# Research Papers — 2026-01 · bundle page 119 of 189 > Full-text markdown of papers #5901–5950 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/119 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-01/page/118.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-01/page/120.md) ### Changes in Visual Attention Patterns for Detection Tasks due to Dependencies on Signal and Background Spatial Frequencies Authors: Amar Kavuri, Howard C. Gifford, Mini Das Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.CV, eess.IV, eess.SP, physics.med-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09008v1 We aim to investigate the impact of image and signal properties on visual attention mechanisms during a signal detection task in digital images. The application of insight yielded from this work spans many areas of digital imaging where signal or pattern recognition is involved in complex heterogenous background. We used simulated tomographic breast images as the platform to investigate this question. While radiologists are highly effective at analyzing medical images to detect and diagnose diseases, misdiagnosis still occurs. We selected digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) images as a sample medical images with different breast densities and structures using digital breast phantoms (Bakic and XCAT). Two types of lesions (with distinct spatial frequency properties) were randomly inserted in the phantoms during projections to generate abnormal cases. Six human observers participated in observer study designed for a locating and detection of an 3-mm sphere lesion and 6-mm spicule lesion in reconstructed in-plane DBT slices. We collected eye-gaze data to estimate gaze metrics and to examine differences in visual attention mechanisms. We found that detection performance in complex visual environments is strongly constrained by later perceptual stages, with decision failures accounting for the largest proportion of errors. Signal detectability is jointly influenced by both target morphology and background complexity, revealing a critical interaction between local signal features and global anatomical noise. Increased fixation duration on spiculated lesions suggests that visual attention is differentially engaged depending on background and signal spatial frequency dependencies. --- ### GOUHFI 2.0: A Next-Generation Toolbox for Brain Segmentation and Cortex Parcellation at Ultra-High Field MRI Authors: Marc-Antoine Fortin, Anne Louise Kristoffersen, Paal Erik Goa Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV, physics.med-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09006v2 Ultra-High Field MRI (UHF-MRI) is increasingly used in large-scale neuroimaging studies, yet automatic brain segmentation and cortical parcellation remain challenging due to signal inhomogeneities, heterogeneous contrasts and resolutions, and the limited availability of tools optimized for UHF data. Standard software packages such as FastSurferVINN and SynthSeg+ often yield suboptimal results when applied directly to UHF images, thereby restricting region-based quantitative analyses. To address this need, we introduce GOUHFI 2.0, an updated implementation of GOUHFI that incorporates increased training data variability and additional functionalities, including cortical parcellation and volumetry. GOUHFI 2.0 preserves the contrast- and resolution-agnostic design of the original toolbox while introducing two independently trained 3D U-Net segmentation tasks. The first performs whole-brain segmentation into 35 labels across contrasts, resolutions, field strengths and populations, using a domain-randomization strategy and a training dataset of 238 subjects. Using the same training data, the second network performs cortical parcellation into 62 labels following the Desikan-Killiany-Tourville (DKT) protocol. Across multiple datasets, GOUHFI 2.0 demonstrated improved segmentation accuracy relative to the original toolbox, particularly in heterogeneous cohorts, and produced reliable cortical parcellations. In addition, the integrated volumetry pipeline yielded results consistent with standard volumetric workflows. Overall, GOUHFI 2.0 provides a comprehensive solution for brain segmentation, parcellation and volumetry across field strengths, and constitutes the first deep-learning toolbox enabling robust cortical parcellation at UHF-MRI. --- ### Instance camera focus prediction for crystal agglomeration classification Authors: Xiaoyu Ji, Chenhao Zhang, Tyler James Downard, Zoltan Nagy, Ali Shakouri, Fengqing Zhu Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09004v1 Agglomeration refers to the process of crystal clustering due to interparticle forces. Crystal agglomeration analysis from microscopic images is challenging due to the inherent limitations of two-dimensional imaging. Overlapping crystals may appear connected even when located at different depth layers. Because optical microscopes have a shallow depth of field, crystals that are in-focus and out-of-focus in the same image typically reside on different depth layers and do not constitute true agglomeration. To address this, we first quantified camera focus with an instance camera focus prediction network to predict 2 class focus level that aligns better with visual observations than traditional image processing focus measures. Then an instance segmentation model is combined with the predicted focus level for agglomeration classification. Our proposed method has