# Research Papers — 2026-01 · bundle page 117 of 189 > Full-text markdown of papers #5801–5850 of 9403 published in 2026-01, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 9403-paper 2026-01 archive (50 papers per file). Canonical page: https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-01/page/117 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-01/page/116.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-01/page/118.md) ### Annealed Relaxation of Speculative Decoding for Faster Autoregressive Image Generation Authors: Xingyao Li, Fengzhuo Zhang, Cunxiao Du, Hui Ji Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09212v1 Despite significant progress in autoregressive image generation, inference remains slow due to the sequential nature of AR models and the ambiguity of image tokens, even when using speculative decoding. Recent works attempt to address this with relaxed speculative decoding but lack theoretical grounding. In this paper, we establish the theoretical basis of relaxed SD and propose COOL-SD, an annealed relaxation of speculative decoding built on two key insights. The first analyzes the total variation (TV) distance between the target model and relaxed speculative decoding and yields an optimal resampling distribution that minimizes an upper bound of the distance. The second uses perturbation analysis to reveal an annealing behaviour in relaxed speculative decoding, motivating our annealed design. Together, these insights enable COOL-SD to generate images faster with comparable quality, or achieve better quality at similar latency. Experiments validate the effectiveness of COOL-SD, showing consistent improvements over prior methods in speed-quality trade-offs. --- ### Affostruction: 3D Affordance Grounding with Generative Reconstruction Authors: Chunghyun Park, Seunghyeon Lee, Minsu Cho Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09211v2 This paper addresses the problem of affordance grounding from RGBD images of an object, which aims to localize surface regions corresponding to a text query that describes an action on the object. While existing methods predict affordance regions only on visible surfaces, we propose Affostruction, a generative framework that reconstructs complete object geometry from partial RGBD observations and grounds affordances on the full shape including unobserved regions. Our approach introduces sparse voxel fusion of multi-view features for constant-complexity generative reconstruction, a flow-based formulation that captures the inherent ambiguity of affordance distributions, and an active view selection strategy guided by predicted affordances. Affostruction outperforms existing methods by large margins on challenging benchmarks, achieving 19.1 aIoU on affordance grounding and 32.67 IoU for 3D reconstruction. --- ### Pairing-free Group-level Knowledge Distillation for Robust Gastrointestinal Lesion Classification in White-Light Endoscopy Authors: Qiang Hu, Qimei Wang, Yingjie Guo, Qiang Li, Zhiwei Wang Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09209v1 White-Light Imaging (WLI) is the standard for endoscopic cancer screening, but Narrow-Band Imaging (NBI) offers superior diagnostic details. A key challenge is transferring knowledge from NBI to enhance WLI-only models, yet existing methods are critically hampered by their reliance on paired NBI-WLI images of the same lesion, a costly and often impractical requirement that leaves vast amounts of clinical data untapped. In this paper, we break this paradigm by introducing PaGKD, a novel Pairing-free Group-level Knowledge Distillation framework that that enables effective cross-modal learning using unpaired WLI and NBI data. Instead of forcing alignment between individual, often semantically mismatched image instances, PaGKD operates at the group level to distill more complete and compatible knowledge across modalities. Central to PaGKD are two complementary modules: (1) Group-level Prototype Distillation (GKD-Pro) distills compact group representations by extracting modality-invariant semantic prototypes via shared lesion-aware queries; (2) Group-level Dense Distillation (GKD-Den) performs dense cross-modal alignment by guiding group-aware attention with activation-derived relation maps. Together, these modules enforce global semantic consistency and local structural coherence without requiring image-level correspondence. Extensive experiments on four clinical datasets demonstrate that PaGKD consistently and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving relative AUC improvements of 3.3%, 1.1%, 2.8%, and 3.2%, respectively, establishing a new direction for cross-modal learning from unpaired data. --- ### Mikasa: A Character-Driven Emotional AI Companion Inspired by Japanese Oshi Culture Authors: Miki Ueno Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09208v2 Recent progress in large language models and multimodal interaction has made it possible to develop AI companions that can have fluent and emotionally expressive conversations. However, many of these systems have problems keeping users satisfied and engaged over long periods. This paper argues that these problems do not come mainly from weak models, but from poor character design and unclear definitions of the user-AI relationship. I present Mikasa, an emotional AI companion inspired by Japanese Oshi culture-specifically its emphasis on long-term, non-exclusive commitment to a stable character-as a case study of character-driven companion design. Mikasa does not work as a general-purpose assistant or a chatbot that changes roles. Instead, Mikasa is designed as a coherent character with a stable personality and a clearly defined relationship as a partner. This relationship does not force exclusivity or obligation. Rather, it works as a reference point that stabilizes interaction norms and reduces the work users must do to keep redefining the relationship. Through an exploratory evaluation, I see that users describe their preferences using surface-level qualities such as conversational naturalness, but they also value relationship control and imaginative engagement in ways they do not state directly. These results suggest that character coherence and relationship definition work as latent structural elements that shape how good the interaction feels, without users recognizing them as main features. The contribution of this work is to show that character design is a functional part of AI companion systems, not just decoration. Mikasa is one example based on a specific cultural context, but the design principles-commitment to a consistent personality and clear relationship definition-can be used for many emotionally grounded AI companions. --- ### Point Tracking as a Temporal Cue for Robust Myocardial Segmentation in Echocardiography Videos Authors: Bahar Khodabakhshian, Nima Hashemi, Armin Saadat, Zahra Gholami, In-Chang Hwang, Samira Sojoudi, Christina Luong, Purang Abolmaesumi, Teresa Tsang Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09207v1 Purpose: Myocardium segmentation in echocardiography videos is a challenging task due to low contrast, noise, and anatomical variability. Traditional deep learning models either process frames independently, ignoring temporal information, or rely on memory-based feature propagation, which accumulates error over time. Methods: We propose Point-Seg, a transformer-based segmentation framework that integrates point tracking as a temporal cue to ensure stable and consistent segmentation of myocardium across frames. Our method leverages a point-tracking module trained on a synthetic echocardiography dataset to track key anatomical landmarks across video sequences. These tracked trajectories provide an explicit motion-aware signal that guides segmentation, reducing drift and eliminating the need for memory-based feature accumulation. Additionally, we incorporate a temporal smoothing loss to further enhance temporal consistency across frames. Results: We evaluate our approach on both public and private echocardiography datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that Point-Seg has statistically similar accuracy in terms of Dice to state-of-the-art segmentation models in high quality echo data, while it achieves better segmentation accuracy in lower quality echo with improved temporal stability. Furthermore, Point-Seg has the key advantage of pixel-level myocardium motion information as opposed to other segmentation methods. Such information is essential in the computation of other downstream tasks such as myocardial strain measurement and regional wall motion abnormality detection. Conclusion: Point-Seg demonstrates that point tracking can serve as an effective temporal cue for consistent video segmentation, offering a reliable and generalizable approach for myocardium segmentation in echocardiography videos. The code is available at https://github.com/DeepRCL/PointSeg. --- ### A.X K1 Technical Report Authors: Sung Jun Cheon, Jaekyung Cho, Seongho Choi, Hyunjun Eun, Seokhwan Jo, Jaehyun Jun, Minsoo Kang, Jin Kim, Jiwon Kim, Minsang Kim, Seungsik Kim, Sungwan Kim et al. Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09200v5 We introduce A.X K1, a 519B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model trained from scratch. Our design leverages scaling laws to optimize training configurations and vocabulary size under fixed computational budgets. A.X K1 is pre-trained on a corpus of approximately 10T tokens, curated by a multi-stage data processing pipeline. Designed to bridge the gap between reasoning capability and inference efficiency, A.X K1 supports explicitly controllable reasoning to facilitate scalable deployment across diverse real-world scenarios. We propose a simple yet effective Think-Fusion training recipe, enabling user-controlled switching between thinking and non-thinking modes within a single unified model. