prognostically relevant image tiles with a sparse autoencoder (SAE) that maps these tiles to interpretable visual patterns. The MIL model was trained and evaluated on a new real-world dataset of 720 GBM-IDHwt cases from three hospitals and four cancer registries across Germany. The SAE was trained on 1,878 whole-slide images from five independent public glioblastoma collections. Despite the many factors influencing survival time, our method showed some ability to discriminate between patients living less than 180 days or more than 360 days solely based on histomorphology (AUC: 0.67; 95% CI: 0.63-0.72). Cox proportional hazards regression confirmed a significant survival difference between predicted groups after adjustment for established prognostic factors (hazard ratio: 1.47; 95% CI: 1.26-1.72). Three neuropathologists categorized the identified visual patterns into seven distinct histomorphological groups, revealing both established prognostic features and unexpected associations, the latter being potentially attributable to surgery-related confounders. The presented explainable AI framework facilitates prognostic biomarker discovery in GBM-IDHwt and beyond, highlighting promising histomorphological features for further analysis and exposing potential confounders that would be hidden in black-box models.

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### Bridging Modalities: Joint Synthesis and Registration Framework for Aligning Diffusion MRI with T1-Weighted Images

Authors: Xiaofan Wang, Junyi Wang, Yuqian Chen, Lauren J. O' Donnell, Fan Zhang
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11689v2

Multimodal image registration between diffusion MRI (dMRI) and T1-weighted (T1w) MRI images is a critical step for aligning diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) data with structural anatomical space. Traditional registration methods often struggle to ensure accuracy due to the large intensity differences between diffusion data and high-resolution anatomical structures. This paper proposes an unsupervised registration framework based on a generative registration network, which transforms the original multimodal registration problem between b0 and T1w images into a unimodal registration task between a generated image and the real T1w image. This effectively reduces the complexity of cross-modal registration. The framework first employs an image synthesis model to generate images with T1w-like contrast, and then learns a deformation field from the generated image to the fixed T1w image. The registration network jointly optimizes local structural similarity and cross-modal statistical dependency to improve deformation estimation accuracy. Experiments conducted on two independent datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art approaches in multimodal registration tasks.

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### SpecMap: Hierarchical LLM Agent for Datasheet-to-Code Traceability Link Recovery in Systems Engineering

Authors: Vedant Nipane, Pulkit Agrawal, Amit Singh
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11688v1

Establishing precise traceability between embedded systems datasheets and their corresponding code implementations remains a fundamental challenge in systems engineering, particularly for low-level software where manual mapping between specification documents and large code repositories is infeasible. Existing Traceability Link Recovery approaches primarily rely on lexical similarity and information retrieval techniques, which struggle to capture the semantic, structural, and symbol level relationships prevalent in embedded systems software. We present a hierarchical datasheet-to-code mapping methodology that employs large language models for semantic analysis while explicitly structuring the traceability process across multiple abstraction levels. Rather than performing direct specification-to-code matching, the proposed approach progressively narrows the search space through repository-level structure inference, file-level relevance estimation, and fine-grained symbollevel alignment. The method extends beyond function-centric mapping by explicitly covering macros, structs, constants, configuration parameters, and register definitions commonly found in systems-level C/C++ codebases. We evaluate the approach on multiple open-source embedded systems repositories using manually curated datasheet-to-code ground truth. Experimental results show substantial improvements over traditional information-retrieval-based baselines, achieving up to 73.3% file mapping accuracy. We significantly reduce computational overhead, lowering total LLM token consumption by 84% and end-to-end runtime by approximately 80%. This methodology supports automated analysis of large embedded software systems and enables downstream applications such as training data generation for systems-aware machine learning models, standards compliance verification, and large-scale specification coverage analysis.