a higher agglomeration classification and segmentation accuracy than the baseline models on ammonium perchlorate crystal and sugar crystal dataset. --- ### Entropy Sentinel: Probing Entropy Traces for LLM Monitoring Authors: Pedro Memoli Buffa, Luciano Del Corro Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09001v6 Deploying LLMs raises two coupled challenges: (1) monitoring---estimating where a model underperforms as traffic drifts---and (2) prioritization---deciding where to intervene to close the largest performance gaps. We explore whether top-$k$ logprobs---cheap, consumer-accessible signals from standard inference---can serve as reliable proxies for domain-level quality of both verifiable and subjective tasks. We summarize each response's output-entropy profile into a compact vector, predict instance quality with a lightweight classifier, and then average predictions to yield a domain-level estimate. On verifiable tasks (ten STEM benchmarks, nine LLMs, exhaustive train/test compositions), estimates often track held-out accuracy, with several models showing near monotonic calibration. On subjective tasks, trained on LLM-judge scores over categorized real user conversations, several models track the judge's slice scores remarkably closely ($r$ up to $0.91$) and detect the worst-performing categories near-perfectly, though this is not the case for all LLMs. Where coupling holds, results suggest that entropy signals can support monitoring at a fraction of the cost of judge-based evaluation. --- ### Universal Dynamics of Warmup Stable Decay: understanding WSD beyond Transformers Authors: Annalisa Belloni, Lorenzo Noci, Antonio Orvieto Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09000v1 The Warmup Stable Decay (WSD) learning rate scheduler has recently become popular, largely due to its good performance and flexibility when training large language models. It remains an open question whether the remarkable performance of WSD - using a decaying learning rate for only a fraction of training compared to cosine decay - is a phenomenon specific to transformer-based language models that can potentially offer new theoretical insights into their training dynamics. Inspired by the usage of learning rate schedulers as a new lens into understanding landscape geometry (e.g., river valley, connected minima, progressive sharpening), in this work we compare the WSD path of the Adam optimizer on a Pythia-like language model to that of a small CNN trained to classify CIFAR10 images. We observe most training signals, optimizer path features, and sharpness dynamics to be qualitatively similar in such architectures. This consistency points to shared geometric characteristics of the loss landscapes of old and new nonconvex problems, and hints to future research questions around the geometry of high dimensional optimization problems. --- ### Physics-Guided Counterfactual Explanations for Large-Scale Multivariate Time Series: Application in Scalable and Interpretable SEP Event Prediction Authors: Pranjal Patil, Anli Ji, Berkay Aydin Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08999v1 Accurate prediction of solar energetic particle events is vital for safeguarding satellites, astronauts, and space-based infrastructure. Modern space weather monitoring generates massive volumes of high-frequency, multivariate time series (MVTS) data from sources such as the Geostationary perational Environmental Satellites (GOES). Machine learning (ML) models trained on this data show strong predictive power, but most existing methods overlook domain-specific feasibility constraints. Counterfactual explanations have emerged as a key tool for improving model interpretability, yet existing approaches rarely enforce physical plausibility. This work introduces a Physics-Guided Counterfactual Explanation framework, a novel method for generating counterfactual explanations in time series classification tasks that remain consistent with underlying physical principles. Applied to solar energetic particles (SEP) forecasting, this framework achieves over 80% reduction in Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) distance increasing the proximity, produces counterfactual explanations with higher sparsity, and reduces runtime by nearly 50% compared to state-of-the-art baselines such as DiCE. Beyond numerical improvements, this framework ensures that generated counterfactual explanations are physically plausible and actionable in scientific domains. In summary, the framework generates counterfactual explanations that are both valid and physically consistent, while laying the foundation for scalable counterfactual generation in big data environments. --- ### Optimising for Energy Efficiency and Performance in Machine Learning Authors: Emile Dos Santos Ferreira, Andrei Paleyes, Neil D. Lawrence Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08991v2 The ubiquity of machine learning (ML) and the demand for ever-larger models bring an increase in energy consumption and environmental impact. However, little is known about the energy scaling laws in ML, and existing research focuses on training cost -- ignoring the larger cost of inference. Furthermore, tools for measuring the energy consumption of ML do not provide actionable feedback. To address these gaps, we developed Energy Consumption Optimiser (ECOpt): a hyperparameter tuner that optimises for energy efficiency and model performance. ECOpt quantifies the trade-off between these metrics