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that A.X K1 achieves performance competitive with leading open-source models, while establishing a distinctive advantage in Korean-language benchmarks. --- ### ProFit: Leveraging High-Value Signals in SFT via Probability-Guided Token Selection Authors: Tao Liu, Taiqiang Wu, Runming Yang, Shaoning Sun, Junjie Wang, Yujiu Yang Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09195v3 Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a fundamental post-training strategy to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human intent. However, traditional SFT often ignores the one-to-many nature of language by forcing alignment with a single reference answer, leading to the model overfitting to non-core expressions. Although our empirical analysis suggests that introducing multiple reference answers can mitigate this issue, the prohibitive data and computational costs necessitate a strategic shift: prioritizing the mitigation of single-reference overfitting over the costly pursuit of answer diversity. To achieve this, we reveal the intrinsic connection between token probability and semantic importance: high-probability tokens carry the core logical framework, while low-probability tokens are mostly replaceable expressions. Based on this insight, we propose ProFit, which selectively masks low-probability tokens to prevent surface-level overfitting. Extensive experiments confirm that ProFit consistently outperforms traditional SFT baselines on general reasoning and mathematical benchmarks. --- ### From Performance to Practice: Knowledge-Distilled Segmentator for On-Premises Clinical Workflows Authors: Qizhen Lan, Aaron Choi, Jun Ma, Bo Wang, Zhaogming Zhao, Xiaoqian Jiang, Yu-Chun Hsu Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09191v1 Deploying medical image segmentation models in routine clinical workflows is often constrained by on-premises infrastructure, where computational resources are fixed and cloud-based inference may be restricted by governance and security policies. While high-capacity models achieve strong segmentation accuracy, their computational demands hinder practical deployment and long-term maintainability in hospital environments. We present a deployment-oriented framework that leverages knowledge distillation to translate a high-performing segmentation model into a scalable family of compact student models, without modifying the inference pipeline. The proposed approach preserves architectural compatibility with existing clinical systems while enabling systematic capacity reduction. The framework is evaluated on a multi-site brain MRI dataset comprising 1,104 3D volumes, with independent testing on 101 curated cases, and is further examined on abdominal CT to assess cross-modality generalizability. Under aggressive parameter reduction (94%), the distilled student model preserves nearly all of the teacher's segmentation accuracy (98.7%), while achieving substantial efficiency gains, including up to a 67% reduction in CPU inference latency without additional deployment overhead. These results demonstrate that knowledge distillation provides a practical and reliable pathway for converting research-grade segmentation models into maintainable, deployment-ready components for on-premises clinical workflows in real-world health systems. --- ### OrthoGeoLoRA: Geometric Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Structured Social Science Concept Retrieval on theWeb Authors: Zeqiang Wang, Xinyue Wu, Chenxi Li, Zixi Chen, Nishanth Sastry, Jon Johnson, Suparna De Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09185v1 Large language models and text encoders increasingly power web-based information systems in the social sciences, including digital libraries, data catalogues, and search interfaces used by researchers, policymakers, and civil society. Full fine-tuning is often computationally and energy intensive, which can be prohibitive for smaller institutions and non-profit organizations in the Web4Good ecosystem. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), especially Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), reduces this cost by updating only a small number of parameters. We show that the standard LoRA update $ΔW = BA^\top$ has geometric drawbacks: gauge freedom, scale ambiguity, and a tendency toward rank collapse. We introduce OrthoGeoLoRA, which enforces an SVD-like form $ΔW = BΣA^\top$ by constraining the low-rank factors to be orthogonal (Stiefel manifold). A geometric reparameterization implements this constraint while remaining compatible with standard optimizers such as Adam and existing fine-tuning pipelines. We also propose a benchmark for hierarchical concept retrieval over the European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST), widely used to organize social science resources in digital repositories. Experiments with a multilingual sentence encoder show that OrthoGeoLoRA outperforms standard LoRA and several strong PEFT variants on ranking metrics under the same low-rank budget, offering a more compute- and parameter-efficient path to adapt foundation models in resource-constrained settings. --- ### Position on LLM-Assisted Peer Review: Addressing Reviewer Gap through Mentoring and Feedback Authors: JungMin Yun, JuneHyoung Kwon, MiHyeon Kim, YoungBin Kim Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09182v1 The rapid expansion of AI research has intensified the Reviewer Gap, threatening the peer-review sustainability and perpetuating a cycle of low-quality evaluations. This position paper critiques existing LLM approaches that automatically generate reviews and argues for a paradigm shift that positions LLMs as tools for assisting and educating human reviewers. We define the core principles of high-quality peer review and propose two complementary systems grounded in these foundations: (i) an LLM-assisted mentoring system that cultivates reviewers' long-term competencies, and (ii) an LLM-assisted feedback system that helps reviewers refine the quality of their reviews. This human-centered approach aims to strengthen reviewer expertise and contribute to building a more sustainable scholarly ecosystem. --- ### $D^2Prune$: Sparsifying Large Language Models via Dual Taylor Expansion and Attention Distribution Awareness Authors: Lang Xiong, Ning Liu, Ao Ren, Yuheng Bai, Haining Fang, BinYan Zhang, Zhe Jiang, Yujuan Tan, Duo Liu Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09176v1 Large language models (LLMs) face significant deployment challenges due to their massive computational demands. % While pruning offers a promising compression solution, existing methods suffer from two critical limitations: (1) They neglect activation distribution shifts between calibration data and test data, resulting in inaccurate error estimations; (2) They overlook the long-tail distribution characteristics of activations in the attention module. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel pruning method, $D^2Prune$. First, we propose a dual Taylor expansion-based method that jointly models weight and activation perturbations for precise error estimation, leading to precise pruning mask selection and weight updating and facilitating error minimization during pruning. % Second, we propose an attention-aware dynamic update strategy that preserves the long-tail attention pattern by jointly minimizing the KL divergence of attention distributions and the reconstruction error. Extensive experiments show that $D^2Prune$ consistently outperforms SOTA methods across various LLMs (e.g., OPT-125M, LLaMA2/3, and Qwen3). Moreover, the dynamic attention update mechanism also generalizes well to ViT-based vision models like DeiT, achieving superior accuracy on ImageNet-1K. --- ### Geometric Stability: The Missing Axis of Representations Authors: Prashant C. Raju Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL, q-bio.QM, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09173v5 Representational similarity analysis and related methods compare the internal geometries of neural networks, but they measure only alignment between spaces, leaving a blind spot -- whether a representation's structure is reliably recoverable, not merely similar. We introduce geometric stability, a distinct axis, and \textit{Shesha}, a metric that quantifies it from a single representation by correlating dissimilarity matrices built from complementary random halves of the feature dimensions. Unlike CKA and Procrustes distance, Shesha is provably non-invariant to orthogonal rotations of the feature basis. This is by design: the basis is privileged for learned models, since probes, patching, and steering act on coordinates, and a rotation-invariant metric cannot see whether the targeted structure survives them. A double dissociation isolates the mechanism -- removing the top principal component collapses CKA while Shesha holds, whereas rotating a representation into its eigenbasis, which preserves the spectrum and CKA exactly, collapses Shesha. Across 2,463 encoder configurations in seven domains, the metrics are redundant under geometry-preserving transforms and anti-correlate under compression ($ρ=-0.47$). Across 170 vision models spanning 6 clean and 38 corruption-shifted datasets, DINOv2 ranks first or second in transferability on three of six clean datasets yet bottom-quartile in stability on five, an isolated dissociation rather than a trade-off. --- ### BalDRO: A Distributionally Robust Optimization based Framework for Large Language Model Unlearning Authors: Pengyang Shao, Naixin Zhai, Lei Chen, Yonghui Yang, Fengbin Zhu, Xun Yang, Meng Wang Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09172v3 As Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly shape online content, removing targeted information from well-trained LLMs (also known as LLM unlearning) has become critical for web governance. A key challenge lies in sample-wise imbalance within the forget set: different samples exhibit widely varying unlearning difficulty, leading to asynchronous forgetting where some knowledge remains insufficiently erased while others become over-forgotten. To address this, we propose BalDRO, a novel and efficient framework for balanced LLM unlearning. BalDRO formulates unlearning as a min-sup process: an inner step identifies a worst-case data distribution that emphasizes hard-to-unlearn samples, while an outer step updates model parameters under this distribution. We instantiate BalDRO via two efficient variants: BalDRO-G, a discrete GroupDRO-based approximation focusing on high-loss subsets, and BalDRO-DV, a continuous Donsker-Varadhan dual method enabling smooth adaptive weighting within standard training pipelines. Experiments