# Research Papers — 2026-01 · bundle page 114 of 189

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### Full Disclosure, Less Trust? How the Level of Detail about AI Use in News Writing Affects Readers' Trust

Authors: Pooja Prajod, Hannes Cools, Thomas Röggla, Karthikeya Puttur Venkatraj, Amber Kusters, Alia ElKattan, Pablo Cesar, Abdallah El Ali
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI, cs.CY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09620v1

As artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly integrated into news production, calls for transparency about the use of AI have gained considerable traction. Recent studies suggest that AI disclosures can lead to a ``transparency dilemma'', where disclosure reduces readers' trust. However, little is known about how the \textit{level of detail} in AI disclosures influences trust and contributes to this dilemma within the news context. In this 3$\times$2$\times$2 mixed factorial study with 40 participants, we investigate how three levels of AI disclosures (none, one-line, detailed) across two types of news (politics and lifestyle) and two levels of AI involvement (low and high) affect news readers' trust. We measured trust using the News Media Trust questionnaire, along with two decision behaviors: source-checking and subscription decisions. Questionnaire responses and subscription rates showed a decline in trust only for detailed AI disclosures, whereas source-checking behavior increased for both one-line and detailed disclosures, with the effect being more pronounced for detailed disclosures. Insights from semi-structured interviews suggest that source-checking behavior was primarily driven by interest in the topic, followed by trust, whereas trust was the main factor influencing subscription decisions. Around two-thirds of participants expressed a preference for detailed disclosures, while most participants who preferred one-line indicated a need for detail-on-demand disclosure formats. Our findings show that not all AI disclosures lead to a transparency dilemma, but instead reflect a trade-off between readers' desire for more transparency and their trust in AI-assisted news content.

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### CogRail: Benchmarking VLMs in Cognitive Intrusion Perception for Intelligent Railway Transportation Systems

Authors: Yonglin Tian, Qiyao Zhang, Wei Xu, Yutong Wang, Yihao Wu, Xinyi Li, Xingyuan Dai, Hui Zhang, Zhiyong Cui, Baoqing Guo, Zujun Yu, Yisheng Lv
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09613v1

Accurate and early perception of potential intrusion targets is essential for ensuring the safety of railway transportation systems. However, most existing systems focus narrowly on object classification within fixed visual scopes and apply rule-based heuristics to determine intrusion status, often overlooking targets that pose latent intrusion risks. Anticipating such risks requires the cognition of spatial context and temporal dynamics for the object of interest (OOI), which presents challenges for conventional visual models. To facilitate deep intrusion perception, we introduce a novel benchmark, CogRail, which integrates curated open-source datasets with cognitively driven question-answer annotations to support spatio-temporal reasoning and prediction. Building upon this benchmark, we conduct a systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art visual-language models (VLMs) using multimodal prompts to identify their strengths and limitations in this domain. Furthermore, we fine-tune VLMs for better performance and propose a joint fine-tuning framework that integrates three core tasks, position perception, movement prediction, and threat analysis, facilitating effective adaptation of general-purpose foundation models into specialized models tailored for cognitive intrusion perception. Extensive experiments reveal that current large-scale multimodal models struggle with the complex spatial-temporal reasoning required by the cognitive intrusion perception task, underscoring the limitations of existing foundation models in this safety-critical domain. In contrast, our proposed joint fine-tuning framework significantly enhances model performance by enabling targeted adaptation to domain-specific reasoning demands, highlighting the advantages of structured multi-task learning in improving both accuracy and interpretability. Code will be available at https://github.com/Hub-Tian/CogRail.

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### DPWriter: Reinforcement Learning with Diverse Planning Branching for Creative Writing

Authors: Qian Cao, Yahui Liu, Wei Bi, Yi Zhao, Ruihua Song, Xiting Wang, Ruiming Tang, Guorui Zhou, Han Li
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09609v1

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based enhancement of large language models (LLMs) often leads to reduced output diversity, undermining their utility in open-ended tasks like creative writing. Current methods lack explicit mechanisms for guiding diverse exploration and instead prioritize optimization efficiency and performance over diversity. This paper proposes an RL framework structured around a semi-structured long Chain-of-Thought (CoT), in which the generation process is decomposed into explicitly planned intermediate steps. We introduce a Diverse Planning Branching method that strategically introduces divergence at the planning phase based on diversity variation, alongside a group-aware diversity reward to encourage distinct trajectories. Experimental results on creative writing benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly improves output diversity without compromising generation quality, consistently outperforming existing baselines.

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### GRCF: Two-Stage Groupwise Ranking and Calibration Framework for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Authors: Manning Gao, Leheng Zhang, Shiqin Han, Haifeng Hu, Yuncheng Jiang, Sijie Mai
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09606v1

Most Multimodal Sentiment Analysis research has focused on point-wise regression. While straightforward, this approach is sensitive to label noise and neglects whether one sample is more positive than another, resulting in unstable predictions and poor correlation alignment. Pairwise ordinal learning frameworks emerged to address this gap, capturing relative order by learning from comparisons. Yet, they introduce two new trade-offs: First, they assign uniform importance to all comparisons, failing to adaptively focus on hard-to-rank samples. Second, they employ static ranking margins, which fail to reflect the varying semantic distances between sentiment groups. To address this, we propose a Two-Stage Group-wise Ranking and Calibration Framework (GRCF) that adapts the philosophy of Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Our framework resolves these trade-offs by simultaneously preserving relative ordinal structure, ensuring absolute score calibration, and adaptively focusing on difficult samples. Specifically, Stage 1 introduces a GRPO-inspired Advantage-Weighted Dynamic Margin Ranking Loss to build a fine-grained ordinal structure. Stage 2 then employs an MAE-driven objective to align prediction magnitudes. To validate its generalizability, we extend GRCF to classification tasks, including multimodal humor detection and sarcasm detection. GRCF achieves state-of-the-art performance on core regression benchmarks, while also showing strong generalizability in classification tasks.

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### Sim2real Image Translation Enables Viewpoint-Robust Policies from Fixed-Camera Datasets

Authors: Jeremiah Coholich, Justin Wit, Robert Azarcon, Zsolt Kira
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09605v3

Vision-based policies for robot manipulation have achieved significant recent success, but are still brittle to distribution shifts such as camera viewpoint variations. Robot demonstration data is scarce and often lacks appropriate variation in camera viewpoints. Simulation offers a way to collect robot demonstrations at scale with comprehensive coverage of different viewpoints, but presents a visual sim2real challenge. To bridge this gap, we propose MANGO -- an unpaired image translation method with a novel segmentation-conditioned InfoNCE loss, a highly-regularized discriminator design, and a modified PatchNCE loss. We find that these elements are crucial for maintaining viewpoint consistency during sim2real translation. When training MANGO, we only require a small amount of fixed-camera data from the real world, but show that our method can generate diverse unseen viewpoints by translating simulated observations. In this setting, MANGO outperforms all other image translation methods we tested. In certain real-world tabletop manipulation tasks, MANGO augmentation increases shifted-view success rates by over 40 percentage points compared to policies trained without augmentation.

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### Sim2real Image Translation Enables Viewpoint-Robust Policies from Fixed-Camera Datasets

Authors: Jeremiah Coholich, Justin Wit, Robert Azarcon, Zsolt Kira
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09605v1

Vision-based policies for robot manipulation have achieved significant recent success, but are still brittle to distribution shifts such as camera viewpoint variations. Robot demonstration data is scarce and often lacks appropriate variation in camera viewpoints. Simulation offers a way to collect robot demonstrations at scale with comprehensive coverage of different viewpoints, but presents a visual sim2real challenge. To bridge this gap, we propose MANGO -- an unpaired image translation method with a novel segmentation-conditioned InfoNCE loss, a highly-regularized discriminator design, and a modified PatchNCE loss. We find that these elements are crucial for maintaining viewpoint consistency during sim2real translation. When training MANGO, we only require a small amount of fixed-camera data from the real world, but show that our method can generate diverse unseen viewpoints by translating simulated observations. In this domain, MANGO outperforms all other image translation methods we tested. Imitation-learning policies trained on data augmented by MANGO are able to achieve success rates as high as 60\% on views that the non-augmented policy fails completely on.

