# Research Papers — 2026-01 · bundle page 116 of 189

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### See More, Store Less: Memory-Efficient Resolution for Video Moment Retrieval

Authors: Mingyu Jeon, Sungjin Han, Jinkwon Hwang, Minchol Kwon, Jonghee Kim, Junyeong Kim
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09350v1

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have improved image recognition and reasoning, but video-related tasks remain challenging due to memory constraints from dense frame processing. Existing Video Moment Retrieval (VMR) methodologies rely on sparse frame sampling, risking potential information loss, especially in lengthy videos. We propose SMORE (See MORE, store less), a framework that enhances memory efficiency while maintaining high information resolution. SMORE (1) uses query-guided captions to encode semantics aligned with user intent, (2) applies query-aware importance modulation to highlight relevant segments, and (3) adaptively compresses frames to preserve key content while reducing redundancy. This enables efficient video understanding without exceeding memory budgets. Experimental validation reveals that SMORE achieves state-of-the-art performance on QVHighlights, Charades-STA, and ActivityNet-Captions benchmarks.

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### Improving Implicit Hate Speech Detection via a Community-Driven Multi-Agent Framework

Authors: Ewelina Gajewska, Katarzyna Budzynska, Jarosław A Chudziak
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09342v2

This work proposes a contextualised detection framework for implicitly hateful speech, implemented as a multi-agent system comprising a central Moderator Agent and dynamically constructed Community Agents representing specific demographic groups. Our approach explicitly integrates socio-cultural context from publicly available knowledge sources, enabling identity-aware moderation that surpasses state-of-the-art prompting methods (zero-shot prompting, few-shot prompting, chain-of-thought prompting) and alternative approaches on a challenging ToxiGen dataset. We enhance the technical rigour of performance evaluation by incorporating balanced accuracy as a central metric of classification fairness that accounts for the trade-off between true positive and true negative rates. We demonstrate that our community-driven consultative framework significantly improves both classification accuracy and fairness across all target groups.

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### High-Performance Serverless Computing: A Systematic Literature Review on Serverless for HPC, AI, and Big Data

Authors: Valerio Besozzi, Matteo Della Bartola, Patrizio Dazzi, Marco Danelutto
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.DC, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09334v1

The widespread deployment of large-scale, compute-intensive applications such as high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and big data is leading to convergence between cloud and high-performance computing infrastructures. Cloud providers are increasingly integrating high-performance computing capabilities in their infrastructures, such as hardware accelerators and high-speed interconnects, while researchers in the high-performance computing community are starting to explore cloud-native paradigms to improve scalability, elasticity, and resource utilization. In this context, serverless computing emerges as a promising execution model to efficiently handle highly dynamic, parallel, and distributed workloads. This paper presents a comprehensive systematic literature review of 122 research articles published between 2018 and early 2025, exploring the use of the serverless paradigm to develop, deploy, and orchestrate compute-intensive applications across cloud, high-performance computing, and hybrid environments. From these, a taxonomy comprising eight primary research directions and nine targeted use case domains is proposed, alongside an analysis of recent publication trends and collaboration networks among authors, highlighting the growing interest and interconnections within this emerging research field. Overall, this work aims to offer a valuable foundation for both new researchers and experienced practitioners, guiding the development of next-generation serverless solutions for parallel compute-intensive applications.

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### Attentive multilayer fusion for vision transformers

Authors: Laure Ciernik, Marco Morik, Lukas Thede, Luca Eyring, Shinichi Nakajima, Zeynep Akata, Lukas Muttenthaler
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09322v2

With the rise of large-scale foundation models, efficiently adapting them to downstream tasks remains a central challenge. Linear probing, which freezes the backbone and trains a lightweight head, is computationally efficient but often restricted to last-layer representations. We show that task-relevant information is distributed across the network hierarchy rather than encoded solely in the last layers. To leverage this distribution of information, we apply an attentive probing mechanism that dynamically fuses representations from all layers of a Vision Transformer. This attentive layer fusion (ALF) learns to identify the most relevant layers for a target task and combines low-level structural cues with high-level semantic abstractions. Across 20 diverse datasets and multiple pretrained foundation models, ALF achieves consistent, substantial gains over standard linear probes. Attention heatmaps further reveal that tasks different from the pre-training domain benefit most from intermediate representations. Overall, our findings underscore the value of intermediate layers and demonstrate a principled, task-aware approach for unlocking their potential for probing-based adaptation.

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### Frequency Error-Guided Under-sampling Optimization for Multi-Contrast MRI Reconstruction

Authors: Xinming Fang, Chaoyan Huang, Juncheng Li, Jun Wang, Jun Shi, Guixu Zhang
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09316v1

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) plays a vital role in clinical diagnostics, yet it remains hindered by long acquisition times and motion artifacts. Multi-contrast MRI reconstruction has emerged as a promising direction by leveraging complementary information from fully-sampled reference scans. However, existing approaches suffer from three major limitations: (1) superficial reference fusion strategies, such as simple concatenation, (2) insufficient utilization of the complementary information provided by the reference contrast, and (3) fixed under-sampling patterns. We propose an efficient and interpretable frequency error-guided reconstruction framework to tackle these issues. We first employ a conditional diffusion model to learn a Frequency Error Prior (FEP), which is then incorporated into a unified framework for jointly optimizing both the under-sampling pattern and the reconstruction network. The proposed reconstruction model employs a model-driven deep unfolding framework that jointly exploits frequency- and image-domain information. In addition, a spatial alignment module and a reference feature decomposition strategy are incorporated to improve reconstruction quality and bridge model-based optimization with data-driven learning for improved physical interpretability. Comprehensive validation across multiple imaging modalities, acceleration rates (4-30x), and sampling schemes demonstrates consistent superiority over state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative metrics and visual quality. All codes are available at https://github.com/fangxinming/JUF-MRI.

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### Understanding or Memorizing? A Case Study of German Definite Articles in Language Models

Authors: Jonathan Drechsel, Erisa Bytyqi, Steffen Herbold
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09313v2

Language models perform well on grammatical agreement, but it is unclear whether this reflects rule-based generalization or memorization. We study this question for German definite singular articles, whose forms depend on gender and case. Using GRADIEND, a gradient-based interpretability method, we learn parameter update directions for gender-case specific article transitions. We find that updates learned for a specific gender-case article transition frequently affect unrelated gender-case settings, with substantial overlap among the most affected neurons across settings. These results argue against a strictly rule-based encoding of German definite articles, indicating that models at least partly rely on memorized associations rather than abstract grammatical rules.

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### On-Device Large Language Models for Sequential Recommendation

Authors: Xin Xia, Hongzhi Yin, Shane Culpepper
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09306v1

On-device recommendation is critical for a number of real-world applications, especially in scenarios that have agreements on execution latency, user privacy, and robust functionality when internet connectivity is unstable or even impossible. While large language models (LLMs) can now provide exceptional capabilities that model user behavior for sequential recommendation tasks, their substantial memory footprint and computational overhead make the deployment on resource-constrained devices a high risk proposition. In this paper, we propose OD-LLM, the first task-adaptive compression framework explicitly designed to provide efficient and accurate on-device deployment of LLMs for sequential recommendation tasks. OD-LLM uniquely integrates two complementary compression strategies: a low-rank structural compression algorithm which uses Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to significantly reduce parameter redundancy in the model, and a novel tokenization normalization technique that better complements the low-rank decomposition process being used. Additionally, to minimize any potential performance degradation when using higher compression ratios, a novel progressive alignment algorithm is used to iteratively refine the parameters required layerwise in the target model. Empirical evaluations conducted on sequential recommendation benchmarks show that OD-LLM exhibits no loss in effectiveness when compared to the original recommendation model, when the deployed model size is halved. These promising results demonstrate the efficacy and scalability of OD-LLM, making this novel solution a practical alternative for real-time, on-device solutions wishing to replace expensive, remotely executed LLMs.