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### Semantic Caching and Intent-Driven Context Optimization for Multi-Agent Natural Language to Code Systems

Authors: Harmohit Singh
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11687v1

We present a production-optimized multi-agent system designed to translate natural language queries into executable Python code for structured data analytics. Unlike systems that rely on expensive frontier models, our approach achieves high accuracy and cost efficiency through three key innovations: (1) a semantic caching system with LLM-based equivalence detection and structured adaptation hints that provides cache hit rates of 67% on production queries; (2) a dual-threshold decision mechanism that separates exact-match retrieval from reference-guided generation; and (3) an intent-driven dynamic prompt assembly system that reduces token consumption by 40-60% through table-aware context filtering. The system has been deployed in production for enterprise inventory management, processing over 10,000 queries with an average latency of 8.2 seconds and 94.3% semantic accuracy. We describe the architecture, present empirical results from production deployment, and discuss practical considerations for deploying LLM-based analytics systems at scale.

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### Proof of Concept: Multi-Target Wildfire Risk Prediction and Large Language Model Synthesis

Authors: Nicolas Caron, Christophe Guyeux, Hassan Noura, Benjamin Aynes
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11686v1

Current state-of-the-art approaches to wildfire risk assessment often overlook operational needs, limiting their practical value for first responders and firefighting services. Effective wildfire management requires a multi-target analysis that captures the diverse dimensions of wildfire risk, including meteorological danger, ignition activity, intervention complexity, and resource mobilization, rather than relying on a single predictive indicator. In this proof of concept, we propose the development of a hybrid framework that combines predictive models for each risk dimension with large language models (LLMs) to synthesize heterogeneous outputs into structured, actionable reports.

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### Towards Efficient Image Deblurring for Edge Deployment

Authors: Srinivas Miriyala, Sowmya Vajrala, Sravanth Kodavanti
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: eess.IV, cs.AI, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11685v1

Image deblurring is a critical stage in mobile image signal processing pipelines, where the ability to restore fine structures and textures must be balanced with real-time constraints on edge devices. While recent deep networks such as transformers and activation-free architectures achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy, their efficiency is typically measured in FLOPs or parameters, which do not correlate with latency on embedded hardware. We propose a hardware-aware adaptation framework that restructures existing models through sensitivity-guided block substitution, surrogate distillation, and training-free multi-objective search driven by device profiling. Applied to the 36-block NAFNet baseline, the optimized variants achieve up to 55% reduction in GMACs compared to the recent transformer-based SOTA while maintaining competitive accuracy. Most importantly, on-device deployment yields a 1.25X latency improvement over the baseline. Experiments on motion deblurring (GoPro), defocus deblurring (DPDD), and auxiliary benchmarks (RealBlur-J/R, HIDE) demonstrate the generality of the approach, while comparisons with prior efficient baselines confirm its accuracy-efficiency trade-off. These results establish feedback-driven adaptation as a principled strategy for bridging the gap between algorithmic design and deployment-ready deblurring models.

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### Mobile-friendly Image de-noising: Hardware Conscious Optimization for Edge Application

Authors: Srinivas Miriyala, Sowmya Vajrala, Hitesh Kumar, Sravanth Kodavanti, Vikram Rajendiran
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: eess.IV, cs.AI, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11684v1

Image enhancement is a critical task in computer vision and photography that is often entangled with noise. This renders the traditional Image Signal Processing (ISP) ineffective compared to the advances in deep learning. However, the success of such methods is increasingly associated with the ease of their deployment on edge devices, such as smartphones. This work presents a novel mobile-friendly network for image de-noising obtained with Entropy-Regularized differentiable Neural Architecture Search (NAS) on a hardware-aware search space for a U-Net architecture, which is first-of-its-kind. The designed model has 12% less parameters, with ~2-fold improvement in ondevice latency and 1.5-fold improvement in the memory footprint for a 0.7% drop in PSNR, when deployed and profiled on Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. Compared to the SOTA Swin-Transformer for Image Restoration, the proposed network had competitive accuracy with ~18-fold reduction in GMACs. Further, the network was tested successfully for Gaussian de-noising with 3 intensities on 4 benchmarks and real-world de-noising on 1 benchmark demonstrating its generalization ability.