on TOFU and MUSE show that BalDRO significantly improves both forgetting quality and model utility over existing methods, and we release code for reproducibility. --- ### N-EIoU-YOLOv9: A Signal-Aware Bounding Box Regression Loss for Lightweight Mobile Detection of Rice Leaf Diseases Authors: Dung Ta Nguyen Duc, Thanh Bui Dang, Hoang Le Minh, Tung Nguyen Viet, Huong Nguyen Thanh, Dong Trinh Cong Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09170v1 In this work, we propose N EIoU YOLOv9, a lightweight detection framework based on a signal aware bounding box regression loss derived from non monotonic gradient focusing and geometric decoupling principles, referred to as N EIoU (Non monotonic Efficient Intersection over Union). The proposed loss reshapes localization gradients by combining non monotonic focusing with decoupled width and height optimization, thereby enhancing weak regression signals for hard samples with low overlap while reducing gradient interference. This design is particularly effective for small and low contrast targets commonly observed in agricultural disease imagery. The proposed N EIoU loss is integrated into a lightweight YOLOv9t architecture and evaluated on a self collected field dataset comprising 5908 rice leaf images across four disease categories and healthy leaves. Experimental results demonstrate consistent performance gains over the standard CIoU loss, achieving a mean Average Precision of 90.3 percent, corresponding to a 4.3 percent improvement over the baseline, with improved localization accuracy under stricter evaluation criteria. For practical validation, the optimized model is deployed on an Android device using TensorFlow Lite with Float16 quantization, achieving an average inference time of 156 milliseconds per frame while maintaining accuracy. These results confirm that the proposed approach effectively balances accuracy, optimization stability, and computational efficiency for edge based agricultural monitoring systems. --- ### Architecture inside the mirage: evaluating generative image models on architectural style, elements, and typologies Authors: Jamie Magrill, Leah Gornstein, Sandra Seekins, Barry Magrill Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09169v1 Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) text-to-image systems are increasingly used to generate architectural imagery, yet their capacity to reproduce accurate images in a historically rule-bound field remains poorly characterized. We evaluated five widely used GenAI image platforms (Adobe Firefly, DALL-E 3, Google Imagen 3, Microsoft Image Generator, and Midjourney) using 30 architectural prompts spanning styles, typologies, and codified elements. Each prompt-generator pair produced four images (n = 600 images total). Two architectural historians independently scored each image for accuracy against predefined criteria, resolving disagreements by consensus. Set-level performance was summarized as zero to four accurate images per four-image set. Image output from Common prompts was 2.7-fold more accurate than from Rare prompts (p < 0.05). Across platforms, overall accuracy was limited (highest accuracy score 52 percent; lowest 32 percent; mean 42 percent). All-correct (4 out of 4) outcomes were similar across platforms. By contrast, all-incorrect (0 out of 4) outcomes varied substantially, with Imagen 3 exhibiting the fewest failures and Microsoft Image Generator exhibiting the highest number of failures. Qualitative review of the image dataset identified recurring patterns including over-embellishment, confusion between medieval styles and their later revivals, and misrepresentation of descriptive prompts (for example, egg-and-dart, banded column, pendentive). These findings support the need for visible labeling of GenAI synthetic content, provenance standards for future training datasets, and cautious educational use of GenAI architectural imagery. --- ### DP-FedSOFIM: Differentially Private Federated Stochastic Optimization using Regularized Fisher Information Matrix Authors: Sidhant Nair, Tanmay Sen, Mrinmay Sen, Sayantan Banerjee Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CR, cs.DC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09166v3 Differentially private federated learning (DP-FL) often suffers from slow convergence under tight privacy budgets because the noise required for privacy preservation degrades gradient quality. Although second-order optimization can accelerate training, existing approaches for DP-FL face significant scalability limitations: Newton-type methods require clients to compute Hessians, while feature covariance methods scale poorly with model dimension. We propose DP-FedSOFIM, a simple and scalable Hessian approximation-based second-order optimization method for DP-FL. The method constructs a regularized proxy for the Fisher information matrix at the server using only privatized aggregated gradients, capturing useful curvature information without requiring full Hessian computations or feature covariance estimation. Efficient rank-one updates based on the Sherman-Morrison formula enable communication costs proportional to the model size and require only O(d) client-side memory. Because all curvature and preconditioning operations are performed at the server on already privatized gradients, DP-FedSOFIM introduces no additional privacy cost beyond the underlying privatized gradient release mechanism. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and PathMNIST demonstrate that DP-FedSOFIM converges faster and consistently achieves higher accuracy than several competitive differentially private federated learning baselines across a wide range of privacy budgets. --- ### Multi-Teacher Ensemble Distillation: A Mathematical Framework for Probability-Domain Knowledge Aggregation Authors: Aaron R. Flouro, Shawn P. Chadwick Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09165v1 Building on the probability-domain distillation framework of Sparse-KD, we develop an axiomatic, operator-theoretic framework for multi-teacher ensemble knowledge distillation. Rather than prescribing a specific aggregation formula, we define five core axioms governing valid knowledge aggregation operators, encompassing convexity, positivity, continuity, weight monotonicity, and temperature coherence. We prove the existence and non-uniqueness of operator families satisfying these axioms, establishing that multiple distinct aggregation mechanisms conform to the same foundational principles. Within this framework, we establish operator-agnostic guarantees showing that multi-teacher aggregation reduces both stochastic variance and systematic supervisory bias under heterogeneous teachers, while providing Jensen-type bounds, log-loss guarantees, and safety attenuation properties. For aggregation operators linear in teacher weights, we further establish classical ensemble variance-reduction results under standard independence assumptions, with extensions to correlated-error regimes. The framework provides theoretical grounding for multi-teacher distillation from diverse frontier models while admitting multiple valid implementation strategies. --- ### Efficient Clustering in Stochastic Bandits Authors: G Dhinesh Chandran, Kota Srinivas Reddy, Srikrishna Bhashyam Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09162v1 We study the Bandit Clustering (BC) problem under the fixed confidence setting, where the objective is to group a collection of data sequences (arms) into clusters through sequential sampling from adaptively selected arms at each time step while ensuring a fixed error probability at the stopping time. We consider a setting where arms in a cluster may have different distributions. Unlike existing results in this setting, which assume Gaussian-distributed arms, we study a broader class of vector-parametric distributions that satisfy mild regularity conditions. Existing asymptotically optimal BC algorithms require solving an optimization problem as part of their sampling rule at each step, which is computationally costly. We propose an Efficient Bandit Clustering algorithm (EBC), which, instead of solving the full optimization problem, takes a single step toward the optimal value at each time step, making it computationally efficient while remaining asymptotically optimal. We also propose a heuristic variant of EBC, called EBC-H, which further simplifies the sampling rule, with arm selection based on quantities computed as part of the stopping rule. We highlight the computational efficiency of EBC and EBC-H by comparing their per-sample run time with that of existing algorithms. The asymptotic optimality of EBC is supported through simulations on the synthetic datasets. Through simulations on both synthetic and real-world datasets, we show the performance gain of EBC and EBC-H over existing approaches. --- ### Deep Learning-based Binary Analysis for Vulnerability Detection in x86-64 Machine Code Authors: Mitchell Petingola Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09157v1 While much of the current research in deep learning-based vulnerability detection relies on disassembled binaries, this paper explores the feasibility of extracting features directly from raw x86-64 machine code. Although assembly language is more interpretable for humans, it requires more complex models to capture token-level context. In contrast, machine code may enable more efficient, lightweight models and preserve all information that might be lost in disassembly. This paper approaches the task of vulnerability detection through an exploratory study on two specific deep learning model architectures and aims to systematically evaluate their performance across three vulnerability types. The results demonstrate that graph-based models consistently outperform sequential models, emphasizing the importance of control flow relationships, and that machine code contains sufficient information for effective vulnerability discovery. --- ### KTCF: Actionable Recourse in Knowledge Tracing via Counterfactual Explanations for Education Authors: Woojin Kim, Changkwon Lee, Hyeoncheol Kim Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09156v1 Using Artificial Intelligence to improve teaching and learning benefits greater adaptivity and scalability in education. Knowledge Tracing (KT) is recognized for student modeling task due to its superior performance and application potential in education. To this end, we conceptualize and investigate counterfactual explanation as the connection from XAI for KT to education. Counterfactual explanations offer actionable recourse, are inherently causal and local, and easy for educational stakeholders to understand who are often non-experts. We propose KTCF, a counterfactual explanation generation method for KT that accounts for knowledge concept relationships, and a post-processing scheme that converts a counterfactual explanation into a sequence of educational instructions. We experiment on a large-scale educational dataset and show our KTCF method achieves superior and robust performance over existing methods, with improvements ranging from 5.7% to 34% across metrics. Additionally, we provide a qualitative evaluation of our post-processing scheme, demonstrating that the resulting educational instructions help in reducing large study burden. We show that counterfactuals have the potential to advance the responsible and practical use of AI in education. Future works on XAI for KT may benefit from educationally grounded conceptualization and developing stakeholder-centered methods. --- ### From Snow to Rain: Evaluating Robustness, Calibration, and Complexity of Model-Based Robust Training Authors: Josué Martínez-Martínez, Olivia Brown, Giselle Zeno, Pooya Khorrami, Rajmonda Caceres Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09153v1 Robustness to natural corruptions remains a critical challenge for reliable deep learning, particularly in safety-sensitive domains. We study a family of model-based training approaches that leverage a learned nuisance variation model to generate realistic corruptions, as well as new hybrid strategies that combine random coverage with adversarial refinement in nuisance space. Using the Challenging Unreal and Real Environments for Traffic Sign Recognition dataset (CURE-TSR), with Snow and Rain corruptions, we evaluate accuracy, calibration, and training complexity across corruption severities. Our results show that model-based methods consistently outperform baselines Vanilla, Adversarial Training, and AugMix baselines, with model-based adversarial training providing the strongest robustness under across all corruptions but at the expense of higher computation and model-based data augmentation achieving comparable robustness with $T$ less computational complexity without incurring a statistically significant drop in performance. These findings highlight the importance of learned nuisance models for capturing natural variability, and suggest a promising path toward more resilient and calibrated models under challenging conditions. --- ### PrivacyReasoner: Can LLM Emulate a Human-like Privacy Mind? Authors: Yiwen Tu, Xuan Liu, Lianhui Qin, Haojian Jin Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09152v2 Prior work on LLM-based privacy focuses on norm judgment over synthetic vignettes, rather than how people think about a specific data practice and formulate their opinions. We address this gap by designing PrivacyReasoner, an agent architecture grounded in three key ideas: (1) LLMs can detect subtle privacy cues in natural language and role-play human characteristics; (2) a user's ``privacy mind'' can be reconstructed from their real-world online comment history, distilling experiences, personality, and cultural orientations; and (3) a contextual filter can dynamically activate relevant privacy beliefs based on the contexts in a scenario. We evaluate PrivacyReasoner on real-world privacy discussions from Hacker News, using an LLM-as-a-Judge evaluator calibrated against an established privacy concern taxonomy to quantify reasoning faithfulness. PrivacyReasoner significantly outperforms baselines in predicting individual privacy concerns and generalizes across different domains, such as AI, e-commerce, and healthcare. --- ### Interpretable Probability Estimation with LLMs via Shapley Reconstruction Authors: Yang Nan, Qihao Wen, Jiahao Wang, Pengfei He, Ravi Tandon, Yong Ge, Han Xu Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09151v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate potential to estimate the probability of uncertain events, by leveraging their extensive knowledge and reasoning capabilities. This ability can be applied to support intelligent decision-making across diverse fields, such as financial forecasting and preventive healthcare. However, directly prompting LLMs for probability estimation faces significant challenges: their outputs are often noisy, and the underlying predicting process is opaque. In this paper, we propose PRISM: Probability Reconstruction via Shapley Measures, a framework that brings transparency and precision to LLM-based probability estimation. PRISM decomposes an LLM's prediction by quantifying the marginal contribution of each input factor using Shapley values. These factor-level contributions are then aggregated to reconstruct a calibrated final estimate. In our experiments, we demonstrate PRISM improves predictive accuracy over direct prompting and other baselines, across multiple domains including finance, healthcare, and agriculture. Beyond performance, PRISM provides a transparent prediction pipeline: our case studies visualize how individual factors shape the final estimate, helping build trust in LLM-based decision support systems. --- ### SSVP: Synergistic Semantic-Visual Prompting for Industrial Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection Authors: Chenhao Fu, Han Fang, Xiuzheng Zheng, Wenbo Wei, Yonghua Li, Hao Sun, Xuelong Li Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09147v2 Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection (ZSAD) leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to enable supervision-free industrial inspection. However, existing ZSAD paradigms are constrained by single visual backbones, which struggle to balance global semantic generalization with fine-grained structural discriminability. To bridge this gap, we propose Synergistic Semantic-Visual Prompting (SSVP), that efficiently fuses diverse visual encodings to elevate model's fine-grained perception. Specifically, SSVP introduces the Hierarchical Semantic-Visual Synergy (HSVS) mechanism, which deeply integrates DINOv3's multi-scale structural priors into the CLIP semantic space. Subsequently, the Vision-Conditioned Prompt Generator (VCPG) employs cross-modal attention to guide dynamic prompt generation, enabling linguistic queries to precisely anchor to specific anomaly patterns. Furthermore, to address the discrepancy between global scoring and local evidence, the Visual-Text Anomaly Mapper (VTAM) establishes a dual-gated calibration paradigm. Extensive evaluations on seven industrial benchmarks validate the robustness of our method; SSVP achieves state-of-the-art performance with 93.0% Image-AUROC and 92.2% Pixel-AUROC on MVTec-AD, significantly outperforming existing zero-shot approaches. --- ### Discrete Solution Operator Learning for Geometry-Dependent PDEs Authors: Jinshuai Bai, Haolin Li, Zahra Sharif Khodaei, M. H. Aliabadi, YuanTong Gu, Xi-Qiao Feng Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.LG, math.NA, physics.comp-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09143v3 Neural operator learning accelerates PDE solution by approximating operators as mappings between continuous function spaces. Yet in many engineering settings, varying geometry induces discrete structural changes, including topological changes, abrupt changes in boundary conditions or boundary types, and changes in the computational domain, which break the smooth-variation premise. Here we introduce Discrete Solution Operator Learning (DiSOL), a complementary paradigm that learns discrete solution procedures rather than continuous function-space operators. DiSOL factorizes the solver into learnable stages that mirror classical discretizations: local contribution encoding, multiscale assembly, and implicit solution reconstruction on an embedded grid, thereby preserving procedure-level consistency while adapting to geometry-dependent discrete structures. Across geometry-dependent Poisson, advection-diffusion, linear elasticity, as well as spatiotemporal heat conduction problems, DiSOL produces stable and accurate predictions under both in-distribution and strongly out-of-distribution geometries, including discontinuous boundaries and topological changes. These results highlight the need for procedural operator representations in geometry-dominated problems and position discrete solution operator learning as a distinct, complementary direction in scientific machine learning. --- ### EvasionBench: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Detecting Managerial Evasion in Earnings Call Q&A Authors: Shijian Ma, Yan Lin, Yi Yang Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09142v2 We present EvasionBench, a comprehensive benchmark for detecting evasive responses in corporate earnings call question-and-answer sessions. Drawing from 22.7 million Q&A pairs extracted from S&P Capital IQ transcripts, we construct a rigorously filtered dataset and introduce a three-level evasion taxonomy: direct, intermediate, and fully evasive. Our annotation pipeline employs a Multi-Model Consensus (MMC) framework, combining dual frontier LLM annotation with a three-judge majority voting mechanism for ambiguous cases, achieving a Cohen's Kappa of 0.835 on human inter-annotator agreement. We release: (1) a balanced 84K training set, (2) a 1K gold-standard evaluation set with expert human labels, and (3) (Eva-4B), a 4-billion parameter classifier fine-tuned from Qwen3-4B that achieves 84.9% Macro-F1, outperforming Claude 4.5, GPT-5.2, and Gemini 3 Flash. Our ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-model consensus labeling over single-model annotation. EvasionBench fills a critical gap in financial NLP by providing the first large-scale benchmark specifically targeting managerial communication evasion. --- ### Identity-Robust Language Model Generation via Content Integrity Preservation Authors: Miao Zhang, Kelly Chen, Md Mehrab Tanjim, Rumi Chunara Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09141v1 Large Language Model (LLM) outputs