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### Single-Round Clustered Federated Learning via Data Collaboration Analysis for Non-IID Data

Authors: Sota Sugawara, Yuji Kawamata, Akihiro Toyoda, Tomoru Nakayama, Yukihiko Okada
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09304v2

Federated Learning (FL) enables distributed learning across multiple clients without sharing raw data. When statistical heterogeneity across clients is severe, Clustered Federated Learning (CFL) can im-prove performance by grouping similar clients and training cluster-wise models. However, most CFL approaches rely on multiple communication rounds for cluster estimation and model updates, which limits their practicality under tight constraints on communication rounds. We propose Data Collaboration-based Clustered Federated Learning (DC-CFL), a single-round framework that completes both client clustering and cluster-wise learning, using only the information shared in DC analysis. DC-CFL quantifies inter-client similarity via total variation distance between label distributions, estimates clusters using hierarchical clustering, and performs cluster-wise learning via DC analysis. Experiments on multiple open datasets under representative non-IID conditions show that DC-CFL achieves accuracy comparable to multi-round baselines while requiring only one communication round. These results indicate that DC-CFL is a practical alternative for collaborative AI model development when multiple communication rounds are impractical. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/souta-suga/DC-CFL.

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### Multi-Modal LLM based Image Captioning in ICT: Bridging the Gap Between General and Industry Domain

Authors: Lianying Chao, Kai Zhang, Haoran Cai, Sijie Wu, Xubin Li, Xin Chen
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09298v2

In the information and communications technology (ICT) industry, training a domain-specific large language model (LLM) or constructing a retrieval-augmented generation system requires a substantial amount of high-value domain knowledge. However, the knowledge is not only hidden in the textual modality but also in the image modality. Traditional methods can parse text from domain documents but dont have image captioning ability. Multi-modal LLM (MLLM) can understand images, but they do not have sufficient domain knowledge. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a multi-stage progressive training strategy to train a Domain-specific Image Captioning Model (DICModel) in ICT, and constructs a standard evaluation system to validate the performance of DICModel. Specifically, this work first synthesizes about 7K image-text pairs by combining the Mermaid tool and LLMs, which are used for the first-stage supervised-fine-tuning (SFT) of DICModel. Then, ICT-domain experts manually annotate about 2K image-text pairs for the second-stage SFT of DICModel. Finally, experts and LLMs jointly synthesize about 1.5K visual question answering data for the instruction-based SFT. Experimental results indicate that our DICModel with only 7B parameters performs better than other state-of-the-art models with 32B parameters. Compared to the SOTA models with 7B and 32B parameters, our DICModel increases the BLEU metric by approximately 56.8% and 20.8%, respectively. On the objective questions constructed by ICT domain experts, our DICModel outperforms Qwen2.5-VL 32B by 1% in terms of accuracy rate. In summary, this work can efficiently and accurately extract the logical text from images, which is expected to promote the development of multimodal models in the ICT domain.

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### Policy-Based Reinforcement Learning with Action Masking for Dynamic Job Shop Scheduling under Uncertainty: Handling Random Arrivals and Machine Failures

Authors: Sofiene Lassoued, Stefan Lier, Andreas Schwung
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09293v1

We present a novel framework for solving Dynamic Job Shop Scheduling Problems under uncertainty, addressing the challenges introduced by stochastic job arrivals and unexpected machine breakdowns. Our approach follows a model-based paradigm, using Coloured Timed Petri Nets to represent the scheduling environment, and Maskable Proximal Policy Optimization to enable dynamic decision-making while restricting the agent to feasible actions at each decision point. To simulate realistic industrial conditions, dynamic job arrivals are modeled using a Gamma distribution, which captures complex temporal patterns such as bursts, clustering, and fluctuating workloads. Machine failures are modeled using a Weibull distribution to represent age-dependent degradation and wear-out dynamics. These stochastic models enable the framework to reflect real-world manufacturing scenarios better. In addition, we study two action-masking strategies: a non-gradient approach that overrides the probabilities of invalid actions, and a gradient-based approach that assigns negative gradients to invalid actions within the policy network. We conduct extensive experiments on dynamic JSSP benchmarks, demonstrating that our method consistently outperforms traditional heuristic and rule-based approaches in terms of makespan minimization. The results highlight the strength of combining interpretable Petri-net-based models with adaptive reinforcement learning policies, yielding a resilient, scalable, and explainable framework for real-time scheduling in dynamic and uncertain manufacturing environments.

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### Blue Teaming Function-Calling Agents

Authors: Greta Dolcetti, Giulio Zizzo, Sergio Maffeis
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09292v1

We present an experimental evaluation that assesses the robustness of four open source LLMs claiming function-calling capabilities against three different attacks, and we measure the effectiveness of eight different defences. Our results show how these models are not safe by default, and how the defences are not yet employable in real-world scenarios.

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### Explainable Autoencoder-Based Anomaly Detection in IEC 61850 GOOSE Networks

Authors: Dafne Lozano-Paredes, Luis Bote-Curiel, Juan Ramón Feijóo-Martínez, Ismael Gómez-Talal, José Luis Rojo-Álvarez
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG, eess.SP
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09287v1

The IEC 61850 Generic Object-Oriented Substation Event (GOOSE) protocol plays a critical role in real-time protection and automation of digital substations, yet its lack of native security mechanisms can expose power systems to sophisticated cyberattacks. Traditional rule-based and supervised intrusion detection techniques struggle to detect protocol-compliant and zero-day attacks under significant class imbalance and limited availability of labeled data. This paper proposes an explainable, unsupervised multi-view anomaly detection framework for IEC 61850 GOOSE networks that explicitly separates semantic integrity and temporal availability. The approach employs asymmetric autoencoders trained only on real operational GOOSE traffic to learn distinct latent representations of sequence-based protocol semantics and timing-related transmission dynamics in normal traffic. Anomaly detection is implemented using reconstruction errors mixed with statistically grounded thresholds, enabling robust detection without specified attack types. Feature-level reconstruction analysis provides intrinsic explainability by directly linking detection outcomes to IEC 61850 protocol characteristics. The proposed framework is evaluated using real substation traffic for training and a public dataset containing normal traffic and message suppression, data manipulation, and denial-of-service attacks for testing. Experimental results show attack detection rates above 99% with false positives remaining below 5% of total traffic, demonstrating strong generalization across environments and effective operation under extreme class imbalance and interpretable anomaly attribution.

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### Why not Collaborative Filtering in Dual View? Bridging Sparse and Dense Models

Authors: Hanze Guo, Jianxun Lian, Xiao Zhou
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09286v1

Collaborative Filtering (CF) remains the cornerstone of modern recommender systems, with dense embedding--based methods dominating current practice. However, these approaches suffer from a critical limitation: our theoretical analysis reveals a fundamental signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) ceiling when modeling unpopular items, where parameter-based dense models experience diminishing SNR under severe data sparsity. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose SaD (Sparse and Dense), a unified framework that integrates the semantic expressiveness of dense embeddings with the structural reliability of sparse interaction patterns. We theoretically show that aligning these dual views yields a strictly superior global SNR. Concretely, SaD introduces a lightweight bidirectional alignment mechanism: the dense view enriches the sparse view by injecting semantic correlations, while the sparse view regularizes the dense model through explicit structural signals. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, under this dual-view alignment, even a simple matrix factorization--style dense model can achieve state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, SaD is plug-and-play and can be seamlessly applied to a wide range of existing recommender models, highlighting the enduring power of collaborative filtering when leveraged from dual perspectives. Further evaluations on real-world benchmarks show that SaD consistently outperforms strong baselines, ranking first on the BarsMatch leaderboard. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/harris26-G/SaD.