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### Attesting Model Lineage by Consisted Knowledge Evolution with Fine-Tuning Trajectory

Authors: Zhuoyi Shang, Jiasen Li, Pengzhen Chen, Yanwei Liu, Xiaoyan Gu, Weiping Wang
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.SE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11683v1

The fine-tuning technique in deep learning gives rise to an emerging lineage relationship among models. This lineage provides a promising perspective for addressing security concerns such as unauthorized model redistribution and false claim of model provenance, which are particularly pressing in \textcolor{blue}{open-weight model} libraries where robust lineage verification mechanisms are often lacking. Existing approaches to model lineage detection primarily rely on static architectural similarities, which are insufficient to capture the dynamic evolution of knowledge that underlies true lineage relationships. Drawing inspiration from the genetic mechanism of human evolution, we tackle the problem of model lineage attestation by verifying the joint trajectory of knowledge evolution and parameter modification. To this end, we propose a novel model lineage attestation framework. In our framework, model editing is first leveraged to quantify parameter-level changes introduced by fine-tuning. Subsequently, we introduce a novel knowledge vectorization mechanism that refines the evolved knowledge within the edited models into compact representations by the assistance of probe samples. The probing strategies are adapted to different types of model families. These embeddings serve as the foundation for verifying the arithmetic consistency of knowledge relationships across models, thereby enabling robust attestation of model lineage. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness and resilience of our approach in a variety of adversarial scenarios in the real world. Our method consistently achieves reliable lineage verification across a broad spectrum of model types, including classifiers, diffusion models, and large language models.

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### FourierPET: Deep Fourier-based Unrolled Network for Low-count PET Reconstruction

Authors: Zheng Zhang, Hao Tang, Yingying Hu, Zhanli Hu, Jing Qin
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11680v2

Low-count positron emission tomography (PET) reconstruction is a challenging inverse problem due to severe degradations arising from Poisson noise, photon scarcity, and attenuation correction errors. Existing deep learning methods typically address these in the spatial domain with an undifferentiated optimization objective, making it difficult to disentangle overlapping artifacts and limiting correction effectiveness. In this work, we perform a Fourier-domain analysis and reveal that these degradations are spectrally separable: Poisson noise and photon scarcity cause high-frequency phase perturbations, while attenuation errors suppress low-frequency amplitude components. Leveraging this insight, we propose FourierPET, a Fourier-based unrolled reconstruction framework grounded in the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers. It consists of three tailored modules: a spectral consistency module that enforces global frequency alignment to maintain data fidelity, an amplitude-phase correction module that decouples and compensates for high-frequency phase distortions and low-frequency amplitude suppression, and a dual adjustment module that accelerates convergence during iterative reconstruction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FourierPET achieves state-of-the-art performance with significantly fewer parameters, while offering enhanced interpretability through frequency-aware correction.

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### Conformal Point and the Calibrated Conic

Authors: Richard Hartley
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11679v1

This gives some information about the conformal point and the calibrating conic, and their relationship one to the other. These concepts are useful for visualizing image geometry, and lead to intuitive ways to compute geometry, such as angles and directions in an image.

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### HALO: Semantic-Aware Distributed LLM Inference in Lossy Edge Network

Authors: Peirong Zheng, Wenchao Xu, Haozhao Wang, Jinyu Chen, Xuemin Shen
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.DC, cs.AI, cs.NI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11676v1

The deployment of large language models' (LLMs) inference at the edge can facilitate prompt service responsiveness while protecting user privacy. However, it is critically challenged by the resource constraints of a single edge node. Distributed inference has emerged to aggregate and leverage computational resources across multiple devices. Yet, existing methods typically require strict synchronization, which is often infeasible due to the unreliable network conditions. In this paper, we propose HALO, a novel framework that can boost the distributed LLM inference in lossy edge network. The core idea is to enable a relaxed yet effective synchronization by strategically allocating less critical neuron groups to unstable devices, thus avoiding the excessive waiting time incurred by delayed packets. HALO introduces three key mechanisms: (1) a semantic-aware predictor to assess the significance of neuron groups prior to activation. (2) a parallel execution scheme of neuron group loading during the model inference. (3) a load-balancing scheduler that efficiently orchestrates multiple devices with heterogeneous resources. Experimental results from a Raspberry Pi cluster demonstrate that HALO achieves a 3.41x end-to-end speedup for LLaMA-series LLMs under unreliable network conditions. It maintains performance comparable to optimal conditions and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art in various scenarios.