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### Linear Complexity Self-Supervised Learning for Music Understanding with Random Quantizer

Authors: Petros Vavaroutsos, Theodoros Palamas, Pantelis Vikatos
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09603v1

In recent years, foundation models have become very popular due to their exceptional performance, mainly in natural language (NLP) tasks where they were first introduced. These models usually consist of hundreds of millions, or even billions, of parameters, making them resource-intensive during training and in production systems, leading to increased costs. This paper focuses on the reduction of a foundation's model size when applied to music information retrieval (MIR) tasks. Our research combines the Branchformer architecture with SummaryMixing, which were first applied in speech recognition, along with a random quantization process. To facilitate reproducibility, we conduct pre-training on publicly available datasets, complemented by a proprietary dataset comparable in scale to other private datasets reported in the literature. We ensure robust evaluation by using a framework consisting of a variety of downstream MIR tasks. Our results show that our architecture achieves competitive performance when compared with other state-of-the-art models that use multi-head self-attention, while reducing the model size from 8.5% up to 12.3%.

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### Iterative Differential Entropy Minimization (IDEM) method for fine rigid pairwise 3D Point Cloud Registration: A Focus on the Metric

Authors: Emmanuele Barberi, Felice Sfravara, Filippo Cucinotta
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09601v1

Point cloud registration is a central theme in computer vision, with alignment algorithms continuously improving for greater robustness. Commonly used methods evaluate Euclidean distances between point clouds and minimize an objective function, such as Root Mean Square Error (RMSE). However, these approaches are most effective when the point clouds are well-prealigned and issues such as differences in density, noise, holes, and limited overlap can compromise the results. Traditional methods, such as Iterative Closest Point (ICP), require choosing one point cloud as fixed, since Euclidean distances lack commutativity. When only one point cloud has issues, adjustments can be made, but in real scenarios, both point clouds may be affected, often necessitating preprocessing. The authors introduce a novel differential entropy-based metric, designed to serve as the objective function within an optimization framework for fine rigid pairwise 3D point cloud registration, denoted as Iterative Differential Entropy Minimization (IDEM). This metric does not depend on the choice of a fixed point cloud and, during transformations, reveals a clear minimum corresponding to the best alignment. Multiple case studies are conducted, and the results are compared with those obtained using RMSE, Chamfer distance, and Hausdorff distance. The proposed metric proves effective even with density differences, noise, holes, and partial overlap, where RMSE does not always yield optimal alignment.

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### Information Access of the Oppressed: Freirean Design for Emancipatory Information Access

Authors: Bhaskar Mitra, Nicola Neophytou, Sireesh Gururaja
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI, cs.HC, cs.IR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09600v3

Online information access (IA) platforms are targets of authoritarian capture. We explore the question of how to safeguard our platforms and ensure emancipatory outcomes through the lens of Paulo Freire's theories of emancipatory pedagogy. Freire's theories provide a radically different lens for exploring IA's sociotechnical concerns relative to the current dominating frames of fairness, accountability, and transparency. We make explicit, with the intention to challenge, the technologist-user dichotomy in IA platform development that mirrors the teacher-student relation in Freire's analysis. By extending Freire's analysis to IA, we critique the technologists-as-liberator frame where it is the burden of (altruistic) technologists to mitigate the risks of emerging technologies for marginalized communities. Instead, we advocate for Freirean Design whose goal is to structurally expose the platform for co-option and co-construction by community members in aid of their emancipatory struggles.

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### Information Access of the Oppressed: A Problem-Posing Framework for Envisioning Emancipatory Information Access Platforms

Authors: Bhaskar Mitra, Nicola Neophytou, Sireesh Gururaja
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI, cs.HC, cs.IR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09600v1

Online information access (IA) platforms are targets of authoritarian capture. These concerns are particularly serious and urgent today in light of the rising levels of democratic erosion worldwide, the emerging capabilities of generative AI technologies such as AI persuasion, and the increasing concentration of economic and political power in the hands of Big Tech. This raises the question of what alternative IA infrastructure we must reimagine and build to mitigate the risks of authoritarian capture of our information ecosystems. We explore this question through the lens of Paulo Freire's theories of emancipatory pedagogy. Freire's theories provide a radically different lens for exploring IA's sociotechnical concerns relative to the current dominating frames of fairness, accountability, confidentiality, transparency, and safety. We make explicit, with the intention to challenge, the dichotomy of how we relate to technology as either technologists (who envision and build technology) and its users. We posit that this mirrors the teacher-student relationship in Freire's analysis. By extending Freire's analysis to IA, we challenge the notion that it is the burden of the (altruistic) technologists to come up with interventions to mitigate the risks that emerging technologies pose to marginalized communities. Instead, we advocate that the first task for the technologists is to pose these as problems to the marginalized communities, to encourage them to make and unmake the technology as part of their material struggle against oppression. Their second task is to redesign our online technology stacks to structurally expose spaces for community members to co-opt and co-construct the technology in aid of their emancipatory struggles. We operationalize Freire's theories to develop a problem-posing framework for envisioning emancipatory IA platforms of the future.

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### Improving CMA-ES Convergence Speed, Efficiency, and Reliability in Noisy Robot Optimization Problems

Authors: Russell M. Martin, Steven H. Collins
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.NE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09594v1

Experimental robot optimization often requires evaluating each candidate policy for seconds to minutes. The chosen evaluation time influences optimization because of a speed-accuracy tradeoff: shorter evaluations enable faster iteration, but are also more subject to noise. Here, we introduce a supplement to the CMA-ES optimization algorithm, named Adaptive Sampling CMA-ES (AS-CMA), which assigns sampling time to candidates based on predicted sorting difficulty, aiming to achieve consistent precision. We compared AS-CMA to CMA-ES and Bayesian optimization using a range of static sampling times in four simulated cost landscapes. AS-CMA converged on 98% of all runs without adjustment to its tunable parameter, and converged 24-65% faster and with 29-76% lower total cost than each landscape's best CMA-ES static sampling time. As compared to Bayesian optimization, AS-CMA converged more efficiently and reliably in complex landscapes, while in simpler landscapes, AS-CMA was less efficient but equally reliable. We deployed AS-CMA in an exoskeleton optimization experiment and found the optimizer's behavior was consistent with expectations. These results indicate that AS-CMA can improve optimization efficiency in the presence of noise while minimally affecting optimization setup complexity and tuning requirements.

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### Energy-Entropy Regularization: The True Power of Minimal Looped Transformers

Authors: Wai-Lun Lam
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09588v2

Recent research suggests that looped Transformers have superior reasoning capabilities compared to standard deep architectures. Current approaches to training single-head looped architectures on benchmark tasks frequently fail or yield suboptimal performance due to a highly non-convex and irregular loss landscape. In these settings, optimization often stagnates in poor local minima and saddle points of the loss landscape, preventing the model from discovering the global minimum point. The internal mechanisms of these single-head looped transformer models remain poorly understood, and training them from scratch remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel training framework that leverages Tsallis entropy and Hamiltonian dynamics to transform the geometry of the loss landscape. By treating the parameter updates as a physical flow, we successfully trained a single-head looped Transformer with model dimension $d = 8$ to solve induction head task with input sequence length of 1000 tokens. This success reveals the internal mechanism behind the superior reasoning capability.