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### Enhancing Spatial Reasoning in Large Language Models for Metal-Organic Frameworks Structure Prediction

Authors: Mianzhi Pan, JianFei Li, Peishuo Liu, Botian Wang, Yawen Ouyang, Yiming Rong, Hao Zhou, Jianbing Zhang
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.LG, cond-mat.mtrl-sci
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09285v2

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are porous crystalline materials with broad applications such as carbon capture and drug delivery, yet accurately predicting their 3D structures remains a significant challenge. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in generating crystal structures, their application to MOFs is hindered by MOFs' high structural complexity arising from the large number of atoms in unit cell. Inspired by the success of block-wise paradigms in deep generative models for MOFs, we pioneer the application of LLMs in this domain by introducing MOF-LLM, the first LLM framework specifically adapted for block-level MOF structure prediction. To effectively harness LLMs for this 3D modular assembly task, our training paradigm integrates spatial-aware continual pre-training (CPT), structural supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and matching-driven reinforcement learning (RL). By incorporating explicit spatial priors and optimizing structural stability via Soft Adaptive Policy Optimization (SAPO), our approach substantially enhances the spatial reasoning in a Qwen-3 8B model for MOF structure prediction. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MOF-LLM achieves state-of-the-art performance with a match rate of 35.78% while exhibiting superior sampling efficiency of 0.04 seconds per structure.

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### Cluster Workload Allocation: Semantic Soft Affinity Using Natural Language Processing

Authors: Leszek Sliwko, Jolanta Mizeria-Pietraszko
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.AI, cs.DC, cs.LG, cs.SE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09282v2

Cluster workload allocation often requires complex configurations, creating a usability gap. This paper introduces a semantic, intent-driven scheduling paradigm for cluster systems using Natural Language Processing. The system employs a Large Language Model (LLM) integrated via a Kubernetes scheduler extender to interpret natural language allocation hint annotations for soft affinity preferences. A prototype featuring a cluster state cache and an intent analyzer (using AWS Bedrock) was developed. Empirical evaluation demonstrated high LLM parsing accuracy (>95% Subset Accuracy on an evaluation ground-truth dataset) for top-tier models like Amazon Nova Pro/Premier and Mistral Pixtral Large, significantly outperforming a baseline engine. Scheduling quality tests across six scenarios showed the prototype achieved superior or equivalent placement compared to standard Kubernetes configurations, particularly excelling in complex and quantitative scenarios and handling conflicting soft preferences. The results validate using LLMs for accessible scheduling but highlight limitations like synchronous LLM latency, suggesting asynchronous processing for production readiness. This work confirms the viability of semantic soft affinity for simplifying workload orchestration and presents a proof-of-concept design.

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### STaR: Sensitive Trajectory Regulation for Unlearning in Large Reasoning Models

Authors: Jingjing Zhou, Gaoxiang Cong, Li Su, Liang Li
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09281v1

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have advanced automated multi-step reasoning, but their ability to generate complex Chain-of-Thought (CoT) trajectories introduces severe privacy risks, as sensitive information may be deeply embedded throughout the reasoning process. Existing Large Language Models (LLMs) unlearning approaches that typically focus on modifying only final answers are insufficient for LRMs, as they fail to remove sensitive content from intermediate steps, leading to persistent privacy leakage and degraded security. To address these challenges, we propose Sensitive Trajectory Regulation (STaR), a parameter-free, inference-time unlearning framework that achieves robust privacy protection throughout the reasoning process. Specifically, we first identify sensitive content via semantic-aware detection. Then, we inject global safety constraints through secure prompt prefix. Next, we perform trajectory-aware suppression to dynamically block sensitive content across the entire reasoning chain. Finally, we apply token-level adaptive filtering to prevent both exact and paraphrased sensitive tokens during generation. Furthermore, to overcome the inadequacies of existing evaluation protocols, we introduce two metrics: Multi-Decoding Consistency Assessment (MCS), which measures the consistency of unlearning across diverse decoding strategies, and Multi-Granularity Membership Inference Attack (MIA) Evaluation, which quantifies privacy protection at both answer and reasoning-chain levels. Experiments on the R-TOFU benchmark demonstrate that STaR achieves comprehensive and stable unlearning with minimal utility loss, setting a new standard for privacy-preserving reasoning in LRMs.

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### ReGraM: Region-First Knowledge Graph Reasoning for Medical Question Answering

Authors: Chaerin Lee, Sohee Park, Hyunsik Na, Daseon Choi
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09280v1

Recent studies in medical question answering (Medical QA) have actively explored the integration of large language models (LLMs) with biomedical knowledge graphs (KGs) to improve factual accuracy. However, most existing approaches still rely on traversing the entire KG or performing large-scale retrieval, which introduces substantial noise and leads to unstable multi-hop reasoning. We argue that the core challenge lies not in expanding access to knowledge, but in identifying and reasoning over the appropriate subset of evidence for each query. ReGraM is a region-first knowledge graph reasoning framework that addresses this challenge by constructing a query-aligned subgraph and performing stepwise reasoning constrained to this localized region under multiple evidence aware modes. By focusing inference on only the most relevant portion of the KG, ReGraM departs from the assumption that all relations are equally useful an assumption that rarely holds in domain-specific medical settings. Experiments on seven medical QA benchmarks demonstrate that ReGraM consistently outperforms a strong baseline (KGARevion), achieving an 8.04% absolute accuracy gain on MCQ, a 4.50% gain on SAQ, and a 42.9% reduction in hallucination rate. Ablation and qualitative analyses further show that aligning region construction with hop-wise reasoning is the primary driver of these improvements. Overall, our results highlight region-first KG reasoning as an effective paradigm for improving factual accuracy and consistency in medical QA.

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### M$^3$Searcher: Modular Multimodal Information Seeking Agency with Retrieval-Oriented Reasoning

Authors: Xiaohan Yu, Chao Feng, Lang Mei, Chong Chen
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09278v1

Recent advances in DeepResearch-style agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in autonomous information acquisition and synthesize from real-world web environments. However, existing approaches remain fundamentally limited to text modality. Extending autonomous information-seeking agents to multimodal settings introduces critical challenges: the specialization-generalization trade-off that emerges when training models for multimodal tool-use at scale, and the severe scarcity of training data capturing complex, multi-step multimodal search trajectories. To address these challenges, we propose M$^3$Searcher, a modular multimodal information-seeking agent that explicitly decouples information acquisition from answer derivation. M$^3$Searcher is optimized with a retrieval-oriented multi-objective reward that jointly encourages factual accuracy, reasoning soundness, and retrieval fidelity. In addition, we develop MMSearchVQA, a multimodal multi-hop dataset to support retrieval centric RL training. Experimental results demonstrate that M$^3$Searcher outperforms existing approaches, exhibits strong transfer adaptability and effective reasoning in complex multimodal tasks.

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### $A^3$-Bench: Benchmarking Memory-Driven Scientific Reasoning via Anchor and Attractor Activation

Authors: Jian Zhang, Yu He, Zhiyuan Wang, Zhangqi Wang, Kai He, Fangzhi Xu, Qika Lin, Jun Liu
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09274v1

Scientific reasoning relies not only on logical inference but also on activating prior knowledge and experiential structures. Memory can efficiently reuse knowledge and enhance reasoning consistency and stability. However, existing benchmarks mainly evaluate final answers or step-by-step coherence, overlooking the \textit{memory-driven} mechanisms that underlie human reasoning, which involves activating anchors and attractors, then integrating them into multi-step inference. To address this gap, we propose $A^3$-Bench~ https://a3-bench.github.io, a benchmark designed to evaluate scientific reasoning through dual-scale memory-driven activation, grounded in Anchor and Attractor Activation. First, we annotate 2,198 science reasoning problems across domains using the SAPM process(subject, anchor & attractor, problem, and memory developing). Second, we introduce a dual-scale memory evaluation framework utilizing anchors and attractors, along with the AAUI(Anchor--Attractor Utilization Index) metric to measure memory activation rates. Finally, through experiments with various base models and paradigms, we validate $A^3$-Bench and analyze how memory activation impacts reasoning performance, providing insights into memory-driven scientific reasoning.