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### Generating metamers of human scene understanding

Authors: Ritik Raina, Abe Leite, Alexandros Graikos, Seoyoung Ahn, Dimitris Samaras, Gregory J. Zelinsky
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11675v3

Human vision combines low-resolution "gist" information from the visual periphery with sparse but high-resolution information from fixated locations to construct a coherent understanding of a visual scene. In this paper, we introduce MetamerGen, a tool for generating scenes that are aligned with latent human scene representations. MetamerGen is a latent diffusion model that combines peripherally obtained scene gist information with information obtained from scene-viewing fixations to generate image metamers for what humans understand after viewing a scene. Generating images from both high and low resolution (i.e. "foveated") inputs constitutes a novel image-to-image synthesis problem, which we tackle by introducing a dual-stream representation of the foveated scenes consisting of DINOv2 tokens that fuse detailed features from fixated areas with peripherally degraded features capturing scene context. To evaluate the perceptual alignment of MetamerGen generated images to latent human scene representations, we conducted a same-different behavioral experiment where participants were asked for a "same" or "different" response between the generated and the original image. With that, we identify scene generations that are indeed metamers for the latent scene representations formed by the viewers. MetamerGen is a powerful tool for understanding scene understanding. Our proof-of-concept analyses uncovered specific features at multiple levels of visual processing that contributed to human judgments. While it can generate metamers even conditioned on random fixations, we find that high-level semantic alignment most strongly predicts metamerism when the generated scenes are conditioned on viewers' own fixated regions.

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### Pigment Network Detection and Classification in Dermoscopic Images Using Directional Imaging Algorithms and Convolutional Neural Networks

Authors: M. A. Rasel, Sameem Abdul Kareem, Unaizah Obaidellah
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: eess.IV, cs.AI, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11674v1

Early diagnosis of melanoma, which can save thousands of lives, relies heavily on the analysis of dermoscopic images. One crucial diagnostic criterion is the identification of unusual pigment network (PN). However, distinguishing between regular (typical) and irregular (atypical) PN is challenging. This study aims to automate the PN detection process using a directional imaging algorithm and classify PN types using machine learning classifiers. The directional imaging algorithm incorporates Principal Component Analysis (PCA), contrast enhancement, filtering, and noise reduction. Applied to the PH2 dataset, this algorithm achieved a 96% success rate, which increased to 100% after pixel intensity adjustments. We created a new dataset containing only PN images from these results. We then employed two classifiers, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Bag of Features (BoF), to categorize PN into atypical and typical classes. Given the limited dataset of 200 images, a simple and effective CNN was designed, featuring two convolutional layers and two batch normalization layers. The proposed CNN achieved 90% accuracy, 90% sensitivity, and 89% specificity. When compared to state-of-the-art methods, our CNN demonstrated superior performance. Our study highlights the potential of the proposed CNN model for effective PN classification, suggesting future research should focus on expanding datasets and incorporating additional dermatological features to further enhance melanoma diagnosis.

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### CoVar: Confidence-Variance-Guided Pseudo-Label Selection for Semi-Supervised Learning

Authors: Jinshi Liu, Lei He, Pan Liu
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11670v3