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### Energy-Entropy Regularization: The True Power of Minimal Looped Transformers

Authors: Wai-Lun Lam
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09588v1

Recent research suggests that looped Transformers have superior reasoning capabilities compared to standard deep architectures. Current approaches to training single-head looped architectures on benchmark tasks frequently fail or yield suboptimal performance due to a highly non-convex and irregular loss landscape. In these settings, optimization often stagnates in poor local minima and saddle points of the loss landscape, preventing the model from discovering the global minimum point. The internal mechanisms of these single-head looped transformer models remain poorly understood, and training them from scratch remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel training framework that leverages Tsallis entropy and Hamiltonian dynamics to transform the geometry of the loss landscape. By treating the parameter updates as a physical flow, we successfully trained a single-head looped Transformer with model dimension $d = 8$ to solve induction head task with input sequence length of 1000 tokens. This success reveals the internal mechanism behind the superior reasoning capability.

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### Show, don't tell -- Providing Visual Error Feedback for Handwritten Documents

Authors: Said Yasin, Torsten Zesch
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09586v1

Handwriting remains an essential skill, particularly in education. Therefore, providing visual feedback on handwritten documents is an important but understudied area. We outline the many challenges when going from an image of handwritten input to correctly placed informative error feedback. We empirically compare modular and end-to-end systems and find that both approaches currently do not achieve acceptable overall quality. We identify the major challenges and outline an agenda for future research.

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### Constraint- and Score-Based Nonlinear Granger Causality Discovery with Kernels

Authors: Fiona Murphy, Alessio Benavoli
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09579v1

Kernel-based methods are used in the context of Granger Causality to enable the identification of nonlinear causal relationships between time series variables. In this paper, we show that two state of the art kernel-based Granger Causality (GC) approaches can be theoretically unified under the framework of Kernel Principal Component Regression (KPCR), and introduce a method based on this unification, demonstrating that this approach can improve causal identification. Additionally, we introduce a Gaussian Process score-based model with Smooth Information Criterion penalisation on the marginal likelihood, and demonstrate improved performance over existing state of the art time-series nonlinear causal discovery methods. Furthermore, we propose a contemporaneous causal identification algorithm, fully based on GC, using the proposed score-based $GP_{SIC}$ method, and compare its performance to a state of the art contemporaneous time series causal discovery algorithm.

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### Multimodal Signal Processing For Thermo-Visible-Lidar Fusion In Real-time 3D Semantic Mapping

Authors: Jiajun Sun, Yangyi Ou, Haoyuan Zheng, Chao yang, Yue Ma
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09578v1

In complex environments, autonomous robot navigation and environmental perception pose higher requirements for SLAM technology. This paper presents a novel method for semantically enhancing 3D point cloud maps with thermal information. By first performing pixel-level fusion of visible and infrared images, the system projects real-time LiDAR point clouds onto this fused image stream. It then segments heat source features in the thermal channel to instantly identify high temperature targets and applies this temperature information as a semantic layer on the final 3D map. This approach generates maps that not only have accurate geometry but also possess a critical semantic understanding of the environment, making it highly valuable for specific applications like rapid disaster assessment and industrial preventive maintenance.

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### Permutation Matching Under Parikh Budgets: Linear-Time Detection, Packing, and Disjoint Selection

Authors: MD Nazmul Alam Shanto, Md. Tanzeem Rahat, Md. Manzurul Hasan
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.DS, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09577v1

We study permutation (jumbled/Abelian) pattern matching over a general alphabet $Σ$. Given a pattern P of length m and a text T of length n, the classical task is to decide whether T contains a length-m substring whose Parikh vector equals that of P . While this existence problem admits a linear-time sliding-window solution, many practical applications require optimization and packing variants beyond mere detection. We present a unified sliding-window framework based on maintaining the Parikh-vector difference between P and the current window of T , enabling permutation matching in O(n + σ) time and O(σ) space, where σ = |Σ|. Building on this foundation, we introduce a combinatorial-optimization variant that we call Maximum Feasible Substring under Pattern Supply (MFSP): find the longest substring S of T whose symbol counts are component-wise bounded by those of P . We show that MFSP can also be solved in O(n + σ) time via a two-pointer feasibility maintenance algorithm, providing an exact packing interpretation of P as a resource budget. Finally, we address non-overlapping occurrence selection by modeling each permutation match as an equal-length interval and proving that a greedy earliest-finishing strategy yields a maximum-cardinality set of disjoint matches, computable in linear time once all matches are enumerated. Our results provide concise, provably correct algorithms with tight bounds, and connect frequency-based string matching to packing-style optimization primitives.

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### OpenVoxel: Training-Free Grouping and Captioning Voxels for Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Understanding

Authors: Sheng-Yu Huang, Jaesung Choe, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang, Cheng Sun
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09575v1

We propose OpenVoxel, a training-free algorithm for grouping and captioning sparse voxels for the open-vocabulary 3D scene understanding tasks. Given the sparse voxel rasterization (SVR) model obtained from multi-view images of a 3D scene, our OpenVoxel is able to produce meaningful groups that describe different objects in the scene. Also, by leveraging powerful Vision Language Models (VLMs) and Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), our OpenVoxel successfully build an informative scene map by captioning each group, enabling further 3D scene understanding tasks such as open-vocabulary segmentation (OVS) or referring expression segmentation (RES). Unlike previous methods, our method is training-free and does not introduce embeddings from a CLIP/BERT text encoder. Instead, we directly proceed with text-to-text search using MLLMs. Through extensive experiments, our method demonstrates superior performance compared to recent studies, particularly in complex referring expression segmentation (RES) tasks. The code will be open.

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### Trustworthy Longitudinal Brain MRI Completion: A Deformation-Based Approach with KAN-Enhanced Diffusion Model

Authors: Tianli Tao, Ziyang Wang, Delong Yang, Han Zhang, Le Zhang
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09572v2

Longitudinal brain MRI is essential for lifespan study, yet high attrition rates often lead to missing data, complicating analysis. Deep generative models have been explored, but most rely solely on image intensity, leading to two key limitations: 1) the fidelity or trustworthiness of the generated brain images are limited, making downstream studies questionable; 2) the usage flexibility is restricted due to fixed guidance rooted in the model structure, restricting full ability to versatile application scenarios. To address these challenges, we introduce DF-DiffCom, a Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN)-enhanced diffusion model that smartly leverages deformation fields for trustworthy longitudinal brain image completion. Trained on OASIS-3, DF-DiffCom outperforms state-of-the-art methods, improving PSNR by 5.6% and SSIM by 0.12. More importantly, its modality-agnostic nature allows smooth extension to varied MRI modalities, even to attribute maps such as brain tissue segmentation results.

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### Trustworthy Longitudinal Brain MRI Completion: A Deformation-Based Approach with KAN-Enhanced Diffusion Model

Authors: Tianli Tao, Ziyang Wang, Delong Yang, Han Zhang, Le Zhang
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09572v1

Longitudinal brain MRI is essential for lifespan study, yet high attrition rates often lead to missing data, complicating analysis. Deep generative models have been explored, but most rely solely on image intensity, leading to two key limitations: 1) the fidelity or trustworthiness of the generated brain images are limited, making downstream studies questionable; 2) the usage flexibility is restricted due to fixed guidance rooted in the model structure, restricting full ability to versatile application scenarios. To address these challenges, we introduce DF-DiffCom, a Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN)-enhanced diffusion model that smartly leverages deformation fields for trustworthy longitudinal brain image completion. Trained on OASIS-3, DF-DiffCom outperforms state-of-the-art methods, improving PSNR by 5.6% and SSIM by 0.12. More importantly, its modality-agnostic nature allows smooth extension to varied MRI modalities, even to attribute maps such as brain tissue segmentation results.