often vary across user sociodemographic attributes, leading to disparities in factual accuracy, utility, and safety, even for objective questions where demographic information is irrelevant. Unlike prior work on stereotypical or representational bias, this paper studies identity-dependent degradation of core response quality. We show empirically that such degradation arises from biased generation behavior, despite factual knowledge being robustly encoded across identities. Motivated by this mismatch, we propose a lightweight, training-free framework for identity-robust generation that selectively neutralizes non-critical identity information while preserving semantically essential attributes, thus maintaining output content integrity. Experiments across four benchmarks and 18 sociodemographic identities demonstrate an average 77% reduction in identity-dependent bias compared to vanilla prompting and a 45% reduction relative to prompt-based defenses. Our work addresses a critical gap in mitigating the impact of user identity cues in prompts on core generation quality. --- ### SkinFlow: Efficient Information Transmission for Open Dermatological Diagnosis via Dynamic Visual Encoding and Staged RL Authors: Lijun Liu, Linwei Chen, Zhishou Zhang, Meng Tian, Hengfu Cui, Ruiyang Li, Zhaocheng Liu, Qiang Ju, Qianxi Li, Hong-Yu Zhou Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09136v1 General-purpose Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), despite their massive scale, often falter in dermatology due to "diffuse attention" - the inability to disentangle subtle pathological lesions from background noise. In this paper, we challenge the assumption that parameter scaling is the only path to medical precision. We introduce SkinFlow, a framework that treats diagnosis as an optimization of visual information transmission efficiency. Our approach utilizes a Virtual-Width Dynamic Vision Encoder (DVE) to "unfold" complex pathological manifolds without physical parameter expansion, coupled with a two-stage Reinforcement Learning strategy. This strategy sequentially aligns explicit medical descriptions (Stage I) and reconstructs implicit diagnostic textures (Stage II) within a constrained semantic space. Furthermore, we propose a clinically grounded evaluation protocol that prioritizes diagnostic safety and hierarchical relevance over rigid label matching. Empirical results are compelling: our 7B model establishes a new state-of-the-art on the Fitzpatrick17k benchmark, achieving a +12.06% gain in Top-1 accuracy and a +28.57% boost in Top-6 accuracy over the massive general-purpose models (e.g., Qwen3VL-235B and GPT-5.2). These findings demonstrate that optimizing geometric capacity and information flow yields superior diagnostic reasoning compared to raw parameter scaling. --- ### Equi-ViT: Rotational Equivariant Vision Transformer for Robust Histopathology Analysis Authors: Fuyao Chen, Yuexi Du, Elèonore V. Lieffrig, Nicha C. Dvornek, John A. Onofrey Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: eess.IV, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09130v1 Vision Transformers (ViTs) have gained rapid adoption in computational pathology for their ability to model long-range dependencies through self-attention, addressing the limitations of convolutional neural networks that excel at local pattern capture but struggle with global contextual reasoning. Recent pathology-specific foundation models have further advanced performance by leveraging large-scale pretraining. However, standard ViTs remain inherently non-equivariant to transformations such as rotations and reflections, which are ubiquitous variations in histopathology imaging. To address this limitation, we propose Equi-ViT, which integrates an equivariant convolution kernel into the patch embedding stage of a ViT architecture, imparting built-in rotational equivariance to learned representations. Equi-ViT achieves superior rotation-consistent patch embeddings and stable classification performance across image orientations. Our results on a public colorectal cancer dataset demonstrate that incorporating equivariant patch embedding enhances data efficiency and robustness, suggesting that equivariant transformers could potentially serve as more generalizable backbones for the application of ViT in histopathology, such as digital pathology foundation models. --- ### Beyond Seen Bounds: Class-Centric Polarization for Single-Domain Generalized Deep Metric Learning Authors: Xin Yuan, Meiqi Wan, Wei Liu, Xin Xu, Zheng Wang Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09121v1 Single-domain generalized deep metric learning (SDG-DML) faces the dual challenge of both category and domain shifts during testing, limiting real-world applications. Therefore, aiming to learn better generalization ability on both unseen categories and domains is a realistic goal for the SDG-DML task. To deliver the aspiration, existing SDG-DML methods employ the domain expansion-equalization strategy to expand the source data and generate out-of-distribution samples. However, these methods rely on proxy-based expansion, which tends to generate samples clustered near class proxies, failing to simulate the broad and distant domain shifts encountered in practice. To alleviate the problem, we propose CenterPolar, a novel SDG-DML framework that dynamically expands and constrains domain distributions to learn a generalizable DML model for wider target domain distributions. Specifically, \textbf{CenterPolar} contains two collaborative class-centric polarization phases: (1) Class-Centric Centrifugal Expansion ($C^3E$) and (2) Class-Centric Centripetal Constraint ($C^4$). In the first phase, $C^3E$ drives the source domain distribution by shifting the source data away from class centroids using centrifugal expansion to generalize to more unseen domains. In the second phase, to consolidate domain-invariant class information for the generalization ability to unseen categories, $C^4$ pulls all seen and unseen samples toward their class centroids while enforcing inter-class separation via centripetal constraint. Extensive experimental results on widely used CUB-200-2011 Ext., Cars196 Ext., DomainNet, PACS, and Office-Home datasets demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our CenterPolar over existing state-of-the-art methods. The code will be released after acceptance. --- ### Adaptive Multi-Stage Patent Claim Generation with Unified Quality Assessment Authors: Chen-Wei Liang, Bin Guo, Zhen-Yuan Wei, Mu-Jiang-Shan Wang Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09120v1 Current patent claim generation systems face three fundamental limitations: poor cross-jurisdictional generalization, inadequate semantic relationship modeling between claims and prior art, and unreliable quality assessment. We introduce a novel three-stage framework that addresses these challenges through relationship-aware similarity analysis, domain-adaptive claim generation, and unified quality assessment. Our approach employs multi-head attention with eight specialized heads for explicit relationship modeling, integrates curriculum learning with dynamic LoRA adapter selection across five patent domains, and implements cross-attention mechanisms between evaluation aspects for comprehensive quality assessment. Extensive experiments on USPTO HUPD dataset, EPO patent collections, and Patent-CE benchmark demonstrate substantial improvements: 7.6-point ROUGE-L gain over GPT-4o, 8.3\% BERTScore enhancement over Llama-3.1-8B, and 0.847 correlation with human experts compared to 0.623 for separate evaluation models. Our method maintains 89.4\% cross-jurisdictional performance retention versus 76.2\% for baselines, establishing a comprehensive solution for automated patent prosecution workflows. --- ### Contrastive Bi-Encoder Models for Multi-Label Skill Extraction: Enhancing ESCO Ontology Matching with BERT and Attention Mechanisms Authors: Yongming Sun Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.CL, econ.GN arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09119v1 Fine-grained labor market analysis increasingly relies on mapping unstructured job advertisements to standardized skill taxonomies such as ESCO. This mapping is naturally formulated as an Extreme Multi-Label Classification (XMLC) problem, but supervised solutions are constrained by the scarcity and cost of large-scale, taxonomy-aligned annotations--especially in non-English settings where job-ad language diverges substantially from formal skill definitions. We propose a zero-shot skill extraction framework that eliminates the need for manually labeled job-ad training data. The framework uses a Large Language Model (LLM) to synthesize training instances from ESCO definitions, and introduces hierarchically constrained multi-skill generation based on ESCO Level-2 categories to improve semantic coherence in multi-label contexts. On top of the synthetic corpus, we train a contrastive bi-encoder that aligns job-ad sentences with ESCO skill descriptions in a shared embedding space; the encoder augments a BERT backbone with BiLSTM and attention pooling to better model long, information-dense requirement statements. An upstream RoBERTa-based binary filter removes non-skill sentences to improve end-to-end precision. Experiments show that (i) hierarchy-conditioned generation improves both fluency and discriminability relative to unconstrained pairing, and (ii) the resulting multi-label model transfers effectively to real-world Chinese job advertisements, achieving strong zero-shot retrieval performance (F1@5 = 0.72) and outperforming TF--IDF and standard BERT baselines. Overall, the proposed pipeline provides a scalable, data-efficient pathway for automated skill coding in labor economics and workforce analytics. --- ### LPCAN: Lightweight Pyramid Cross-Attention Network for Rail Surface Defect Detection Using RGB-D Data Authors: Jackie Alex, Guoqiang Huan Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09118v2 This paper addresses the limitations of current vision-based rail defect detection methods, including high computational complexity, excessive parameter counts, and suboptimal accuracy. We propose a Lightweight Pyramid Cross-Attention Network (LPCANet) that leverages RGB-D data for efficient and accurate defect