Pseudo-label selection in semi-supervised learning is commonly driven by maximum-confidence thresholds, yet confidence alone can be unreliable under model overconfidence and class imbalance. We propose CoVar, a confidence--variance framework that assesses pseudo-label reliability by jointly modeling Maximum Confidence (MC) and Residual-Class Variance (RCV). Starting from entropy minimization, we derive a second-order cross-entropy approximation showing that low-loss pseudo-labels are favored when MC is high and RCV is low, with a confidence-dependent penalty that becomes stronger for near-certain predictions. Based on this criterion, CoVar embeds predictions into a two-dimensional confidence--variance space and uses SVD-based spectral relaxation to separate reliable and unreliable predictions without hand-tuned confidence thresholds. Cluster-wise Gaussian weighting then converts this separation into per-sample training weights. The resulting weights can be integrated into existing semi-supervised segmentation and classification pipelines during training and introduce no inference-time overhead. Experiments on PASCAL VOC 2012, Cityscapes, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, and STL-10 show clear gains on VOC and Cityscapes under matched backbones, as well as competitive or improved error rates on standard classification benchmarks. These results indicate that residual-class dispersion provides a useful signal complementary to confidence for robust pseudo-label selection.

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### IPEC: Test-Time Incremental Prototype Enhancement Classifier for Few-Shot Learning

Authors: Wenwen Liao, Hang Ruan, Jianbo Yu, Xiaofeng Yang, Qingchao Jiang, Xuefeng Yan
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11669v1

Metric-based few-shot approaches have gained significant popularity due to their relatively straightforward implementation, high interpret ability, and computational efficiency. However, stemming from the batch-independence assumption during testing, which prevents the model from leveraging valuable knowledge accumulated from previous batches. To address these challenges, we propose a novel test-time method called Incremental Prototype Enhancement Classifier (IPEC), a test-time method that optimizes prototype estimation by leveraging information from previous query samples. IPEC maintains a dynamic auxiliary set by selectively incorporating query samples that are classified with high confidence. To ensure sample quality, we design a robust dual-filtering mechanism that assesses each query sample based on both global prediction confidence and local discriminative ability. By aggregating this auxiliary set with the support set in subsequent tasks, IPEC builds progressively more stable and representative prototypes, effectively reducing its reliance on the initial support set. We ground this approach in a Bayesian interpretation, conceptualizing the support set as a prior and the auxiliary set as a data-driven posterior, which in turn motivates the design of a practical "warm-up and test" two-stage inference protocol. Extensive empirical results validate the superior performance of our proposed method across multiple few-shot classification tasks.

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### Distill-then-Replace: Efficient Task-Specific Hybrid Attention Model Construction

Authors: Xiaojie Xia, Huigang Zhang, Chaoliang Zhong, Jun Sun, Yusuke Oishi
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11667v2

Transformer architectures deliver state-of-the-art accuracy via dense full-attention, but their quadratic time and memory complexity with respect to sequence length limits practical deployment. Linear attention mechanisms offer linear or near-linear scaling yet often incur performance degradation. Hybrid models that integrate full and linear attention layers promise a balance between efficiency and expressiveness, but face two major challenges: training such hybrid models from scratch is computationally expensive, and manually designing the optimal placement of attention types is highly nontrivial. We propose DtR (Distill-then-Replace), which first transfers weights from the pretrained full-attention modules to its linear attention counterparts through blockwise local distillation, and then applies a greedy layer replacement strategy that iteratively substitutes full attention blocks with linear ones while monitoring validation performance on the target task. DtR yields a task-specific hybrid model in a single efficient pass, without costly re-training or neural architecture search, and can be applied to any pretrained full-attention backbone for diverse downstream tasks.

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### MATEX: Multi-scale Attention and Text-guided Explainability of Medical Vision-Language Models

Authors: Muhammad Imran, Chi Lee, Yugyung Lee
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11666v1

We introduce MATEX (Multi-scale Attention and Text-guided Explainability), a novel framework that advances interpretability in medical vision-language models by incorporating anatomically informed spatial reasoning. MATEX synergistically combines multi-layer attention rollout, text-guided spatial priors, and layer consistency analysis to produce precise, stable, and clinically meaningful gradient attribution maps. By addressing key limitations of prior methods, such as spatial imprecision, lack of anatomical grounding, and limited attention granularity, MATEX enables more faithful and interpretable model explanations. Evaluated on the MS-CXR dataset, MATEX outperforms the state-of-the-art M2IB approach in both spatial precision and alignment with expert-annotated findings. These results highlight MATEX's potential to enhance trust and transparency in radiological AI applications.