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### MCGA: A Multi-task Classical Chinese Literary Genre Audio Corpus

Authors: Yexing Du, Kaiyuan Liu, Bihe Zhang, Youcheng Pan, Bo Yang, Liangyu Huo, Xiyuan Zhang, Jian Xie, Daojing He, Yang Xiang, Ming Liu, Bing Qin
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09270v3

With the rapid advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), their potential has gained significant attention in Chinese Classical Studies (CCS). While existing research primarily focuses on text and visual modalities, the audio corpus within this domain remains largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Multi-task Classical Chinese Literary Genre Audio Corpus (MCGA), a 119-hour corpus comprising 22,000 audio samples. It encompasses a diverse range of literary genres across six tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Speech-to-Text Translation (S2TT), Speech Emotion Captioning (SEC), Spoken Question Answering (SQA), Speech Understanding (SU), and Speech Reasoning (SR). Through the evaluation of ten MLLMs, our experimental results demonstrate that current MLLMs still face substantial challenges on the MCGA test set. Furthermore, we introduce a domain-specific metric for SEC and a metric to measure the consistency between speech and text capabilities. We release MCGA to the public to facilitate the development of more robust MLLMs. MCGA Corpus: https://github.com/yxduir/MCGA

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### RISER: Orchestrating Latent Reasoning Skills for Adaptive Activation Steering

Authors: Wencheng Ye, Xiaoyang Yuan, Yi Bin, Pengpeng Zeng, Hengyu Jin, Liang Peng, Heng Tao Shen
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09269v2

Recent work on domain-specific reasoning with large language models (LLMs) often relies on training-intensive approaches that require parameter updates. While activation steering has emerged as a parameter efficient alternative, existing methods apply static, manual interventions that fail to adapt to the dynamic nature of complex reasoning. To address this limitation, we propose RISER (Router-based Intervention for Steerable Enhancement of Reasoning), a plug-and-play intervention framework that adaptively steers LLM reasoning in activation space. RISER constructs a library of reusable reasoning vectors and employs a lightweight Router to dynamically compose them for each input. The Router is optimized via reinforcement learning under task-level rewards, activating latent cognitive primitives in an emergent and compositional manner. Across seven diverse benchmarks, RISER yields 3.4-6.5% average zero-shot accuracy improvements over the base model while surpassing CoT-style reasoning with 2-3x higher token efficiency and robust accuracy gains. Further analysis shows that RISER autonomously combines multiple vectors into interpretable, precise control strategies, pointing toward more controllable and efficient LLM reasoning.

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### GaussianFluent: Gaussian Simulation for Dynamic Scenes with Mixed Materials

Authors: Bei Huang, Yixin Chen, Ruijie Lu, Gang Zeng, Hongbin Zha, Yuru Pei, Siyuan Huang
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09265v1

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a prominent 3D representation for high-fidelity and real-time rendering. Prior work has coupled physics simulation with Gaussians, but predominantly targets soft, deformable materials, leaving brittle fracture largely unresolved. This stems from two key obstacles: the lack of volumetric interiors with coherent textures in GS representation, and the absence of fracture-aware simulation methods for Gaussians. To address these challenges, we introduce GaussianFluent, a unified framework for realistic simulation and rendering of dynamic object states. First, it synthesizes photorealistic interiors by densifying internal Gaussians guided by generative models. Second, it integrates an optimized Continuum Damage Material Point Method (CD-MPM) to enable brittle fracture simulation at remarkably high speed. Our approach handles complex scenarios including mixed-material objects and multi-stage fracture propagation, achieving results infeasible with previous methods. Experiments clearly demonstrate GaussianFluent's capability for photo-realistic, real-time rendering with structurally consistent interiors, highlighting its potential for downstream application, such as VR and Robotics.

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### Coordinated Pandemic Control with Large Language Model Agents as Policymaking Assistants

Authors: Ziyi Shi, Xusen Guo, Hongliang Lu, Mingxing Peng, Haotian Wang, Zheng Zhu, Zhenning Li, Yuxuan Liang, Xinhu Zheng, Hai Yang
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09264v1

Effective pandemic control requires timely and coordinated policymaking across administrative regions that are intrinsically interdependent. However, human-driven responses are often fragmented and reactive, with policies formulated in isolation and adjusted only after outbreaks escalate, undermining proactive intervention and global pandemic mitigation. To address this challenge, here we propose a large language model (LLM) multi-agent policymaking framework that supports coordinated and proactive pandemic control across regions. Within our framework, each administrative region is assigned an LLM agent as an AI policymaking assistant. The agent reasons over region-specific epidemiological dynamics while communicating with other agents to account for cross-regional interdependencies. By integrating real-world data, a pandemic evolution simulator, and structured inter-agent communication, our framework enables agents to jointly explore counterfactual intervention scenarios and synthesize coordinated policy decisions through a closed-loop simulation process. We validate the proposed framework using state-level COVID-19 data from the United States between April and December 2020, together with real-world mobility records and observed policy interventions. Compared with real-world pandemic outcomes, our approach reduces cumulative infections and deaths by up to 63.7% and 40.1%, respectively, at the individual state level, and by 39.0% and 27.0%, respectively, when aggregated across states. These results demonstrate that LLM multi-agent systems can enable more effective pandemic control with coordinated policymaking...

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### BrainSegNet: A Novel Framework for Whole-Brain MRI Parcellation Enhanced by Large Models

Authors: Yucheng Li, Xiaofan Wang, Junyi Wang, Yijie Li, Xi Zhu, Mubai Du, Dian Sheng, Wei Zhang, Fan Zhang
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09263v1

Whole-brain parcellation from MRI is a critical yet challenging task due to the complexity of subdividing the brain into numerous small, irregular shaped regions. Traditionally, template-registration methods were used, but recent advances have shifted to deep learning for faster workflows. While large models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) offer transferable feature representations, they are not tailored for the high precision required in brain parcellation. To address this, we propose BrainSegNet, a novel framework that adapts SAM for accurate whole-brain parcellation into 95 regions. We enhance SAM by integrating U-Net skip connections and specialized modules into its encoder and decoder, enabling fine-grained anatomical precision. Key components include a hybrid encoder combining U-Net skip connections with SAM's transformer blocks, a multi-scale attention decoder with pyramid pooling for varying-sized structures, and a boundary refinement module to sharpen edges. Experimental results on the Human Connectome Project (HCP) dataset demonstrate that BrainSegNet outperforms several state-of-the-art methods, achieving higher accuracy and robustness in complex, multi-label parcellation.

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### Magnifying change: Rapid burn scar mapping with multi-resolution, multi-source satellite imagery

Authors: Maria Sdraka, Dimitrios Michail, Ioannis Papoutsis
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09262v1

Delineating wildfire affected areas using satellite imagery remains challenging due to irregular and spatially heterogeneous spectral changes across the electromagnetic spectrum. While recent deep learning approaches achieve high accuracy when high-resolution multispectral data are available, their applicability in operational settings, where a quick delineation of the burn scar shortly after a wildfire incident is required, is limited by the trade-off between spatial resolution and temporal revisit frequency of current satellite systems. To address this limitation, we propose a novel deep learning model, namely BAM-MRCD, which employs multi-resolution, multi-source satellite imagery (MODIS and Sentinel-2) for the timely production of detailed burnt area maps with high spatial and temporal resolution. Our model manages to detect even small scale wildfires with high accuracy, surpassing similar change detection models as well as solid baselines. All data and code are available in the GitHub repository: https://github.com/Orion-AI-Lab/BAM-MRCD.

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### Learning to Trust Experience: A Monitor-Trust-Regulator Framework for Learning under Unobservable Feedback Reliability

Authors: Zhipeng Zhang, Zhenjie Yao, Kai Li, Lei Yang
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09261v2

Learning under unobservable feedback reliability poses a distinct challenge beyond optimization robustness: a system must decide whether to learn from an experience, not only how to learn stably. We study this setting as Epistemic Identifiability under Unobservable Reliability (EIUR), where each experience has a latent credibility, reliable and unreliable feedback can be locally indistinguishable, and data are generated in a closed loop by the learner's own evolving beliefs and actions. In EIUR, standard robust learning can converge stably yet form high-confidence, systematically wrong beliefs. We propose metacognitive regulation as a practical response: a second, introspective control loop that infers experience credibility from endogenous evidence in the learner's internal dynamics. We formalize this as a modular Monitor-Trust-Regulator (MTR) decomposition and instantiate it with self-diagnosis, which maintains a slowly varying experience-trust variable that softly modulates learning updates, without exogenous reliability labels or an explicit corruption model. Empirically, in the EIUR regimes studied here, self-diagnosis is associated with improved epistemic identifiability. In reinforcement learning, it enables calibrated skepticism and recovery under systematically corrupted rewards. In supervised learning, it exposes a critical dissociation: performance recovery does not imply epistemic recovery. Accuracy can rebound while internal belief dynamics remain locked-in by early misleading data, a failure detectable only through introspective diagnostics. Together, MTR and self-diagnosis provide an organizing abstraction and a concrete design template for intrinsic reliability assessment in autonomous learning under unobservable reliability.