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### Dialogue Telemetry: Turn-Level Instrumentation for Autonomous Information Gathering

Authors: Dimitris Panagopoulos, Adolfo Perrusquia, Weisi Guo
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09570v1

Autonomous systems conducting schema-grounded information-gathering dialogues face an instrumentation gap, lacking turn-level observables for monitoring acquisition efficiency and detecting when questioning becomes unproductive. We introduce Dialogue Telemetry (DT), a measurement framework that produces two model-agnostic signals after each question-answer exchange: (i) a Progress Estimator (PE) quantifying residual information potential per category (with a bits-based variant), and (ii) a Stalling Index (SI) detecting an observable failure signature characterized by repeated category probing with semantically similar, low-marginal-gain responses. SI flags this pattern without requiring causal diagnosis, supporting monitoring in settings where attributing degradation to specific causes may be impractical. We validate DT in controlled search-and-rescue (SAR)-inspired interviews using large language model (LLM)-based simulations, distinguishing efficient from stalled dialogue traces and illustrating downstream utility by integrating DT signals into a reinforcement learning (RL) policy. Across these settings, DT provides interpretable turn-level instrumentation that improves policy performance when stalling carries operational costs.

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### Hot-Start Chinese Language Modeling:Visual Glyphs Accelerate Sample-Efficient Learning

Authors: Shuyang Xiang, Hao Guan
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09566v4

In this work, we study whether rendering Chinese characters as visual glyph images, rather than discrete token IDs as mainstream LLMs do, providing an inductive bias for character-level language modeling. Our central finding gives a double-edged insight: visual inputs produce a pronounced hot-start effect, more than doubling early-stage accuracy within the first epoch (at 0.4% of total training steps) (12.3% visual inputs vs. 5.8% index-based baseline), yet both approaches converge to essentially identical final accuracy (39%). This pattern holds across resolutions as low as 8x8 pixels, partial cropping up to 50%, and model scales from 110M to 1.78B parameters. The mechanism we identify is that glyph rendering pre-encodes radical-based structure into embedding space before any training (cosine similarity 0.27 vs. 0.002 for random embeddings), enabling faster alignment but not higher final capacity. Our results clarify both the promise and fundamental limitation of visual representations as inductive biases for Chinese language modeling.

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### Hot-Start from Pixels: Low-Resolution Visual Tokens for Chinese Language Modeling

Authors: Shuyang Xiang, Hao Guan
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09566v1

Large language models typically represent Chinese characters as discrete index-based tokens, largely ignoring their visual form. For logographic scripts, visual structure carries semantic and phonetic information, which may aid prediction. We investigate whether low-resolution visual inputs can serve as an alternative for character-level modeling. Instead of token IDs, our decoder receives grayscale images of individual characters, with resolutions as low as $8 \times 8$ pixels. Remarkably, these inputs achieve 39.2\% accuracy, comparable to the index-based baseline of 39.1\%. Such low-resource settings also exhibit a pronounced \emph{hot-start} effect: by 0.4\% of total training, accuracy reaches above 12\%, while index-based models lag at below 6\%. Overall, our results demonstrate that minimal visual structure can provide a robust and efficient signal for Chinese language modeling, offering an alternative perspective on character representation that complements traditional index-based approaches.

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### SiliconHealth: A Complete Low-Cost Blockchain Healthcare Infrastructure for Resource-Constrained Regions Using Repurposed Bitcoin Mining ASICs

Authors: Francisco Angulo de Lafuente, Seid Mehammed Abdu, Nirmal Tej
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.NE, cs.CR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09557v2

This paper presents SiliconHealth, a comprehensive blockchain-based healthcare infrastructure designed for resource-constrained regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa. We demonstrate that obsolete Bitcoin mining Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) can be repurposed to create a secure, low-cost, and energy-efficient medical records system. The proposed architecture employs a four-tier hierarchical network: regional hospitals using Antminer S19 Pro (90+ TH/s), urban health centers with Antminer S9 (14 TH/s), rural clinics equipped with Lucky Miner LV06 (500 GH/s, 13W), and mobile health points with portable ASIC devices. We introduce the Deterministic Hardware Fingerprinting (DHF) paradigm, which repurposes SHA-256 mining ASICs as cryptographic proof generators, achieving 100% verification rate across 23 test proofs during 300-second validation sessions. The system incorporates Reed-Solomon LSB watermarking for medical image authentication with 30-40% damage tolerance, semantic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for intelligent medical record queries, and offline synchronization protocols for intermittent connectivity. Economic analysis demonstrates 96% cost reduction compared to GPU-based alternatives, with total deployment cost of $847 per rural clinic including 5-year solar power infrastructure. Validation experiments on Lucky Miner LV06 (BM1366 chip, 5nm) achieve 2.93 MH/W efficiency and confirm hardware universality. This work establishes a practical framework for deploying verifiable, tamper-proof electronic health records in regions where traditional healthcare IT infrastructure is economically unfeasible, potentially benefiting over 600 million people lacking access to basic health information systems.

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### SiliconHealth: A Complete Low-Cost Blockchain Healthcare Infrastructure for Resource-Constrained Regions Using Repurposed Bitcoin Mining ASICs

Authors: Francisco Angulo de Lafuente, Seid Mehammed Abdu, Nirmal Tej
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.NE, cs.CR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09557v1

This paper presents SiliconHealth, a comprehensive blockchain-based healthcare infrastructure designed for resource-constrained regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa. We demonstrate that obsolete Bitcoin mining Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) can be repurposed to create a secure, low-cost, and energy-efficient medical records system. The proposed architecture employs a four-tier hierarchical network: regional hospitals using Antminer S19 Pro (90+ TH/s), urban health centers with Antminer S9 (14 TH/s), rural clinics equipped with Lucky Miner LV06 (500 GH/s, 13W), and mobile health points with portable ASIC devices. We introduce the Deterministic Hardware Fingerprinting (DHF) paradigm, which repurposes SHA-256 mining ASICs as cryptographic proof generators, achieving 100% verification rate across 23 test proofs during 300-second validation sessions. The system incorporates Reed-Solomon LSB watermarking for medical image authentication with 30-40% damage tolerance, semantic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for intelligent medical record queries, and offline synchronization protocols for intermittent connectivity. Economic analysis demonstrates 96% cost reduction compared to GPU-based alternatives, with total deployment cost of $847 per rural clinic including 5-year solar power infrastructure. Validation experiments on Lucky Miner LV06 (BM1366 chip, 5nm) achieve 2.93 MH/W efficiency and confirm hardware universality. This work establishes a practical framework for deploying verifiable, tamper-proof electronic health records in regions where traditional healthcare IT infrastructure is economically unfeasible, potentially benefiting over 600 million people lacking access to basic health information systems.

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### Benchmarking Post-Training Quantization of Large Language Models under Microscaling Floating Point Formats

Authors: Manyi Zhang, Ji-Fu Li, Zhongao Sun, Haoli Bai, Hui-Ling Zhen, Zhenhua Dong, Xianzhi Yu
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09555v1

Microscaling Floating-Point (MXFP) has emerged as a promising low-precision format for large language models (LLMs). Despite various post-training quantization (PTQ) algorithms being proposed, they mostly focus on integer quantization, while their applicability and behavior under MXFP formats remain largely unexplored. To address this gap, this work conducts a systematic investigation of PTQ under MXFP formats, encompassing over 7 PTQ algorithms, 15 evaluation benchmarks, and 3 LLM families. The key findings include: 1) MXFP8 consistently achieves near-lossless performance, while MXFP4 introduces substantial accuracy degradation and remains challenging; 2) PTQ effectiveness under MXFP depends strongly on format compatibility, with some algorithmic paradigms being consistently more effective than others; 3) PTQ performance exhibits highly consistent trends across model families and modalities, in particular, quantization sensitivity is dominated by the language model rather than the vision encoder in multimodal LLMs; 4) The scaling factor of quantization is a critical error source in MXFP4, and a simple pre-scale optimization strategy can significantly mitigate its impact. Together, these results provide practical guidance on adapting existing PTQ methods to MXFP quantization.