identification. The architecture integrates MobileNetv2 as a backbone for RGB feature extraction with a lightweight pyramid module (LPM) for depth processing, coupled with a cross-attention mechanism (CAM) for multimodal fusion and a spatial feature extractor (SFE) for enhanced structural analysis. Comprehensive evaluations on three unsupervised RGB-D rail datasets (NEU-RSDDS-AUG, RSDD-TYPE1, RSDD-TYPE2) demonstrate that LPCANet achieves state-of-the-art performance with only 9.90 million parameters, 2.50 G FLOPs, and 162.60 fps inference speed. Compared to 18 existing methods, LPCANet shows significant improvements, including +1.48\% in $S_α$, +0.86\% in IOU, and +1.77\% in MAE over the best-performing baseline. Ablation studies confirm the critical roles of CAM and SFE, while experiments on non-rail datasets (DAGM2007, MT, Kolektor-SDD2) validate its generalization capability. The proposed framework effectively bridges traditional and deep learning approaches, offering substantial practical value for industrial defect inspection. Future work will focus on further model compression for real-time deployment. --- ### A Marketplace for AI-Generated Adult Content and Deepfakes Authors: Shalmoli Ghosh, Matthew R. DeVerna, Filippo Menczer Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09117v3 Generative AI systems increasingly enable the production of highly realistic synthetic media. Civitai, a popular community-driven platform for AI-generated content, operates a monetized feature called Bounties, which allows users to commission the generation of content in exchange for payment. To examine how this mechanism is used and what content it incentivizes, we conduct a longitudinal analysis of all publicly available bounty requests collected over a 14-month period following the platform's launch. We find that the bounty marketplace is dominated by tools that let users steer AI models toward content they were not trained to generate. At the same time, requests for content that is "Not Safe For Work" are widespread and have increased steadily over time, now comprising a majority of all bounties. Participation in bounty creation is uneven, with 20% of requesters accounting for roughly half of requests. Requests for "deepfake" - media depicting identifiable real individuals - exhibit a higher concentration than other types of bounties. A nontrivial subset of these requests involves explicit deepfakes despite platform policies prohibiting such content. These bounties disproportionately target female celebrities, revealing a pronounced gender asymmetry in social harm. Together, these findings show how monetized, community-driven generative AI platforms can produce gendered harms, raising questions about consent, governance, and enforcement. --- ### LP-LLM: End-to-End Real-World Degraded License Plate Text Recognition via Large Multimodal Models Authors: Haoyan Gong, Hongbin Liu Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09116v1 Real-world License Plate Recognition (LPR) faces significant challenges from severe degradations such as motion blur, low resolution, and complex illumination. The prevailing "restoration-then-recognition" two-stage paradigm suffers from a fundamental flaw: the pixel-level optimization objectives of image restoration models are misaligned with the semantic goals of character recognition, leading to artifact interference and error accumulation. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated powerful general capabilities, they lack explicit structural modeling for license plate character sequences (e.g., fixed length, specific order). To address this, we propose an end-to-end structure-aware multimodal reasoning framework based on Qwen3-VL. The core innovation lies in the Character-Aware Multimodal Reasoning Module (CMRM), which introduces a set of learnable Character Slot Queries. Through a cross-attention mechanism, these queries actively retrieve fine-grained evidence corresponding to character positions from visual features. Subsequently, we inject these character-aware representations back into the visual tokens via residual modulation, enabling the language model to perform autoregressive generation based on explicit structural priors. Furthermore, combined with the LoRA parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategy, the model achieves domain adaptation while retaining the generalization capabilities of the large model. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world severely degraded datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing restoration-recognition combinations and general VLMs, validating the superiority of incorporating structured reasoning into large models for low-quality text recognition tasks. --- ### A Machine Learning Approach Towards Runtime Optimisation of Matrix Multiplication Authors: Yufan Xia, Marco De La Pierre, Amanda S. Barnard, Giuseppe Maria Junior Barca Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.DC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09114v1 The GEneral Matrix Multiplication (GEMM) is one of the essential algorithms in scientific computing. Single-thread GEMM implementations are well-optimised with techniques like blocking and autotuning. However, due to the complexity of modern multi-core shared memory systems, it is challenging to determine the number of threads that minimises the multi-thread GEMM runtime. We present a proof-of-concept approach to building an Architecture and Data-Structure Aware Linear Algebra (ADSALA) software library that uses machine learning to optimise the runtime performance of BLAS routines. More specifically, our method uses a machine learning model on-the-fly to automatically select the optimal number of threads for a given GEMM task based on the collected training data. Test results on two different HPC node architectures, one based on a two-socket Intel Cascade Lake and the other on a two-socket AMD Zen 3, revealed a 25 to 40 per cent speedup compared to traditional GEMM implementations in BLAS when using GEMM of memory usage within 100 MB. --- ### The AI Hippocampus: How Far are We From Human Memory? Authors: Zixia Jia, Jiaqi Li, Yipeng Kang, Yuxuan Wang, Tong Wu, Quansen Wang, Xiaobo Wang, Shuyi Zhang, Junzhe Shen, Qing Li, Siyuan Qi, Yitao Liang et al. Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09113v1 Memory plays a foundational role in augmenting the reasoning, adaptability, and contextual fidelity of modern Large Language Models and Multi-Modal LLMs. As these models transition from static predictors to interactive systems capable of continual learning and personalized inference, the incorporation of memory mechanisms has emerged as a central theme in their architectural and functional evolution. This survey presents a comprehensive and structured synthesis of memory in LLMs and MLLMs, organizing the literature into a cohesive taxonomy comprising implicit, explicit, and agentic memory paradigms. Specifically, the survey delineates three primary memory frameworks. Implicit memory refers to the knowledge embedded within the internal parameters of pre-trained transformers, encompassing their capacity for memorization, associative retrieval, and contextual reasoning. Recent work has explored methods to interpret, manipulate, and reconfigure this latent memory. Explicit memory involves external storage and retrieval components designed to augment model outputs with dynamic, queryable knowledge representations, such as textual corpora, dense vectors, and graph-based structures, thereby enabling scalable and updatable interaction with information sources. Agentic memory introduces persistent, temporally extended memory structures within autonomous agents, facilitating long-term planning, self-consistency, and collaborative behavior in multi-agent systems, with relevance to embodied and interactive AI. Extending beyond text, the survey examines the integration of memory within multi-modal settings, where coherence across vision, language, audio, and action modalities is essential. Key architectural advances, benchmark tasks, and open challenges are discussed, including issues related to memory capacity, alignment, factual consistency, and cross-system interoperability. --- ### Towards Open Environments and Instructions: General Vision-Language Navigation via Fast-Slow Interactive Reasoning Authors: Yang Li, Aming Wu, Zihao Zhang, Yahong Han Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09111v2 Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) aims to enable agents to navigate to a target location based on language instructions. Traditional VLN often follows a close-set assumption, i.e., training and test data share the same style of the input images and instructions. However, the real world is open and filled with various unseen environments, posing enormous difficulties for close-set methods. To this end, we focus on the General Scene Adaptation (GSA-VLN) task, aiming to learn generalized navigation ability by introducing diverse environments and inconsistent instructions.Recent research indicates that by means of fast and slow cognition systems, human beings could generate stable policies, which strengthen their adaptation for open world. Inspired by this idea, we propose the slow4fast-VLN, establishing a dynamic interactive fast-slow reasoning framework. The fast-reasoning module, an end-to-end strategy network, outputs actions via real-time input. It accumulates execution records in a history repository to build memory. The slow-reasoning module analyze the memories generated by the fast-reasoning module. Through deep reflection, it extracts experiences that enhance the generalization ability of decision-making. These experiences are structurally stored and used to continuously optimize the fast-reasoning module. Unlike traditional methods that treat fast-slow reasoning as independent mechanisms, our framework enables fast-slow interaction. By leveraging the experiences from slow reasoning, it continually improves the accuracy and generalization ability of fast decisions. This interaction allows the system to continuously adapt and efficiently execute navigation tasks when facing unseen scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiorities of our method. --- ### SAM-Aug: Leveraging SAM Priors for Few-Shot Parcel Segmentation