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### Efficient Paths and Dense Rewards: Probabilistic Flow Reasoning for Large Language Models

Authors: Yan Liu, Feng Zhang, Zhanyu Ma, Jun Xu, Jiuchong Gao, Jinghua Hao, Renqing He, Han Liu, Yangdong Deng
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09260v1

High-quality chain-of-thought has demonstrated strong potential for unlocking the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, current paradigms typically treat the reasoning process as an indivisible sequence, lacking an intrinsic mechanism to quantify step-wise information gain. This granularity gap manifests in two limitations: inference inefficiency from redundant exploration without explicit guidance, and optimization difficulty due to sparse outcome supervision or costly external verifiers. In this work, we propose CoT-Flow, a framework that reconceptualizes discrete reasoning steps as a continuous probabilistic flow, quantifying the contribution of each step toward the ground-truth answer. Built on this formulation, CoT-Flow enables two complementary methodologies: flow-guided decoding, which employs a greedy flow-based decoding strategy to extract information-efficient reasoning paths, and flow-based reinforcement learning, which constructs a verifier-free dense reward function. Experiments on challenging benchmarks demonstrate that CoT-Flow achieves a superior balance between inference efficiency and reasoning performance.

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### MAXS: Meta-Adaptive Exploration with LLM Agents

Authors: Jian Zhang, Zhiyuan Wang, Zhangqi Wang, Yu He, Haoran Luo, li yuan, Lingling Zhang, Rui Mao, Qika Lin, Jun Liu
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09259v1

Large Language Model (LLM) Agents exhibit inherent reasoning abilities through the collaboration of multiple tools. However, during agent inference, existing methods often suffer from (i) locally myopic generation, due to the absence of lookahead, and (ii) trajectory instability, where minor early errors can escalate into divergent reasoning paths. These issues make it difficult to balance global effectiveness and computational efficiency. To address these two issues, we propose meta-adaptive exploration with LLM agents https://github.com/exoskeletonzj/MAXS, a meta-adaptive reasoning framework based on LLM Agents that flexibly integrates tool execution and reasoning planning. MAXS employs a lookahead strategy to extend reasoning paths a few steps ahead, estimating the advantage value of tool usage, and combines step consistency variance and inter-step trend slopes to jointly select stable, consistent, and high-value reasoning steps. Additionally, we introduce a trajectory convergence mechanism that controls computational cost by halting further rollouts once path consistency is achieved, enabling a balance between resource efficiency and global effectiveness in multi-tool reasoning. We conduct extensive empirical studies across three base models (MiMo-VL-7B, Qwen2.5-VL-7B, Qwen2.5-VL-32B) and five datasets, demonstrating that MAXS consistently outperforms existing methods in both performance and inference efficiency. Further analysis confirms the effectiveness of our lookahead strategy and tool usage.

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### LatencyPrism: Online Non-intrusive Latency Sculpting for SLO-Guaranteed LLM Inference

Authors: Yin Du, Jiayi Ren, Xiayu Sun, Tianyao Zhou, Haizhu Zhou, Ruiyan Ma, Danyang Zhang
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.DC, cs.LG, cs.OS
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09258v2

LLM inference latency critically determines user experience and operational costs, directly impacting throughput under SLO constraints. Even brief latency spikes degrade service quality despite acceptable average performance. However, distributed inference environments featuring diverse software frameworks and XPU architectures combined with dynamic workloads make latency analysis challenging. Constrained by intrusive designs that necessitate service restarts or even suspension, and by hardware-bound implementations that fail to adapt to heterogeneous inference environments, existing AI profiling methods are often inadequate for real-time production analysis. We present LatencyPrism, the first zero-intrusion multi-platform latency sculpting system. It aims to break down the inference latency across pipeline, proactively alert on inference latency anomalies, and guarantee adherence to SLOs, all without requiring code modifications or service restarts. LatencyPrism has been deployed across thousands of XPUs for over six months. It enables low-overhead real-time monitoring at batch level with alerts triggered in milliseconds. This approach distinguishes between workload-driven latency variations and anomalies indicating underlying issues with an F1-score of 0.98. We also conduct extensive experiments and investigations into root cause analysis to demonstrate LatencyPrism's capability. Furthermore, we introduce the first LLM anomaly simulation toolkit to facilitate future research in robust and predictable inference systems.

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### PhyRPR: Training-Free Physics-Constrained Video Generation

Authors: Yibo Zhao, Hengjia Li, Xiaofei He, Boxi Wu
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09255v1

Recent diffusion-based video generation models can synthesize visually plausible videos, yet they often struggle to satisfy physical constraints. A key reason is that most existing approaches remain single-stage: they entangle high-level physical understanding with low-level visual synthesis, making it hard to generate content that require explicit physical reasoning. To address this limitation, we propose a training-free three-stage pipeline,\textit{PhyRPR}:\textit{Phy\uline{R}eason}--\textit{Phy\uline{P}lan}--\textit{Phy\uline{R}efine}, which decouples physical understanding from visual synthesis. Specifically, \textit{PhyReason} uses a large multimodal model for physical state reasoning and an image generator for keyframe synthesis; \textit{PhyPlan} deterministically synthesizes a controllable coarse motion scaffold; and \textit{PhyRefine} injects this scaffold into diffusion sampling via a latent fusion strategy to refine appearance while preserving the planned dynamics. This staged design enables explicit physical control during generation. Extensive experiments under physics constraints show that our method consistently improves physical plausibility and motion controllability.

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### RIFT: Repurposing Negative Samples via Reward-Informed Fine-Tuning

Authors: Zehua Liu, Shuqi Liu, Tao Zhong, Mingxuan Yuan
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09253v2

While Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Rejection Sampling Fine-Tuning (RFT) are standard for LLM alignment, they either rely on costly expert data or discard valuable negative samples, leading to data inefficiency. To address this, we propose Reward Informed Fine-Tuning (RIFT), a simple yet effective framework that utilizes all self-generated samples. Unlike the hard thresholding of RFT, RIFT repurposes negative trajectories, reweighting the loss with scalar rewards to learn from both the positive and negative trajectories from the model outputs. To overcome the training collapse caused by naive reward integration, where direct multiplication yields an unbounded loss, we introduce a stabilized loss formulation that ensures numerical robustness and optimization efficiency. Extensive experiments on mathematical benchmarks across various base models show that RIFT consistently outperforms RFT. Our results demonstrate that RIFT is a robust and data-efficient alternative for alignment using mixed-quality, self-generated data.

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### HGATSolver: A Heterogeneous Graph Attention Solver for Fluid-Structure Interaction

Authors: Qin-Yi Zhang, Hong Wang, Siyao Liu, Haichuan Lin, Linying Cao, Xiao-Hu Zhou, Chen Chen, Shuangyi Wang, Zeng-Guang Hou
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09251v1

Fluid-structure interaction (FSI) systems involve distinct physical domains, fluid and solid, governed by different partial differential equations and coupled at a dynamic interface. While learning-based solvers offer a promising alternative to costly numerical simulations, existing methods struggle to capture the heterogeneous dynamics of FSI within a unified framework. This challenge is further exacerbated by inconsistencies in response across domains due to interface coupling and by disparities in learning difficulty across fluid and solid regions, leading to instability during prediction. To address these challenges, we propose the Heterogeneous Graph Attention Solver (HGATSolver). HGATSolver encodes the system as a heterogeneous graph, embedding physical structure directly into the model via distinct node and edge types for fluid, solid, and interface regions. This enables specialized message-passing mechanisms tailored to each physical domain. To stabilize explicit time stepping, we introduce a novel physics-conditioned gating mechanism that serves as a learnable, adaptive relaxation factor. Furthermore, an Inter-domain Gradient-Balancing Loss dynamically balances the optimization objectives across domains based on predictive uncertainty. Extensive experiments on two constructed FSI benchmarks and a public dataset demonstrate that HGATSolver achieves state-of-the-art performance, establishing an effective framework for surrogate modeling of coupled multi-physics systems.