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### Omni-R1: Towards the Unified Generative Paradigm for Multimodal Reasoning

Authors: Dongjie Cheng, Yongqi Li, Zhixin Ma, Hongru Cai, Yupeng Hu, Wenjie Wang, Liqiang Nie, Wenjie Li
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09536v2

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are making significant progress in multimodal reasoning. Early approaches focus on pure text-based reasoning. More recent studies have incorporated multimodal information into the reasoning steps; however, they often follow a single task-specific reasoning pattern, which limits their generalizability across various multimodal tasks. In fact, there are numerous multimodal tasks requiring diverse reasoning skills, such as zooming in on a specific region or marking an object within an image. To address this, we propose unified generative multimodal reasoning, which unifies diverse multimodal reasoning skills by generating intermediate images during the reasoning process. We instantiate this paradigm with Omni-R1, a two-stage SFT+RL framework featuring perception alignment loss and perception reward, thereby enabling functional image generation. Additionally, we introduce Omni-R1-Zero, which eliminates the need for multimodal annotations by bootstrapping step-wise visualizations from text-only reasoning data. Empirical results show that Omni-R1 achieves unified generative reasoning across a wide range of multimodal tasks, and Omni-R1-Zero can match or even surpass Omni-R1 on average, suggesting a promising direction for generative multimodal reasoning.

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### Omni-R1: Towards the Unified Generative Paradigm for Multimodal Reasoning

Authors: Dongjie Cheng, Yongqi Li, Zhixin Ma, Hongru Cai, Yupeng Hu, Wenjie Wang, Liqiang Nie, Wenjie Li
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09536v1

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are making significant progress in multimodal reasoning. Early approaches focus on pure text-based reasoning. More recent studies have incorporated multimodal information into the reasoning steps; however, they often follow a single task-specific reasoning pattern, which limits their generalizability across various multimodal tasks. In fact, there are numerous multimodal tasks requiring diverse reasoning skills, such as zooming in on a specific region or marking an object within an image. To address this, we propose unified generative multimodal reasoning, which unifies diverse multimodal reasoning skills by generating intermediate images during the reasoning process. We instantiate this paradigm with Omni-R1, a two-stage SFT+RL framework featuring perception alignment loss and perception reward, thereby enabling functional image generation. Additionally, we introduce Omni-R1-Zero, which eliminates the need for multimodal annotations by bootstrapping step-wise visualizations from text-only reasoning data. Empirical results show that Omni-R1 achieves unified generative reasoning across a wide range of multimodal tasks, and Omni-R1-Zero can match or even surpass Omni-R1 on average, suggesting a promising direction for generative multimodal reasoning.

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### Residual Power Flow for Neural Solvers

Authors: Jochen Stiasny, Jochen Cremer
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: eess.SY, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09533v1

The energy transition challenges operational tasks based on simulations and optimisation. These computations need to be fast and flexible as the grid is ever-expanding, and renewables' uncertainty requires a flexible operational environment. Learned approximations, proxies or surrogates -- we refer to them as Neural Solvers -- excel in terms of evaluation speed, but are inflexible with respect to adjusting to changing tasks. Hence, neural solvers are usually applicable to highly specific tasks, which limits their usefulness in practice; a widely reusable, foundational neural solver is required. Therefore, this work proposes the Residual Power Flow (RPF) formulation. RPF formulates residual functions based on Kirchhoff's laws to quantify the infeasibility of an operating condition. The minimisation of the residuals determines the voltage solution; an additional slack variable is needed to achieve AC-feasibility. RPF forms a natural, foundational subtask of tasks subject to power flow constraints. We propose to learn RPF with neural solvers to exploit their speed. Furthermore, RPF improves learning performance compared to common power flow formulations. To solve operational tasks, we integrate the neural solver in a Predict-then-Optimise (PO) approach to combine speed and flexibility. The case study investigates the IEEE 9-bus system and three tasks (AC Optimal Power Flow (OPF), power-flow and quasi-steady state power flow) solved by PO. The results demonstrate the accuracy and flexibility of learning with RPF.

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### Bipartite Mode Matching for Vision Training Set Search from a Hierarchical Data Server

Authors: Yue Yao, Ruining Yang, Tom Gedeon
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09531v1

We explore a situation in which the target domain is accessible, but real-time data annotation is not feasible. Instead, we would like to construct an alternative training set from a large-scale data server so that a competitive model can be obtained. For this problem, because the target domain usually exhibits distinct modes (i.e., semantic clusters representing data distribution), if the training set does not contain these target modes, the model performance would be compromised. While prior existing works improve algorithms iteratively, our research explores the often-overlooked potential of optimizing the structure of the data server. Inspired by the hierarchical nature of web search engines, we introduce a hierarchical data server, together with a bipartite mode matching algorithm (BMM) to align source and target modes. For each target mode, we look in the server data tree for the best mode match, which might be large or small in size. Through bipartite matching, we aim for all target modes to be optimally matched with source modes in a one-on-one fashion. Compared with existing training set search algorithms, we show that the matched server modes constitute training sets that have consistently smaller domain gaps with the target domain across object re-identification (re-ID) and detection tasks. Consequently, models trained on our searched training sets have higher accuracy than those trained otherwise. BMM allows data-centric unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) orthogonal to existing model-centric UDA methods. By combining the BMM with existing UDA methods like pseudo-labeling, further improvement is observed.

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### GlovEgo-HOI: Bridging the Synthetic-to-Real Gap for Industrial Egocentric Human-Object Interaction Detection

Authors: Alfio Spoto, Rosario Leonardi, Francesco Ragusa, Giovanni Maria Farinella
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09528v1

Egocentric Human-Object Interaction (EHOI) analysis is crucial for industrial safety, yet the development of robust models is hindered by the scarcity of annotated domain-specific data. We address this challenge by introducing a data generation framework that combines synthetic data with a diffusion-based process to augment real-world images with realistic Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). We present GlovEgo-HOI, a new benchmark dataset for industrial EHOI, and GlovEgo-Net, a model integrating Glove-Head and Keypoint- Head modules to leverage hand pose information for enhanced interaction detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed data generation framework and GlovEgo-Net. To foster further research, we release the GlovEgo-HOI dataset, augmentation pipeline, and pre-trained models at: GitHub project.

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### Private LLM Inference on Consumer Blackwell GPUs: A Practical Guide for Cost-Effective Local Deployment in SMEs

Authors: Jonathan Knoop, Hendrik Holtmann
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.PF
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09527v1

SMEs increasingly seek alternatives to cloud LLM APIs, which raise data privacy concerns. Dedicated cloud GPU instances offer improved privacy but with limited guarantees and ongoing costs, while professional on-premise hardware (A100, H100) remains prohibitively expensive. We present a systematic evaluation of NVIDIA's Blackwell consumer GPUs (RTX 5060 Ti, 5070 Ti, 5090) for production LLM inference, benchmarking four open-weight models (Qwen3-8B, Gemma3-12B, Gemma3-27B, GPT-OSS-20B) across 79 configurations spanning quantization formats (BF16, W4A16, NVFP4, MXFP4), context lengths (8k-64k), and three workloads: RAG, multi-LoRA agentic serving, and high-concurrency APIs. The RTX 5090 delivers 3.5-4.6x higher throughput than the 5060 Ti with 21x lower latency for RAG, but budget GPUs achieve the highest throughput-per-dollar for API workloads with sub-second latency. NVFP4 quantization provides 1.6x throughput over BF16 with 41% energy reduction and only 2-4% quality loss. Self-hosted inference costs $0.001-0.04 per million tokens (electricity only), which is 40-200x cheaper than budget-tier cloud APIs, with hardware breaking even in under four months at moderate volume (30M tokens/day). Our results show that consumer GPUs can reliably replace cloud inference for most SME workloads, except latency-critical long-context RAG, where high-end GPUs remain essential. We provide deployment guidance and release all benchmark data for reproducible SME-scale deployments.