in Satellite Time Series Authors: Kai Hu, Yaozu Feng, Vladimir Lysenko, Ya Guo, Huayi Wu Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09110v2 Few-shot semantic segmentation of time-series remote sensing images remains a critical challenge, particularly in regions where labeled data is scarce or costly to obtain. While state-of-the-art models perform well under full supervision, their performance degrades significantly under limited labeling, limiting their real-world applicability. In this work, we propose SAM-Aug, a new annotation-efficient framework that leverages the geometry-aware segmentation capability of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to improve few-shot land cover mapping. Our approach constructs cloud-free composite images from temporal sequences and applies SAM in a fully unsupervised manner to generate geometry-aware mask priors. These priors are then integrated into training through a proposed loss function called RegionSmoothLoss, which enforces prediction consistency within each SAM-derived region across temporal frames, effectively regularizing the model to respect semantically coherent structures. Extensive experiments on the PASTIS-R benchmark under a 5 percent labeled setting demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of SAM-Aug. Averaged over three random seeds (42, 2025, 4090), our method achieves a mean test mIoU of 36.21 percent, outperforming the state-of-the-art baseline by +2.33 percentage points, a relative improvement of 6.89 percent. Notably, on the most favorable split (seed=42), SAM-Aug reaches a test mIoU of 40.28 percent, representing an 11.2 percent relative gain with no additional labeled data. The consistent improvement across all seeds confirms the generalization power of leveraging foundation model priors under annotation scarcity. Our results highlight that vision models like SAM can serve as useful regularizers in few-shot remote sensing learning, offering a scalable and plug-and-play solution for land cover monitoring without requiring manual annotations or model fine-tuning. --- ### Small but Mighty: Dynamic Wavelet Expert-Guided Fine-Tuning of Large-Scale Models for Optical Remote Sensing Object Segmentation Authors: Yanguang Sun, Chao Wang, Jian Yang, Lei Luo Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09108v1 Accurately localizing and segmenting relevant objects from optical remote sensing images (ORSIs) is critical for advancing remote sensing applications. Existing methods are typically built upon moderate-scale pre-trained models and employ diverse optimization strategies to achieve promising performance under full-parameter fine-tuning. In fact, deeper and larger-scale foundation models can provide stronger support for performance improvement. However, due to their massive number of parameters, directly adopting full-parameter fine-tuning leads to pronounced training difficulties, such as excessive GPU memory consumption and high computational costs, which result in extremely limited exploration of large-scale models in existing works. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic wavelet expert-guided fine-tuning paradigm with fewer trainable parameters, dubbed WEFT, which efficiently adapts large-scale foundation models to ORSIs segmentation tasks by leveraging the guidance of wavelet experts. Specifically, we introduce a task-specific wavelet expert extractor to model wavelet experts from different perspectives and dynamically regulate their outputs, thereby generating trainable features enriched with task-specific information for subsequent fine-tuning. Furthermore, we construct an expert-guided conditional adapter that first enhances the fine-grained perception of frozen features for specific tasks by injecting trainable features, and then iteratively updates the information of both types of feature, allowing for efficient fine-tuning. Extensive experiments show that our WEFT not only outperforms 21 state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on three ORSIs datasets, but also achieves optimal results in camouflage, natural, and medical scenarios. The source code is available at: https://github.com/CSYSI/WEFT. --- ### Vision Foundation Models for Domain Generalisable Cross-View Localisation in Planetary Ground-Aerial Robotic Teams Authors: Lachlan Holden, Feras Dayoub, Alberto Candela, David Harvey, Tat-Jun Chin Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09107v1 Accurate localisation in planetary robotics enables the advanced autonomy required to support the increased scale and scope of future missions. The successes of the Ingenuity helicopter and multiple planetary orbiters lay the groundwork for future missions that use ground-aerial robotic teams. In this paper, we consider rovers using machine learning to localise themselves in a local aerial map using limited field-of-view monocular ground-view RGB images as input. A key consideration for machine learning methods is that real space data with ground-truth position labels suitable for training is scarce. In this work, we propose a novel method of localising rovers in an aerial map using cross-view-localising dual-encoder deep neural networks. We leverage semantic segmentation with vision foundation models and high volume synthetic data to bridge the domain gap to real images. We also contribute a new cross-view dataset of real-world rover trajectories with corresponding ground-truth localisation data captured in a planetary analogue facility, plus a high volume dataset of analogous synthetic image pairs. Using particle filters for state estimation with the cross-view networks allows accurate position estimation over simple and complex trajectories based on sequences of ground-view images. --- ### AviationLMM: A Large Multimodal Foundation Model for Civil Aviation Authors: Wenbin Li, Jingling Wu, Xiaoyong Lin. Jing Chen, Cong Chen Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09105v2 Civil aviation is a cornerstone of global transportation and commerce, and ensuring its safety, efficiency and customer satisfaction is paramount. Yet conventional Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions in aviation remain siloed and narrow, focusing on isolated tasks or single modalities. They struggle to integrate heterogeneous data such as voice communications, radar tracks, sensor streams and textual reports, which limits situational awareness, adaptability, and real-time decision support. This paper introduces the vision of AviationLMM, a Large Multimodal foundation Model for civil aviation, designed to unify the heterogeneous data streams of civil aviation and enable understanding, reasoning, generation and agentic applications. We firstly identify the gaps between existing AI solutions and requirements. Secondly, we describe the model architecture that ingests multimodal inputs such as air-ground voice, surveillance, on-board telemetry, video and structured texts, and performs cross-modal alignment and fusion, and produces flexible outputs ranging from situation summaries and risk alerts to predictive diagnostics and multimodal incident reconstructions. In order to fully realize this vision, we identify key research opportunities to address, including data acquisition, alignment and fusion, pretraining, reasoning, trustworthiness, privacy, robustness to missing modalities, and synthetic scenario generation. By articulating the design and challenges of AviationLMM, we aim to boost the civil aviation foundation model progress and catalyze coordinated research efforts toward an integrated, trustworthy and privacy-preserving aviation AI ecosystem. --- ### Enhancing Imbalanced Electrocardiogram Classification: A Novel Approach Integrating Data Augmentation through Wavelet Transform and Interclass Fusion Authors: Haijian Shao, Wei Liu, Xing Deng, Daze Lu Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09103v1 Imbalanced electrocardiogram (ECG) data hampers the efficacy and resilience of algorithms in the automated processing and interpretation of cardiovascular diagnostic information, which in turn impedes deep learning-based ECG classification. Notably, certain cardiac conditions that are infrequently encountered are disproportionately underrepresented in these datasets. Although algorithmic generation and oversampling of specific ECG signal types can mitigate class skew, there is a lack of consensus regarding the effectiveness of such techniques in ECG classification. Furthermore, the methodologies and scenarios of ECG acquisition introduce noise, further complicating the processing of ECG data. This paper presents a significantly enhanced ECG classifier that simultaneously addresses both class imbalance and noise-related challenges in ECG analysis, as observed in the CPSC 2018 dataset. Specifically, we propose the application of feature fusion based on the wavelet transform, with a focus on wavelet transform-based interclass fusion, to generate the training feature library and the test set feature library. Subsequently, the original training and test data are amalgamated with their respective feature databases, resulting in more balanced training and test datasets. Employing this approach, our ECG model achieves recognition accuracies of up to 99%, 98%, 97%, 98%, 96%, 92%, and 93% for Normal, AF, I-AVB, LBBB, RBBB, PAC, PVC, STD, and STE, respectively. Furthermore, the average recognition accuracy for these categories ranges between 92\% and 98\%. Notably, our proposed data fusion methodology surpasses any known algorithms in terms of ECG classification accuracy in the CPSC 2018 dataset. --- ### DScheLLM: Enabling Dynamic Scheduling through a Fine-Tuned Dual-System Large language Model Authors: Lixiang Zhang, Chenggong Zhao, Qing Gao, Xiaoke Zhao, Gengyi Bai, Jinhu Lv Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09100v2 Production scheduling is highly susceptible to dynamic disruptions, such as variations in processing times, machine availability, and unexpected task insertions. Conventional approaches typically rely on event-specific models and explicit analytical formulations, which limits their adaptability and generalization across previously unseen disturbances. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes DScheLLM, a dynamic scheduling approach that leverages fine-tuned large language models within a dual-system (fast-slow) reasoning architecture to address disturbances of different scales. A unified large language model-based framework is constructed to handle dynamic events, where training datasets for both fast and slow reasoning modes are generated using exact schedules obtained from an operations research solver. The Huawei OpenPangu Embedded-7B model is subsequently fine-tuned under the hybrid reasoning paradigms using LoRA. Experimental evaluations on standard job shop scheduling benchmarks demonstrate that the fast-thinking mode can efficiently generate high-quality schedules and the slow-thinking mode can produce solver-compatible and well-formatted decision inputs. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents one of the earliest studies applying large language models to job shop scheduling in dynamic environments, highlighting their considerable potential for intelligent and adaptive scheduling optimization. --- ### Programming over Thinking: Efficient and Robust Multi-Constraint Planning Authors: Derrick Goh Xin Deik, Quanyu Long, Zhengyuan Liu, Nancy F. Chen, Wenya Wang Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09097v4 Multi-constraint planning involves identifying, evaluating, and refining candidate plans while satisfying multiple, potentially conflicting constraints. Existing large language model (LLM) approaches face fundamental limitations in this domain. Pure reasoning paradigms, which rely on long natural language chains, are prone to inconsistency, error accumulation, and prohibitive cost as constraints compound. Conversely, LLMs combined with coding- or solver-based strategies lack flexibility: they often generate problem-specific code from scratch or depend on fixed solvers, failing to capture generalizable logic across diverse problems. To address these challenges, we introduce the Scalable COde Planning Engine (SCOPE), a framework that disentangles query-specific reasoning from generic code execution. By separating reasoning from execution, SCOPE produces solver functions that are consistent, deterministic, and reusable across queries while requiring only minimal changes to input parameters. SCOPE achieves state-of-the-art performance while lowering cost and latency. For example, with GPT-4o, it reaches 93.1% success on TravelPlanner, a 61.6% gain over the best baseline (CoT) while cutting inference cost by 1.4x and time by ~4.67x. Code is available at https://github.com/DerrickGXD/SCOPE. --- ### Comparative Assessment of Concrete Compressive Strength Prediction at Industry Scale Using Embedding-based Neural Networks, Transformers, and Traditional Machine Learning Approaches Authors: Md Asiful Islam, Md Ahmed Al Muzaddid, Afia Jahin Prema, Sreenath Reddy Vuske Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09096v1 Concrete is the most widely used construction material worldwide; however, reliable prediction of compressive strength remains challenging due to material heterogeneity, variable mix proportions, and sensitivity to field and environmental conditions. Recent advances in artificial intelligence enable data-driven modeling frameworks capable of supporting automated decision-making in construction quality control. This study leverages an industry-scale dataset consisting of approximately 70,000 compressive strength test records to evaluate and compare multiple predictive approaches, including linear regression, decision trees, random forests, transformer-based neural networks, and embedding-based neural networks. The models incorporate key mixture design and placement variables such as water cement ratio, cementitious material content, slump, air content, temperature, and placement conditions. Results indicate that the embedding-based neural network consistently outperforms traditional machine learning and transformer-based models, achieving a mean 28-day prediction error of approximately 2.5%. This level of accuracy is comparable to routine laboratory testing variability, demonstrating the potential of embedding-based learning frameworks to enable automated, data-driven quality control and decision support in large-scale construction operations. --- ### Hidden States as Early Signals: Step-level Trace Evaluation and Pruning for Efficient Test-Time Scaling Authors: Zhixiang Liang, Beichen Huang, Zheng Wang, Minjia Zhang Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09093v2 Large Language Models (LLMs) can enhance reasoning capabilities through test-time scaling by generating multiple traces. However, the combination of lengthy reasoning traces with multiple sampling introduces substantial computation and high end-to-end latency. Prior work on accelerating this process has relied on similarity-based or confidence-based pruning, but these signals do not reliably indicate trace quality. To address these limitations, we propose STEP: Step-level Trace Evaluation and Pruning, a novel pruning framework that evaluates reasoning steps using hidden states and dynamically prunes unpromising traces during generation. We train a lightweight step scorer to estimate trace quality, and design a GPU memory-aware pruning strategy that triggers pruning as the GPU memory is saturated by KV cache to reduce end-to-end latency. Experiments across challenging reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that STEP reduces end-to-end inference latency by 45%-70% on average compared to self-consistency while also improving reasoning accuracy. Our code is released at: https://github.com/Supercomputing-System-AI-Lab/STEP --- ### SubTokenTest: A Practical Benchmark for Real-World Sub-token Understanding Authors: Shuyang Hou, Yi Hu, Muhan Zhang Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09089v1 Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their reasoning capabilities. However, they continue to struggle with basic character-level tasks, such as counting letters in words, a problem rooted in their tokenization process. While existing benchmarks have highlighted this weakness through basic character operations, such failures are often dismissed due to lacking practical relevance. Yet, many real-world applications, such as navigating text-based maps or interpreting structured tables, rely heavily on precise sub-token understanding. In this regard, we introduce SubTokenTest, a comprehensive benchmark that assesses sub-token understanding through practical, utility-driven tasks. Our benchmark includes ten tasks across four domains and isolates tokenization-related failures by decoupling performance from complex reasoning. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of nine advanced LLMs. Additionally, we investigate the impact of test-time scaling on sub-token reasoning and explore how character-level information is encoded within the hidden states. --- ### Distribution-Aligned Sequence Distillation for Superior Long-CoT Reasoning Authors: Shaotian Yan, Kaiyuan Liu, Chen Shen, Bing Wang, Sinan Fan, Jun Zhang, Yue Wu, Zheng Wang, Jieping Ye Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09088v1 In this report, we introduce DASD-4B-Thinking, a lightweight yet highly capable, fully open-source reasoning model. It achieves SOTA performance among open-source models of comparable scale across challenging benchmarks in mathematics, scientific reasoning, and code generation -- even outperforming several larger models. We begin by critically reexamining a widely adopted distillation paradigm in the community: SFT on teacher-generated responses, also known as sequence-level distillation. Although a series of recent works following this scheme have demonstrated remarkable efficiency and strong empirical performance, they are primarily grounded in the SFT perspective. Consequently, these approaches focus predominantly on designing heuristic rules for SFT data filtering, while largely overlooking the core principle of distillation itself -- enabling the student model to learn the teacher's full output distribution so as to inherit its generalization capability. Specifically, we identify three critical limitations in current practice: i) Inadequate representation of the teacher's sequence-level distribution; ii) Misalignment between the teacher's output distribution and the student's learning capacity; and iii) Exposure bias arising from teacher-forced training versus autoregressive inference. In summary, these shortcomings reflect a systemic absence of explicit teacher-student interaction throughout the distillation process, leaving the essence of distillation underexploited. To address these issues, we propose several methodological innovations that collectively form an enhanced sequence-level distillation training pipeline. Remarkably, DASD-4B-Thinking obtains competitive results using only 448K training samples -- an order of magnitude fewer than those employed by most existing open-source efforts. To support community research, we publicly release our models and the training dataset. --- ### MMR-GRPO: Accelerating GRPO-Style Training through Diversity-Aware Reward Reweighting Authors: Kangda Wei, Ruihong Huang Published: 2026-01-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09085v2 Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has become a standard approach for training mathematical reasoning models; however, its reliance on multiple completions per prompt makes training computationally expensive. Although recent work has reduced the number of training steps required to reach peak performance, the overall wall-clock training time often remains unchanged or even increases due to higher per-step cost. We propose MMR-GRPO, which integrates Maximal Marginal Relevance to reweigh rewards based on completion diversity. Our key insight is that semantically redundant completions contribute limited marginal learning signal; prioritizing diverse solutions yields more informative updates and accelerates convergence. Extensive evaluations across three model sizes (1.5B, 7B, 8B), three GRPO variants, and five mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that MMR-GRPO achieves comparable peak performance while requiring on average 47.9% fewer training steps and 70.2% less wall-clock time. These gains are consistent across models, methods, and benchmarks. Our code is released at: https://github.com/WeiKangda/MMR-GRPO. ---