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### When to Invoke: Refining LLM Fairness with Toxicity Assessment

Authors: Jing Ren, Bowen Li, Ziqi Xu, Renqiang Luo, Shuo Yu, Xin Ye, Haytham Fayek, Xiaodong Li, Feng Xia
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09250v1

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for toxicity assessment in online moderation systems, where fairness across demographic groups is essential for equitable treatment. However, LLMs often produce inconsistent toxicity judgements for subtle expressions, particularly those involving implicit hate speech, revealing underlying biases that are difficult to correct through standard training. This raises a key question that existing approaches often overlook: when should corrective mechanisms be invoked to ensure fair and reliable assessments? To address this, we propose FairToT, an inference-time framework that enhances LLM fairness through prompt-guided toxicity assessment. FairToT identifies cases where demographic-related variation is likely to occur and determines when additional assessment should be applied. In addition, we introduce two interpretable fairness indicators that detect such cases and improve inference consistency without modifying model parameters. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that FairToT reduces group-level disparities while maintaining stable and reliable toxicity predictions, demonstrating that inference-time refinement offers an effective and practical approach for fairness improvement in LLM-based toxicity assessment systems. The source code can be found at https://aisuko.github.io/fair-tot/.

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### Hybrid guided variational autoencoder for visual place recognition

Authors: Ni Wang, Zihan You, Emre Neftci, Thorben Schoepe
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09248v1

Autonomous agents such as cars, robots and drones need to precisely localize themselves in diverse environments, including in GPS-denied indoor environments. One approach for precise localization is visual place recognition (VPR), which estimates the place of an image based on previously seen places. State-of-the-art VPR models require high amounts of memory, making them unwieldy for mobile deployment, while more compact models lack robustness and generalization capabilities. This work overcomes these limitations for robotics using a combination of event-based vision sensors and an event-based novel guided variational autoencoder (VAE). The encoder part of our model is based on a spiking neural network model which is compatible with power-efficient low latency neuromorphic hardware. The VAE successfully disentangles the visual features of 16 distinct places in our new indoor VPR dataset with a classification performance comparable to other state-of-the-art approaches while, showing robust performance also under various illumination conditions. When tested with novel visual inputs from unknown scenes, our model can distinguish between these places, which demonstrates a high generalization capability by learning the essential features of location. Our compact and robust guided VAE with generalization capabilities poses a promising model for visual place recognition that can significantly enhance mobile robot navigation in known and unknown indoor environments.

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### Integrating Diverse Assignment Strategies into DETRs

Authors: Yiwei Zhang, Jin Gao, Hanshi Wang, Fudong Ge, Guan Luo, Weiming Hu, Zhipeng Zhang
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09247v1

Label assignment is a critical component in object detectors, particularly within DETR-style frameworks where the one-to-one matching strategy, despite its end-to-end elegance, suffers from slow convergence due to sparse supervision. While recent works have explored one-to-many assignments to enrich supervisory signals, they often introduce complex, architecture-specific modifications and typically focus on a single auxiliary strategy, lacking a unified and scalable design. In this paper, we first systematically investigate the effects of ``one-to-many'' supervision and reveal a surprising insight that performance gains are driven not by the sheer quantity of supervision, but by the diversity of the assignment strategies employed. This finding suggests that a more elegant, parameter-efficient approach is attainable. Building on this insight, we propose LoRA-DETR, a flexible and lightweight framework that seamlessly integrates diverse assignment strategies into any DETR-style detector. Our method augments the primary network with multiple Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) branches during training, each instantiating a different one-to-many assignment rule. These branches act as auxiliary modules that inject rich, varied supervisory gradients into the main model and are discarded during inference, thus incurring no additional computational cost. This design promotes robust joint optimization while maintaining the architectural simplicity of the original detector. Extensive experiments on different baselines validate the effectiveness of our approach. Our work presents a new paradigm for enhancing detectors, demonstrating that diverse ``one-to-many'' supervision can be integrated to achieve state-of-the-art results without compromising model elegance.

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### TeachPro: Multi-Label Qualitative Teaching Evaluation via Cross-View Graph Synergy and Semantic Anchored Evidence Encoding

Authors: Xiangqian Wang, Yifan Jia, Yang Xiang, Yumin Zhang, Yanbin Wang, Ke Liu
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09246v1

Standardized Student Evaluation of Teaching often suffer from low reliability, restricted response options, and response distortion. Existing machine learning methods that mine open-ended comments usually reduce feedback to binary sentiment, which overlooks concrete concerns such as content clarity, feedback timeliness, and instructor demeanor, and provides limited guidance for instructional improvement.We propose TeachPro, a multi-label learning framework that systematically assesses five key teaching dimensions: professional expertise, instructional behavior, pedagogical efficacy, classroom experience, and other performance metrics. We first propose a Dimension-Anchored Evidence Encoder, which integrates three core components: (i) a pre-trained text encoder that transforms qualitative feedback annotations into contextualized embeddings; (ii) a prompt module that represents five teaching dimensions as learnable semantic anchors; and (iii) a cross-attention mechanism that aligns evidence with pedagogical dimensions within a structured semantic space. We then propose a Cross-View Graph Synergy Network to represent student comments. This network comprises two components: (i) a Syntactic Branch that extracts explicit grammatical dependencies from parse trees, and (ii) a Semantic Branch that models latent conceptual relations derived from BERT-based similarity graphs. BiAffine fusion module aligns syntactic and semantic units, while a differential regularizer disentangles embeddings to encourage complementary representations. Finally, a cross-attention mechanism bridges the dimension-anchored evidence with the multi-view comment representations. We also contribute a novel benchmark dataset featuring expert qualitative annotations and multi-label scores. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TeachPro offers superior diagnostic granularity and robustness across diverse evaluation settings.

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### A$^2$TG: Adaptive Anisotropic Textured Gaussians for Efficient 3D Scene Representation

Authors: Sheng-Chi Hsu, Ting-Yu Yen, Shih-Hsuan Hung, Hung-Kuo Chu
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09243v2

Gaussian Splatting has emerged as a powerful representation for high-quality, real-time 3D scene rendering. While recent works extend Gaussians with learnable textures to enrich visual appearance, existing approaches allocate a fixed square texture per primitive, leading to inefficient memory usage and limited adaptability to scene variability. In this paper, we introduce adaptive anisotropic textured Gaussians (A$^2$TG), a novel representation that generalizes textured Gaussians by equipping each primitive with an anisotropic texture. Our method employs a gradient-guided adaptive rule to jointly determine texture resolution and aspect ratio, enabling non-uniform, detail-aware allocation that aligns with the anisotropic nature of Gaussian splats. This design significantly improves texture efficiency, reducing memory consumption while enhancing image quality. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that A TG consistently outperforms fixed-texture Gaussian Splatting methods, achieving comparable rendering fidelity with substantially lower memory requirements. Project page: http://github.com/Rickyeeeeee/A2TG.