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### UAV-Based Infrastructure Inspections: A Literature Review and Proposed Framework for AEC+FM

Authors: Amir Farzin Nikkhah, Dong Chen, Bradford Campbell, Somayeh Asadi, Arsalan Heydarian
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11665v3

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are transforming infrastructure inspections in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Facility Management (AEC+FM) domain. By synthesizing insights from over 150 studies, this review paper highlights UAV-based methodologies for data acquisition, photogrammetric modeling, defect detection, and decision-making support. Key innovations include path optimization, thermal integration, and advanced machine learning (ML) models such as YOLO and Faster R-CNN for anomaly detection. UAVs have demonstrated value in structural health monitoring (SHM), disaster response, urban infrastructure management, energy efficiency evaluations, and cultural heritage preservation. Despite these advancements, challenges in real-time processing, multimodal data fusion, and generalizability remain. A proposed workflow framework, informed by literature and a case study, integrates RGB imagery, LiDAR, and thermal sensing with transformer-based architectures to improve accuracy and reliability in detecting structural defects, thermal anomalies, and geometric inconsistencies. The proposed framework ensures precise and actionable insights by fusing multimodal data and dynamically adapting path planning for complex environments, presented as a comprehensive step-by-step guide to address these challenges effectively. This paper concludes with future research directions emphasizing lightweight AI models, adaptive flight planning, synthetic datasets, and richer modality fusion to streamline modern infrastructure inspections.

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### UniX: Unifying Autoregression and Diffusion for Chest X-Ray Understanding and Generation

Authors: Ruiheng Zhang, Jingfeng Yao, Huangxuan Zhao, Hao Yan, Xiao He, Lei Chen, Zhou Wei, Yong Luo, Zengmao Wang, Lefei Zhang, Dacheng Tao, Bo Du
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11522v1

Despite recent progress, medical foundation models still struggle to unify visual understanding and generation, as these tasks have inherently conflicting goals: semantic abstraction versus pixel-level reconstruction. Existing approaches, typically based on parameter-shared autoregressive architectures, frequently lead to compromised performance in one or both tasks. To address this, we present UniX, a next-generation unified medical foundation model for chest X-ray understanding and generation. UniX decouples the two tasks into an autoregressive branch for understanding and a diffusion branch for high-fidelity generation. Crucially, a cross-modal self-attention mechanism is introduced to dynamically guide the generation process with understanding features. Coupled with a rigorous data cleaning pipeline and a multi-stage training strategy, this architecture enables synergistic collaboration between tasks while leveraging the strengths of diffusion models for superior generation. On two representative benchmarks, UniX achieves a 46.1% improvement in understanding performance (Micro-F1) and a 24.2% gain in generation quality (FD-RadDino), using only a quarter of the parameters of LLM-CXR. By achieving performance on par with task-specific models, our work establishes a scalable paradigm for synergistic medical image understanding and generation. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/ZrH42/UniX.

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### How Long Is a Piece of String? A Brief Empirical Analysis of Tokenizers

Authors: Jonathan Roberts, Kai Han, Samuel Albanie
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11518v1

Frontier LLMs are increasingly utilised across academia, society and industry. A commonly used unit for comparing models, their inputs and outputs, and estimating inference pricing is the token. In general, tokens are used as a stable currency, assumed to be broadly consistent across tokenizers and contexts, enabling direct comparisons. However, tokenization varies significantly across models and domains of text, making naive interpretation of token counts problematic. We quantify this variation by providing a comprehensive empirical analysis of tokenization, exploring the compression of sequences to tokens across different distributions of textual data. Our analysis challenges commonly held heuristics about token lengths, finding them to be overly simplistic. We hope the insights of our study add clarity and intuition toward tokenization in contemporary LLMs.

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### Do explanations generalize across large reasoning models?