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### Video Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures for Facial Expression Recognition

Authors: Lennart Eing, Cristina Luna-Jiménez, Silvan Mertes, Elisabeth André
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV, cs.HC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09524v1

This paper introduces a novel application of Video Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (V-JEPAs) for Facial Expression Recognition (FER). Departing from conventional pre-training methods for video understanding that rely on pixel-level reconstructions, V-JEPAs learn by predicting embeddings of masked regions from the embeddings of unmasked regions. This enables the trained encoder to not capture irrelevant information about a given video like the color of a region of pixels in the background. Using a pre-trained V-JEPA video encoder, we train shallow classifiers using the RAVDESS and CREMA-D datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance on RAVDESS and outperforming all other vision-based methods on CREMA-D (+1.48 WAR). Furthermore, cross-dataset evaluations reveal strong generalization capabilities, demonstrating the potential of purely embedding-based pre-training approaches to advance FER. We release our code at https://github.com/lennarteingunia/vjepa-for-fer.

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### Class Adaptive Conformal Training

Authors: Badr-Eddine Marani, Julio Silva-Rodriguez, Ismail Ben Ayed, Maria Vakalopoulou, Stergios Christodoulidis, Jose Dolz
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09522v1

Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable success across a variety of tasks, yet they often suffer from unreliable probability estimates. As a result, they can be overconfident in their predictions. Conformal Prediction (CP) offers a principled framework for uncertainty quantification, yielding prediction sets with rigorous coverage guarantees. Existing conformal training methods optimize for overall set size, but shaping the prediction sets in a class-conditional manner is not straightforward and typically requires prior knowledge of the data distribution. In this work, we introduce Class Adaptive Conformal Training (CaCT), which formulates conformal training as an augmented Lagrangian optimization problem that adaptively learns to shape prediction sets class-conditionally without making any distributional assumptions. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets, including standard and long-tailed image recognition as well as text classification, demonstrate that CaCT consistently outperforms prior conformal training methods, producing significantly smaller and more informative prediction sets while maintaining the desired coverage guarantees.

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### Towards Realistic Synthetic Data for Automatic Drum Transcription

Authors: Pierfrancesco Melucci, Paolo Merialdo, Taketo Akama
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09520v1

Deep learning models define the state-of-the-art in Automatic Drum Transcription (ADT), yet their performance is contingent upon large-scale, paired audio-MIDI datasets, which are scarce. Existing workarounds that use synthetic data often introduce a significant domain gap, as they typically rely on low-fidelity SoundFont libraries that lack acoustic diversity. While high-quality one-shot samples offer a better alternative, they are not available in a standardized, large-scale format suitable for training. This paper introduces a new paradigm for ADT that circumvents the need for paired audio-MIDI training data. Our primary contribution is a semi-supervised method to automatically curate a large and diverse corpus of one-shot drum samples from unlabeled audio sources. We then use this corpus to synthesize a high-quality dataset from MIDI files alone, which we use to train a sequence-to-sequence transcription model. We evaluate our model on the ENST and MDB test sets, where it achieves new state-of-the-art results, significantly outperforming both fully supervised methods and previous synthetic-data approaches. The code for reproducing our experiments is publicly available at https://github.com/pier-maker92/ADT_STR

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### Learning Whole-Body Human-Humanoid Interaction from Human-Human Demonstrations

Authors: Wei-Jin Huang, Yue-Yi Zhang, Yi-Lin Wei, Zhi-Wei Xia, Juantao Tan, Yuan-Ming Li, Zhilin Zhao, Wei-Shi Zheng
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09518v1

Enabling humanoid robots to physically interact with humans is a critical frontier, but progress is hindered by the scarcity of high-quality Human-Humanoid Interaction (HHoI) data. While leveraging abundant Human-Human Interaction (HHI) data presents a scalable alternative, we first demonstrate that standard retargeting fails by breaking the essential contacts. We address this with PAIR (Physics-Aware Interaction Retargeting), a contact-centric, two-stage pipeline that preserves contact semantics across morphology differences to generate physically consistent HHoI data. This high-quality data, however, exposes a second failure: conventional imitation learning policies merely mimic trajectories and lack interactive understanding. We therefore introduce D-STAR (Decoupled Spatio-Temporal Action Reasoner), a hierarchical policy that disentangles when to act from where to act. In D-STAR, Phase Attention (when) and a Multi-Scale Spatial module (where) are fused by the diffusion head to produce synchronized whole-body behaviors beyond mimicry. By decoupling these reasoning streams, our model learns robust temporal phases without being distracted by spatial noise, leading to responsive, synchronized collaboration. We validate our framework through extensive and rigorous simulations, demonstrating significant performance gains over baseline approaches and a complete, effective pipeline for learning complex whole-body interactions from HHI data.

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### SERM: Self-Evolving Relevance Model with Agent-Driven Learning from Massive Query Streams

Authors: Chenglong Wang, Canjia Li, Xingzhao Zhu, Yifu Huo, Huiyu Wang, Weixiong Lin, Yun Yang, Qiaozhi He, Tianhua Zhou, Xiaojia Chang, Jingbo Zhu, Tong Xiao
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09515v3

Due to the dynamically evolving nature of real-world query streams, relevance models struggle to generalize to practical search scenarios. A sophisticated solution is self-evolution techniques. However, in large-scale industrial settings with massive query streams, this technique faces two challenges: (1) informative samples are often sparse and difficult to identify, and (2) pseudo-labels generated by the current model could be unreliable. To address these challenges, in this work, we propose a Self-Evolving Relevance Model approach (SERM), which comprises two complementary multi-agent modules: a multi-agent sample miner, designed to detect distributional shifts and identify informative training samples, and a multi-agent relevance annotator, which provides reliable labels through a two-level agreement framework. We evaluate SERM in a large-scale industrial setting, which serves billions of user requests daily. Experimental results demonstrate that SERM can achieve significant performance gains through iterative self-evolution, as validated by extensive offline multilingual evaluations and online testing.

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### SERM: Self-Evolving Relevance Model with Agent-Driven Learning from Massive Query Streams

Authors: Chenglong Wang, Canjia Li, Xingzhao Zhu, Yifu Huo, Huiyu Wang, Weixiong Lin, Yun Yang, Qiaozhi He, Tianhua Zhou, Xiaojia Chang, Jingbo Zhu, Tong Xiao
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09515v1

Due to the dynamically evolving nature of real-world query streams, relevance models struggle to generalize to practical search scenarios. A sophisticated solution is self-evolution techniques. However, in large-scale industrial settings with massive query streams, this technique faces two challenges: (1) informative samples are often sparse and difficult to identify, and (2) pseudo-labels generated by the current model could be unreliable. To address these challenges, in this work, we propose a Self-Evolving Relevance Model approach (SERM), which comprises two complementary multi-agent modules: a multi-agent sample miner, designed to detect distributional shifts and identify informative training samples, and a multi-agent relevance annotator, which provides reliable labels through a two-level agreement framework. We evaluate SERM in a large-scale industrial setting, which serves billions of user requests daily. Experimental results demonstrate that SERM can achieve significant performance gains through iterative self-evolution, as validated by extensive offline multilingual evaluations and online testing.