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### When to Trust: A Causality-Aware Calibration Framework for Accurate Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Authors: Jing Ren, Bowen Li, Ziqi Xu, Xikun Zhang, Haytham Fayek, Xiaodong Li
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09241v2

Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (KG-RAG) extends the RAG paradigm by incorporating structured knowledge from knowledge graphs, enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform more precise and explainable reasoning. While KG-RAG improves factual accuracy in complex tasks, existing KG-RAG models are often severely overconfident, producing high-confidence predictions even when retrieved sub-graphs are incomplete or unreliable, which raises concerns for deployment in high-stakes domains. To address this issue, we propose Ca2KG, a Causality-aware Calibration framework for KG-RAG. Ca2KG integrates counterfactual prompting, which exposes retrieval-dependent uncertainties in knowledge quality and reasoning reliability, with a panel-based re-scoring mechanism that stabilises predictions across interventions. Extensive experiments on two complex QA datasets demonstrate that Ca2KG consistently improves calibration while maintaining or even enhancing predictive accuracy.

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### DeTracker: Motion-decoupled Vehicle Detection and Tracking in Unstabilized Satellite Videos

Authors: Jiajun Chen, Jing Xiao, Shaohan Cao, Yuming Zhu, Liang Liao, Jun Pan, Mi Wang
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV, eess.IV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09240v2

Satellite videos provide continuous observations of surface dynamics but pose significant challenges for multi-object tracking (MOT), especially under unstabilized conditions where platform jitter and the weak appearance of tiny objects jointly degrade tracking performance. To address this problem, we propose DeTracker, a joint-detection-and-tracking framework tailored for unstabilized satellite videos. DeTracker introduces a task-driven Global-Local Motion Decoupling (GLMD) module to address the motion imbalance between dominant platform motion and weak target motion. It suppresses background-dominated motion via global semantic alignment at the feature level and captures target-specific motion through local refinement, improving trajectory stability and identity consistency. In addition, a Temporal Dependency Feature Pyramid (TDFP) module is developed to perform cross-frame temporal feature fusion, enhancing the continuity and discriminability of tiny-object representations. We further construct a new benchmark dataset, SDM-Car-SU, which simulates multi-directional and multi-speed platform motions to enable systematic evaluation of tracking robustness under varying motion perturbations. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real unstabilized satellite videos demonstrate that DeTracker significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving 61.1% MOTA on SDM-Car-SU and 45.3% MOTA on real satellite video data. The code and dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/alex-chenjiajun/DeTracker.

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### DSA-Tokenizer: Disentangled Semantic-Acoustic Tokenization via Flow Matching-based Hierarchical Fusion

Authors: Hanlin Zhang, Daxin Tan, Dehua Tao, Xiao Chen, Haochen Tan, Yunhe Li, Yuchen Cao, Linqi Song
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI, eess.AS
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09239v6

Speech tokenizers are a key building block of fully discrete Speech LLMs. Existing tokenizers either prioritize semantic encoding, fuse semantic content with acoustic style inseparably, or achieve incomplete semantic-acoustic disentanglement. To achieve better disentanglement, we propose DSA-Tokenizer, which explicitly disentangles speech into discrete semantic and acoustic tokens via distinct optimization constraints. Specifically, semantic tokens are supervised by ASR to capture linguistic content, while acoustic tokens focus on mel-spectrograms restoration to encode style. We further introduce a hierarchical Flow Matching decoder and a joint reconstruction-context inpainting training strategy, allowing the model to support both high-fidelity reconstruction and cross-utterance voice clone. To speed up inference, we distill the dit decoder to 4-step inference and improve synthesis quality with GAN fine-tuning. Experiments demonstrate that DSA-Tokenizer provides strong semantic-acoustic disentanglement, reliable controllable voice cloning, and efficient high-fidelity generation with low WER/CER. Moreover, our results suggest that disentangled tokenization provides a more effective interface for downstream large-model speech generation. Audio samples are avaialble at https://anonymous.4open.science/w/DSA_Tokenizer_demo/

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### Knowledge-Embedded and Hypernetwork-Guided Few-Shot Substation Meter Defect Image Generation Method

Authors: Jackie Alex, Justin Petter
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09238v2

Substation meters play a critical role in monitoring and ensuring the stable operation of power grids, yet their detection of cracks and other physical defects is often hampered by a severe scarcity of annotated samples. To address this few-shot generation challenge, we propose a novel framework that integrates Knowledge Embedding and Hypernetwork-Guided Conditional Control into a Stable Diffusion pipeline, enabling realistic and controllable synthesis of defect images from limited data. First, we bridge the substantial domain gap between natural-image pre-trained models and industrial equipment by fine-tuning a Stable Diffusion backbone using DreamBooth-style knowledge embedding. This process encodes the unique structural and textural priors of substation meters, ensuring generated images retain authentic meter characteristics. Second, we introduce a geometric crack modeling module that parameterizes defect attributes--such as location, length, curvature, and branching pattern--to produce spatially constrained control maps. These maps provide precise, pixel-level guidance during generation. Third, we design a lightweight hypernetwork that dynamically modulates the denoising process of the diffusion model in response to the control maps and high-level defect descriptors, achieving a flexible balance between generation fidelity and controllability. Extensive experiments on a real-world substation meter dataset demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms existing augmentation and generation baselines. It reduces Frechet Inception Distance (FID) by 32.7%, increases diversity metrics, and--most importantly--boosts the mAP of a downstream defect detector by 15.3% when trained on augmented data. The framework offers a practical, high-quality data synthesis solution for industrial inspection systems where defect samples are rare.

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### XLinear: A Lightweight and Accurate MLP-Based Model for Long-Term Time Series Forecasting with Exogenous Inputs

Authors: Xinyang Chen, Huidong Jin, Yu Huang, Zaiwen Feng
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09237v1

Despite the prevalent assumption of uniform variable importance in long-term time series forecasting models, real world applications often exhibit asymmetric causal relationships and varying data acquisition costs. Specifically, cost-effective exogenous data (e.g., local weather) can unilaterally influence dynamics of endogenous variables, such as lake surface temperature. Exploiting these links enables more effective forecasts when exogenous inputs are readily available. Transformer-based models capture long-range dependencies but incur high computation and suffer from permutation invariance. Patch-based variants improve efficiency yet can miss local temporal patterns. To efficiently exploit informative signals across both the temporal dimension and relevant exogenous variables, this study proposes XLinear, a lightweight time series forecasting model built upon MultiLayer Perceptrons (MLPs). XLinear uses a global token derived from an endogenous variable as a pivotal hub for interacting with exogenous variables, and employs MLPs with sigmoid activation to extract both temporal patterns and variate-wise dependencies. Its prediction head then integrates these signals to forecast the endogenous series. We evaluate XLinear on seven standard benchmarks and five real-world datasets with exogenous inputs. Compared with state-of-the-art models, XLinear delivers superior accuracy and efficiency for both multivariate forecasts and univariate forecasts influenced by exogenous inputs.

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### Reward Learning through Ranking Mean Squared Error

Authors: Chaitanya Kharyal, Calarina Muslimani, Matthew E. Taylor
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09236v3

Reward design remains a significant bottleneck in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems. A popular alternative is reward learning, where reward functions are inferred from human feedback rather than manually specified. Recent work has proposed learning reward functions from human ratings rather than traditional binary preferences, enabling richer and potentially less cognitively demanding supervision. Building on this paradigm, we introduce a new rating-based RL method, Ranked Return Regression for RL (R4). At its core, R4 uses a novel ranking mean squared error loss that learns from a dataset of trajectory-rating pairs, treating the human-provided discrete ratings (e.g., bad, neutral, good) as ordinal targets. Unlike prior rating-based approaches, R4 offers formal guarantees: its solution set is provably minimal and complete under mild assumptions. Empirically, using both human-provided and simulated ratings, we demonstrate that R4 consistently matches or outperforms existing rating and preference-based RL methods on robotic benchmarks from OpenAI Gym and the DeepMind Control Suite. Code released at https://github.com/IRLL/R4.