Authors: Koyena Pal, David Bau, Chandan Singh
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11517v1

Large reasoning models (LRMs) produce a textual chain of thought (CoT) in the process of solving a problem, which serves as a potentially powerful tool to understand the problem by surfacing a human-readable, natural-language explanation. However, it is unclear whether these explanations generalize, i.e. whether they capture general patterns about the underlying problem rather than patterns which are esoteric to the LRM. This is a crucial question in understanding or discovering new concepts, e.g. in AI for science. We study this generalization question by evaluating a specific notion of generalizability: whether explanations produced by one LRM induce the same behavior when given to other LRMs. We find that CoT explanations often exhibit this form of generalization (i.e. they increase consistency between LRMs) and that this increased generalization is correlated with human preference rankings and post-training with reinforcement learning. We further analyze the conditions under which explanations yield consistent answers and propose a straightforward, sentence-level ensembling strategy that improves consistency. Taken together, these results prescribe caution when using LRM explanations to yield new insights and outline a framework for characterizing LRM explanation generalization.

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### Building Production-Ready Probes For Gemini

Authors: János Kramár, Joshua Engels, Zheng Wang, Bilal Chughtai, Rohin Shah, Neel Nanda, Arthur Conmy
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11516v4

Frontier language model capabilities are improving rapidly. We thus need stronger mitigations against bad actors misusing increasingly powerful systems. Prior work has shown that activation probes may be a promising misuse mitigation technique, but we identify a key remaining challenge: probes fail to generalize under important production distribution shifts. In particular, we find that the shift from short-context to long-context inputs is difficult for existing probe architectures. We propose several new probe architectures that handle this long-context distribution shift. We evaluate these probes in the cyber-offensive domain, testing their robustness against various production-relevant distribution shifts, including multi-turn conversations, long context prompts, and adaptive red teaming. Our results demonstrate that while our novel architectures address context length, a combination of architecture choice and training on diverse distributions is required for broad generalization. Additionally, we show that pairing probes with prompted classifiers achieves optimal accuracy at a low cost due to the computational efficiency of probes. These findings have informed the successful deployment of misuse mitigation probes in user-facing instances of Gemini, Google's frontier language model. Finally, we find early positive results using AlphaEvolve to automate improvements in both probe architecture search and adaptive red teaming, showing that automating some AI safety research is already possible.

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### ShapeR: Robust Conditional 3D Shape Generation from Casual Captures

Authors: Yawar Siddiqui, Duncan Frost, Samir Aroudj, Armen Avetisyan, Henry Howard-Jenkins, Daniel DeTone, Pierre Moulon, Qirui Wu, Zhengqin Li, Julian Straub, Richard Newcombe, Jakob Engel
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11514v1

Recent advances in 3D shape generation have achieved impressive results, but most existing methods rely on clean, unoccluded, and well-segmented inputs. Such conditions are rarely met in real-world scenarios. We present ShapeR, a novel approach for conditional 3D object shape generation from casually captured sequences. Given an image sequence, we leverage off-the-shelf visual-inertial SLAM, 3D detection algorithms, and vision-language models to extract, for each object, a set of sparse SLAM points, posed multi-view images, and machine-generated captions. A rectified flow transformer trained to effectively condition on these modalities then generates high-fidelity metric 3D shapes. To ensure robustness to the challenges of casually captured data, we employ a range of techniques including on-the-fly compositional augmentations, a curriculum training scheme spanning object- and scene-level datasets, and strategies to handle background clutter. Additionally, we introduce a new evaluation benchmark comprising 178 in-the-wild objects across 7 real-world scenes with geometry annotations. Experiments show that ShapeR significantly outperforms existing approaches in this challenging setting, achieving an improvement of 2.7x in Chamfer distance compared to state of the art.