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### CLARE: Continual Learning for Vision-Language-Action Models via Autonomous Adapter Routing and Expansion

Authors: Ralf Römer, Yi Zhang, Yuming Li, Angela P. Schoellig
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09512v2

To teach robots complex manipulation tasks, a common approach is to fine-tune a pre-trained vision-language-action model (VLA) on task-specific data. However, since this recipe updates existing representations, it is unsuitable for long-term operation in the real world, where robots must continually adapt to new tasks and environments while retaining the knowledge they have already acquired. Existing continual learning methods for robotics commonly require storing previous data (exemplars), struggle with long task sequences, or rely on task identifiers for deployment. To address these limitations, we propose CLARE, a general, parameter-efficient framework for exemplar-free continual learning with VLAs. CLARE introduces lightweight modular adapters into selected VLA modules and autonomously expands the model only where necessary when learning a new task, guided by layer-wise feature similarity. During deployment, an autoencoder-based routing mechanism dynamically activates the most relevant adapters without requiring task labels. Through extensive experiments on the LIBERO benchmark and five real-world tasks, we show that CLARE achieves high performance on new tasks without catastrophic forgetting of earlier tasks, significantly outperforming even exemplar-based methods. Code, data, and videos are available at our website: https://tum-lsy.github.io/clare.

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### CLARE: Continual Learning for Vision-Language-Action Models via Autonomous Adapter Routing and Expansion

Authors: Ralf Römer, Yi Zhang, Angela P. Schoellig
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09512v1

To teach robots complex manipulation tasks, it is now a common practice to fine-tune a pre-trained vision-language-action model (VLA) on task-specific data. However, since this recipe updates existing representations, it is unsuitable for long-term operation in the real world, where robots must continually adapt to new tasks and environments while retaining the knowledge they have already acquired. Existing continual learning methods for robotics commonly require storing previous data (exemplars), struggle with long task sequences, or rely on task identifiers for deployment. To address these limitations, we propose CLARE, a general, parameter-efficient framework for exemplar-free continual learning with VLAs. CLARE introduces lightweight modular adapters into selected feedforward layers and autonomously expands the model only where necessary when learning a new task, guided by layer-wise feature similarity. During deployment, an autoencoder-based routing mechanism dynamically activates the most relevant adapters without requiring task labels. Through extensive experiments on the LIBERO benchmark, we show that CLARE achieves high performance on new tasks without catastrophic forgetting of earlier tasks, significantly outperforming even exemplar-based methods. Code and data are available at https://tum-lsy.github.io/clare.

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### MVSS: A Unified Framework for Multi-View Structured Survey Generation

Authors: Yinqi Liu, Yueqi Zhu, Yongkang Zhang, Feiran Liu, Yutong Shen, Yufei Sun, Xin Wang, Renzhao Liang, Yidong Wang, Cunxiang Wang
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09504v2

Scientific surveys require not only summarizing large bodies of literature, but also organizing them into clear and coherent conceptual structures. However, existing automatic survey generation methods typically focus on linear text generation and struggle to explicitly model hierarchical relations among research topics and structured methodological comparisons, resulting in substantial gaps in structural organization and evidence presentation compared to expert-written surveys. To address this limitation, we propose MVSS, a multi-view structured survey generation framework that jointly generates and aligns citation-grounded hierarchical trees, structured comparison tables, and survey text. MVSS follows a structure-first paradigm: it first constructs a tree that captures the conceptual organization of a research domain, then generates comparison tables constrained by the tree structure, and finally uses both the tree and tables as joint structural constraints to guide outline construction and survey text generation. This design enables complementary and aligned multi-view representations across structure, comparison, and narrative. In addition, we introduce a dedicated evaluation framework that systematically assesses generated surveys from multiple dimensions, including structural quality, comparative completeness, and citation fidelity. Through large-scale experiments on 76 computer science topics, we demonstrate that MVSS significantly outperforms existing methods in survey organization and evidence grounding, and achieves performance comparable to expert-written surveys across multiple evaluation metrics.

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### MVSS: A Unified Framework for Multi-View Structured Survey Generation

Authors: Yinqi Liu, Yueqi Zhu, Yongkang Zhang, Xinfeng Li, Feiran Liu, Yufei Sun, Xin Wang, Renzhao Liang, Yidong Wang, Cunxiang Wang
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09504v1

Scientific surveys require not only summarizing large bodies of literature, but also organizing them into clear and coherent conceptual structures. Existing automatic survey generation methods typically focus on linear text generation and struggle to explicitly model hierarchical relations among research topics and structured methodological comparisons, resulting in gaps in structural organization compared to expert-written surveys. We propose MVSS, a multi-view structured survey generation framework that jointly generates and aligns citation-grounded hierarchical trees, structured comparison tables, and survey text. MVSS follows a structure-first paradigm: it first constructs a conceptual tree of the research domain, then generates comparison tables constrained by the tree, and finally uses both as structural constraints for text generation. This enables complementary multi-view representations across structure, comparison, and narrative. We introduce an evaluation framework assessing structural quality, comparative completeness, and citation fidelity. Experiments on 76 computer science topics show MVSS outperforms existing methods in organization and evidence grounding, achieving performance comparable to expert surveys.

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### What Do LLM Agents Know About Their World? Task2Quiz: A Paradigm for Studying Environment Understanding

Authors: Siyuan Liu, Hongbang Yuan, Xinze Li, Ziyue Zhu, Yixin Cao, Yu-Gang Jiang
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09503v1

Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex decision-making and tool-use tasks, yet their ability to generalize across varying environments remains a under-examined concern. Current evaluation paradigms predominantly rely on trajectory-based metrics that measure task success, while failing to assess whether agents possess a grounded, transferable model of the environment. To address this gap, we propose Task-to-Quiz (T2Q), a deterministic and automated evaluation paradigm designed to decouple task execution from world-state understanding. We instantiate this paradigm in T2QBench, a suite comprising 30 environments and 1,967 grounded QA pairs across multiple difficulty levels. Our extensive experiments reveal that task success is often a poor proxy for environment understanding, and that current memory machanism can not effectively help agents acquire a grounded model of the environment. These findings identify proactive exploration and fine-grained state representation as primary bottlenecks, offering a robust foundation for developing more generalizable autonomous agents.

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### V-DPM: 4D Video Reconstruction with Dynamic Point Maps

Authors: Edgar Sucar, Eldar Insafutdinov, Zihang Lai, Andrea Vedaldi
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09499v1

Powerful 3D representations such as DUSt3R invariant point maps, which encode 3D shape and camera parameters, have significantly advanced feed forward 3D reconstruction. While point maps assume static scenes, Dynamic Point Maps (DPMs) extend this concept to dynamic 3D content by additionally representing scene motion. However, existing DPMs are limited to image pairs and, like DUSt3R, require post processing via optimization when more than two views are involved. We argue that DPMs are more useful when applied to videos and introduce V-DPM to demonstrate this. First, we show how to formulate DPMs for video input in a way that maximizes representational power, facilitates neural prediction, and enables reuse of pretrained models. Second, we implement these ideas on top of VGGT, a recent and powerful 3D reconstructor. Although VGGT was trained on static scenes, we show that a modest amount of synthetic data is sufficient to adapt it into an effective V-DPM predictor. Our approach achieves state of the art performance in 3D and 4D reconstruction for dynamic scenes. In particular, unlike recent dynamic extensions of VGGT such as P3, DPMs recover not only dynamic depth but also the full 3D motion of every point in the scene.

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### Towards Robust Cross-Dataset Object Detection Generalization under Domain Specificity

Authors: Ritabrata Chakraborty, Hrishit Mitra, Shivakumara Palaiahnakote, Umapada Pal
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09497v1

Object detectors often perform well in-distribution, yet degrade sharply on a different benchmark. We study cross-dataset object detection (CD-OD) through a lens of setting specificity. We group benchmarks into setting-agnostic datasets with diverse everyday scenes and setting-specific datasets tied to a narrow environment, and evaluate a standard detector family across all train--test pairs. This reveals a clear structure in CD-OD: transfer within the same setting type is relatively stable, while transfer across setting types drops substantially and is often asymmetric. The most severe breakdowns occur when transferring from specific sources to agnostic targets, and persist after open-label alignment, indicating that domain shift dominates in the hardest regimes. To disentangle domain shift from label mismatch, we compare closed-label transfer with an open-label protocol that maps predicted classes to the nearest target label using CLIP similarity. Open-label evaluation yields consistent but bounded gains, and many corrected cases correspond to semantic near-misses supported by the image evidence. Overall, we provide a principled characterization of CD-OD under setting specificity and practical guidance for evaluating detectors under distribution shift. Code will be released at \href{(https://github.com/Ritabrata04/cdod-icpr.git}{https://github.com/Ritabrata04/cdod-icpr}.