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### GIFT: Reconciling Post-Training Objectives via Variational Finite-Temperature Gibbs Initialization

Authors: Zhengyang Zhao, Lu Ma, Yizhen Jiang, Xiaochen Ma, Zimo Meng, Chengyu Shen, Lexiang Tang, Haoze Sun, Peng Pei, Wentao Zhang
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09233v3

The prevailing post-training paradigm for Large Reasoning Models (LRMs)---Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL)-suffers from an intrinsic optimization mismatch: the rigid likelihood maximization in SFT induces distributional collapse, thereby exhausting the exploration space necessary for subsequent RL. Motivated by the Gibbs optimum of KL-regularized RL, we derive a token-level variational surrogate that makes the SFT target structurally compatible with the subsequent RL stage, and propose Gibbs Initialization with Finite Temperature (GIFT). Standard SFT emerges as a degenerate zero-temperature limit of this surrogate, while a finite temperature preserves structural diversity. Our experiments demonstrate that GIFT outperforms standard SFT and surpasses competitive baselines when utilized for RL initialization. Our code is available at https://github.com/zzy1127/GIFT.

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### CLIDD: Cross-Layer Independent Deformable Description for Efficient and Discriminative Local Feature Representation

Authors: Haodi Yao, Fenghua He, Ning Hao, Yao Su
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09230v1

Robust local feature representations are essential for spatial intelligence tasks such as robot navigation and augmented reality. Establishing reliable correspondences requires descriptors that provide both high discriminative power and computational efficiency. To address this, we introduce Cross-Layer Independent Deformable Description (CLIDD), a method that achieves superior distinctiveness by sampling directly from independent feature hierarchies. This approach utilizes learnable offsets to capture fine-grained structural details across scales while bypassing the computational burden of unified dense representations. To ensure real-time performance, we implement a hardware-aware kernel fusion strategy that maximizes inference throughput. Furthermore, we develop a scalable framework that integrates lightweight architectures with a training protocol leveraging both metric learning and knowledge distillation. This scheme generates a wide spectrum of model variants optimized for diverse deployment constraints. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our approach achieves superior matching accuracy and exceptional computational efficiency simultaneously. Specifically, the ultra-compact variant matches the precision of SuperPoint while utilizing only 0.004M parameters, achieving a 99.7% reduction in model size. Furthermore, our high-performance configuration outperforms all current state-of-the-art methods, including high-capacity DINOv2-based frameworks, while exceeding 200 FPS on edge devices. These results demonstrate that CLIDD delivers high-precision local feature matching with minimal computational overhead, providing a robust and scalable solution for real-time spatial intelligence tasks.

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### SPOT-Face: Forensic Face Identification using Attention Guided Optimal Transport

Authors: Ravi Shankar Prasad, Dinesh Singh
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09229v1

Person identification in forensic investigations becomes very challenging when common identification means for DNA (i.e., hair strands, soft tissue) are not available. Current methods utilize deep learning methods for face recognition. However, these methods lack effective mechanisms to model cross-domain structural correspondence between two different forensic modalities. In this paper, we introduce a SPOT-Face, a superpixel graph-based framework designed for cross-domain forensic face identification of victims using their skeleton and sketch images. Our unified framework involves constructing a superpixel-based graph from an image and then using different graph neural networks(GNNs) backbones to extract the embeddings of these graphs, while cross-domain correspondence is established through attention-guided optimal transport mechanism. We have evaluated our proposed framework on two publicly available dataset: IIT\_Mandi\_S2F (S2F) and CUFS. Extensive experiments were conducted to evaluate our proposed framework. The experimental results show significant improvement in identification metrics ( i.e., Recall, mAP) over existing graph-based baselines. Furthermore, our framework demonstrates to be highly effective for matching skulls and sketches to faces in forensic investigations.

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### Disentangle Object and Non-object Infrared Features via Language Guidance

Authors: Fan Liu, Ting Wu, Chuanyi Zhang, Liang Yao, Xing Ma, Yuhui Zheng
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09228v1

Infrared object detection focuses on identifying and locating objects in complex environments (\eg, dark, snow, and rain) where visible imaging cameras are disabled by poor illumination. However, due to low contrast and weak edge information in infrared images, it is challenging to extract discriminative object features for robust detection. To deal with this issue, we propose a novel vision-language representation learning paradigm for infrared object detection. An additional textual supervision with rich semantic information is explored to guide the disentanglement of object and non-object features. Specifically, we propose a Semantic Feature Alignment (SFA) module to align the object features with the corresponding text features. Furthermore, we develop an Object Feature Disentanglement (OFD) module that disentangles text-aligned object features and non-object features by minimizing their correlation. Finally, the disentangled object features are entered into the detection head. In this manner, the detection performance can be remarkably enhanced via more discriminative and less noisy features. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance on two benchmarks: M\textsuperscript{3}FD (83.7\% mAP), FLIR (86.1\% mAP). Our code will be publicly available once the paper is accepted.

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### From Hawkes Processes to Attention: Time-Modulated Mechanisms for Event Sequences

Authors: Xinzi Tan, Kejian Zhang, Junhan Yu, Doudou Zhou
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.LG, math.ST, stat.AP
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09220v2

Marked Temporal Point Processes (MTPPs) arise naturally in medical, social, commercial, and financial domains. However, existing Transformer-based methods mostly inject temporal information only via positional encodings, relying on shared or parametric decay structures, which limits their ability to capture heterogeneous and type-specific temporal effects. Inspired by this observation, we derive a novel attention operator called Hawkes Attention from the multivariate Hawkes process theory for MTPP, using learnable per-type neural kernels to modulate query, key and value projections, thereby replacing the corresponding parts in the traditional attention. Benefited from the design, Hawkes Attention unifies event timing and content interaction, learning both the time-relevant behavior and type-specific excitation patterns from the data. The experimental results show that our method achieves better performance compared to the baselines. In addition to the general MTPP, our attention mechanism can also be easily applied to specific temporal structures, such as time series forecasting.

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### UserLM-R1: Modeling Human Reasoning in User Language Models with Multi-Reward Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Feng Zhang, Shijia Li, Chunmao Zhang, Zhanyu Ma, Jun Xu, Jiuchong Gao, Jinghua Hao, Renqing He, Jingwen Xu, Han Liu
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09215v1

User simulators serve as the critical interactive environment for agent post-training, and an ideal user simulator generalizes across domains and proactively engages in negotiation by challenging or bargaining. However, current methods exhibit two issues. They rely on static and context-unaware profiles, necessitating extensive manual redesign for new scenarios, thus limiting generalizability. Moreover, they neglect human strategic thinking, leading to vulnerability to agent manipulation. To address these issues, we propose UserLM-R1, a novel user language model with reasoning capability. Specifically, we first construct comprehensive user profiles with both static roles and dynamic scenario-specific goals for adaptation to diverse scenarios. Then, we propose a goal-driven decision-making policy to generate high-quality rationales before producing responses, and further refine the reasoning and improve strategic capabilities with supervised fine-tuning and multi-reward reinforcement learning. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that UserLM-R1 outperforms competitive baselines, particularly on the more challenging adversarial set.

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### SpikeVAEDiff: Neural Spike-based Natural Visual Scene Reconstruction via VD-VAE and Versatile Diffusion

Authors: Jialu Li, Taiyan Zhou
Published: 2026-01-14
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09213v1

Reconstructing natural visual scenes from neural activity is a key challenge in neuroscience and computer vision. We present SpikeVAEDiff, a novel two-stage framework that combines a Very Deep Variational Autoencoder (VDVAE) and the Versatile Diffusion model to generate high-resolution and semantically meaningful image reconstructions from neural spike data. In the first stage, VDVAE produces low-resolution preliminary reconstructions by mapping neural spike signals to latent representations. In the second stage, regression models map neural spike signals to CLIP-Vision and CLIP-Text features, enabling Versatile Diffusion to refine the images via image-to-image generation. We evaluate our approach on the Allen Visual Coding-Neuropixels dataset and analyze different brain regions. Our results show that the VISI region exhibits the most prominent activation and plays a key role in reconstruction quality. We present both successful and unsuccessful reconstruction examples, reflecting the challenges of decoding neural activity. Compared with fMRI-based approaches, spike data provides superior temporal and spatial resolution. We further validate the effectiveness of the VDVAE model and conduct ablation studies demonstrating that data from specific brain regions significantly enhances reconstruction performance.

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