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### ReScene4D: Temporally Consistent Semantic Instance Segmentation of Evolving Indoor 3D Scenes

Authors: Emily Steiner, Jianhao Zheng, Henry Howard-Jenkins, Chris Xie, Iro Armeni
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11508v2

Indoor environments evolve as objects move, appear, or leave the scene. Capturing these dynamics requires maintaining temporally consistent instance identities across intermittently captured 3D scans, even when changes are unobserved. We introduce and formalize the task of temporally sparse 4D indoor semantic instance segmentation (SIS), which jointly segments, identifies, and temporally associates object instances. This setting poses a challenge for existing 3DSIS methods, which require a discrete matching step due to their lack of temporal reasoning, and for 4D LiDAR approaches, which perform poorly due to their reliance on high-frequency temporal measurements that are uncommon in the longer-horizon evolution of indoor environments. We propose ReScene4D, a novel method that adapts 3DSIS architectures for 4DSIS without needing dense observations. Our method enables temporal information sharing--using spatiotemporal contrastive loss, masking, and serialization--to adaptively leverage geometric and semantic priors across observations. This shared context enables consistent instance tracking and improves standard 3DSIS performance. To evaluate this task, we define a new metric, t-mAP, that extends mAP to reward temporal identity consistency. ReScene4D achieves state-of-the-art performance on the 3RScan dataset, establishing a new benchmark for understanding evolving indoor scenes.

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### MetaboNet: The Largest Publicly Available Consolidated Dataset for Type 1 Diabetes Management

Authors: Miriam K. Wolff, Peter Calhoun, Eleonora Maria Aiello, Yao Qin, Sam F. Royston
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, eess.SY, q-bio.QM
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11505v2

Progress in Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) algorithm development is limited by the fragmentation and lack of standardization across existing T1D management datasets. Current datasets differ substantially in structure and are time-consuming to access and process, which impedes data integration and reduces the comparability and generalizability of algorithmic developments. This work aims to establish a unified and accessible data resource for T1D algorithm development. Multiple publicly available T1D datasets were consolidated into a unified resource, termed the MetaboNet dataset. Inclusion required the availability of both continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) data and corresponding insulin pump dosing records. Additionally, auxiliary information such as reported carbohydrate intake and physical activity was retained when present. The MetaboNet dataset comprises 3135 subjects and 1228 patient-years of overlapping CGM and insulin data, making it substantially larger than existing standalone benchmark datasets. The resource is distributed as a fully public subset available for immediate download at https://metabo-net.org/ , and with a Data Use Agreement (DUA)-restricted subset accessible through their respective application processes. For the datasets in the latter subset, processing pipelines are provided to automatically convert the data into the standardized MetaboNet format. A consolidated public dataset for T1D research is presented, and the access pathways for both its unrestricted and DUA-governed components are described. The resulting dataset covers a broad range of glycemic profiles and demographics and thus can yield more generalizable algorithmic performance than individual datasets.

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### QUPID: A Partitioned Quantum Neural Network for Anomaly Detection in Smart Grid

Authors: Hoang M. Ngo, Tre' R. Jeter, Jung Taek Seo, My T. Thai
Published: 2026-01-16
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11500v1

Smart grid infrastructures have revolutionized energy distribution, but their day-to-day operations require robust anomaly detection methods to counter risks associated with cyber-physical threats and system faults potentially caused by natural disasters, equipment malfunctions, and cyber attacks. Conventional machine learning (ML) models are effective in several domains, yet they struggle to represent the complexities observed in smart grid systems. Furthermore, traditional ML models are highly susceptible to adversarial manipulations, making them increasingly unreliable for real-world deployment. Quantum ML (QML) provides a unique advantage, utilizing quantum-enhanced feature representations to model the intricacies of the high-dimensional nature of smart grid systems while demonstrating greater resilience to adversarial manipulation. In this work, we propose QUPID, a partitioned quantum neural network (PQNN) that outperforms traditional state-of-the-art ML models in anomaly detection. We extend our model to R-QUPID that even maintains its performance when including differential privacy (DP) for enhanced robustness. Moreover, our partitioning framework addresses a significant scalability problem in QML by efficiently distributing computational workloads, making quantum-enhanced anomaly detection practical in large-scale smart grid environments. Our experimental results across various scenarios exemplifies the efficacy of QUPID and R-QUPID to significantly improve anomaly detection capabilities and robustness compared to traditional ML approaches.

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