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### Parallelizable memory recurrent units

Authors: Florent De Geeter, Gaspard Lambrechts, Damien Ernst, Guillaume Drion
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09495v3

With the emergence of massively parallel processing units, parallelization has become a desirable property for new sequence models. The ability to parallelize the processing of sequences with respect to the sequence length during training is one of the main factors behind the uprising of the Transformer architecture. However, Transformers lack efficiency at sequence generation, as they need to reprocess all past timesteps at every generation step. Recently, state-space models (SSMs) emerged as a more efficient alternative. These new kinds of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) keep the efficient update of the RNNs while gaining parallelization by getting rid of nonlinear dynamics (or recurrence). SSMs can reach state-of-the art performance through the efficient training of potentially very large networks, but still suffer from limited representation capabilities. In particular, SSMs cannot exhibit persistent memory, or the capacity of retaining information for an infinite duration, because of their monostability. In this paper, we introduce a new family of RNNs, the memory recurrent units (MRUs), that combine the persistent memory capabilities of nonlinear RNNs with the parallelizable computations of SSMs. These units leverage multistability as a source of persistent memory, while getting rid of transient dynamics for efficient computations. We then derive a specific implementation as proof-of-concept: the bistable memory recurrent unit (BMRU). This new RNN is compatible with the parallel scan algorithm. We show that BMRU achieves good results in tasks with long-term dependencies, and can be combined with state-space models to create hybrid networks that are parallelizable and have transient dynamics as well as persistent memory.

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### Parallelizable memory recurrent units

Authors: Florent De Geeter, Gaspard Lambrechts, Damien Ernst, Guillaume Drion
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09495v1

With the emergence of massively parallel processing units, parallelization has become a desirable property for new sequence models. The ability to parallelize the processing of sequences with respect to the sequence length during training is one of the main factors behind the uprising of the Transformer architecture. However, Transformers lack efficiency at sequence generation, as they need to reprocess all past timesteps at every generation step. Recently, state-space models (SSMs) emerged as a more efficient alternative. These new kinds of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) keep the efficient update of the RNNs while gaining parallelization by getting rid of nonlinear dynamics (or recurrence). SSMs can reach state-of-the art performance through the efficient training of potentially very large networks, but still suffer from limited representation capabilities. In particular, SSMs cannot exhibit persistent memory, or the capacity of retaining information for an infinite duration, because of their monostability. In this paper, we introduce a new family of RNNs, the memory recurrent units (MRUs), that combine the persistent memory capabilities of nonlinear RNNs with the parallelizable computations of SSMs. These units leverage multistability as a source of persistent memory, while getting rid of transient dynamics for efficient computations. We then derive a specific implementation as proof-of-concept: the bistable memory recurrent unit (BMRU). This new RNN is compatible with the parallel scan algorithm. We show that BMRU achieves good results in tasks with long-term dependencies, and can be combined with state-space models to create hybrid networks that are parallelizable and have transient dynamics as well as persistent memory.

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### Deep Operator Networks for Surrogate Modeling of Cyclic Adsorption Processes with Varying Initial Conditions

Authors: Beatrice Ceccanti, Mattia Galanti, Ivo Roghair, Martin van Sint Annaland
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09491v1

Deep Operator Networks are emerging as fundamental tools among various neural network types to learn mappings between function spaces, and have recently gained attention due to their ability to approximate nonlinear operators. In particular, DeepONets offer a natural formulation for PDE solving, since the solution of a partial differential equation can be interpreted as an operator mapping an initial condition to its corresponding solution field. In this work, we applied DeepONets in the context of process modeling for adsorption technologies, to assess their feasibility as surrogates for cyclic adsorption process simulation and optimization. The goal is to accelerate convergence of cyclic processes such as Temperature-Vacuum Swing Adsorption (TVSA), which require repeated solution of transient PDEs, which are computationally expensive. Since each step of a cyclic adsorption process starts from the final state of the preceding step, effective surrogate modeling requires generalization across a wide range of initial conditions. The governing equations exhibit steep traveling fronts, providing a demanding benchmark for operator learning. To evaluate functional generalization under these conditions, we construct a mixed training dataset composed of heterogeneous initial conditions and train DeepONets to approximate the corresponding solution operators. The trained models are then tested on initial conditions outside the parameter ranges used during training, as well as on completely unseen functional forms. The results demonstrate accurate predictions both within and beyond the training distribution, highlighting DeepONets as potential efficient surrogates for accelerating cyclic adsorption simulations and optimization workflows.

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### SlidesGen-Bench: Evaluating Slides Generation via Computational and Quantitative Metrics

Authors: Yunqiao Yang, Wenbo Li, Houxing Ren, Zimu Lu, Ke Wang, Zhiyuan Huang, Zhuofan Zong, Mingjie Zhan, Hongsheng Li
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09487v2

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has fostered diverse paradigms for automated slide generation, ranging from code-driven layouts to image-centric synthesis. However, evaluating these heterogeneous systems remains challenging, as existing protocols often struggle to provide comparable scores across architectures or rely on uncalibrated judgments. In this paper, we introduce SlidesGen-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate slide generation through a lens of three core principles: universality, quantification, and reliability. First, to establish a unified evaluation framework, we ground our analysis in the visual domain, treating terminal outputs as renderings to remain agnostic to the underlying generation method. Second, we propose a computational approach that quantitatively assesses slides across three distinct dimensions - Content, Aesthetics, and Editability - offering reproducible metrics where prior works relied on subjective or reference-dependent proxies. Finally, to ensure high correlation with human preference, we construct the Slides-Align1.5k dataset, a human preference aligned dataset covering slides from nine mainstream generation systems across seven scenarios. Our experiments demonstrate that SlidesGen-Bench achieves a higher degree of alignment with human judgment than existing evaluation pipelines. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/YunqiaoYang/SlidesGen-Bench.

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### SlidesGen-Bench: Evaluating Slides Generation via Computational and Quantitative Metrics

Authors: Yunqiao Yang, Wenbo Li, Houxing Ren, Zimu Lu, Ke Wang, Zhiyuan Huang, Zhuofan Zong, Mingjie Zhan, Hongsheng Li
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09487v1

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has fostered diverse paradigms for automated slide generation, ranging from code-driven layouts to image-centric synthesis. However, evaluating these heterogeneous systems remains challenging, as existing protocols often struggle to provide comparable scores across architectures or rely on uncalibrated judgments. In this paper, we introduce SlidesGen-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate slide generation through a lens of three core principles: universality, quantification, and reliability. First, to establish a unified evaluation framework, we ground our analysis in the visual domain, treating terminal outputs as renderings to remain agnostic to the underlying generation method. Second, we propose a computational approach that quantitatively assesses slides across three distinct dimensions - Content, Aesthetics, and Editability - offering reproducible metrics where prior works relied on subjective or reference-dependent proxies. Finally, to ensure high correlation with human preference, we construct the Slides-Align1.5k dataset, a human preference aligned dataset covering slides from nine mainstream generation systems across seven scenarios. Our experiments demonstrate that SlidesGen-Bench achieves a higher degree of alignment with human judgment than existing evaluation pipelines. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/YunqiaoYang/SlidesGen-Bench.

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