as an interpretable Pareto frontier. This enables ML practitioners to make informed decisions about energy cost and environmental impact, while maximising the benefit of their models and complying with new regulations. Using ECOpt, we show that parameter and floating-point operation counts can be unreliable proxies for energy consumption, and observe that the energy efficiency of Transformer models for text generation is relatively consistent across hardware. These findings motivate measuring and publishing the energy metrics of ML models. We further show that ECOpt can have a net positive environmental impact and use it to uncover seven models for CIFAR-10 that improve upon the state of the art, when considering accuracy and energy efficiency together. --- ### ART: Action-based Reasoning Task Benchmarking for Medical AI Agents Authors: Ananya Mantravadi, Shivali Dalmia, Abhishek Mukherji Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08988v1 Reliable clinical decision support requires medical AI agents capable of safe, multi-step reasoning over structured electronic health records (EHRs). While large language models (LLMs) show promise in healthcare, existing benchmarks inadequately assess performance on action-based tasks involving threshold evaluation, temporal aggregation, and conditional logic. We introduce ART, an Action-based Reasoning clinical Task benchmark for medical AI agents, which mines real-world EHR data to create challenging tasks targeting known reasoning weaknesses. Through analysis of existing benchmarks, we identify three dominant error categories: retrieval failures, aggregation errors, and conditional logic misjudgments. Our four-stage pipeline -- scenario identification, task generation, quality audit, and evaluation -- produces diverse, clinically validated tasks grounded in real patient data. Evaluating GPT-4o-mini and Claude 3.5 Sonnet on 600 tasks shows near-perfect retrieval after prompt refinement, but substantial gaps in aggregation (28--64%) and threshold reasoning (32--38%). By exposing failure modes in action-oriented EHR reasoning, ART advances toward more reliable clinical agents, an essential step for AI systems that reduce cognitive load and administrative burden, supporting workforce capacity in high-demand care settings --- ### SAM-pose2seg: Pose-Guided Human Instance Segmentation in Crowds Authors: Constantin Kolomiiets, Miroslav Purkrabek, Jiri Matas Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08982v2 Segment Anything (SAM) provides an unprecedented foundation for human segmentation, but may struggle under occlusion, where keypoints may be partially or fully invisible. We adapt SAM 2.1 for pose-guided segmentation with minimal encoder modifications, retaining its strong generalization. Using a fine-tuning strategy called PoseMaskRefine, we incorporate pose keypoints with high visibility into the iterative correction process originally employed by SAM, yielding improved robustness and accuracy across multiple datasets. During inference, we simplify prompting by selecting only the three keypoints with the highest visibility. This strategy reduces sensitivity to common errors, such as missing body parts or misclassified clothing, and allows accurate mask prediction from as few as a single keypoint. Our results demonstrate that pose-guided fine-tuning of SAM enables effective, occlusion-aware human segmentation while preserving the generalization capabilities of the original model. The code and pretrained models will be available at https://mirapurkrabek.github.io/BBox-Mask-Pose/. --- ### Thermo-LIO: A Novel Multi-Sensor Integrated System for Structural Health Monitoring Authors: Chao Yang, Haoyuan Zheng, Yue Ma Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08977v1 Traditional two-dimensional thermography, despite being non-invasive and useful for defect detection in the construction field, is limited in effectively assessing complex geometries, inaccessible areas, and subsurface defects. This paper introduces Thermo-LIO, a novel multi-sensor system that can enhance Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) by fusing thermal imaging with high-resolution LiDAR. To achieve this, the study first develops a multimodal fusion method combining thermal imaging and LiDAR, enabling precise calibration and synchronization of multimodal data streams to create accurate representations of temperature distributions in buildings. Second, it integrates this fusion approach with LiDAR-Inertial Odometry (LIO), enabling full coverage of large-scale structures and allowing for detailed monitoring of temperature variations and defect detection across inspection cycles. Experimental validations, including case studies on a bridge and a hall building, demonstrate that Thermo-LIO can detect detailed thermal anomalies and structural defects more accurately than traditional methods. The system enhances diagnostic precision, enables real-time processing, and expands inspection coverage, highlighting the crucial role of multimodal sensor integration in advancing SHM methodologies for large-scale civil infrastructure. --- ### Continuous Fairness On Data Streams Authors: Subhodeep Ghosh, Zhihui Du, Angela Bonifati, Manish Kumar, David Bader, Senjuti Basu Roy Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CY, cs.DS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08976v1 We study the problem of enforcing continuous group fairness over windows in data streams. We propose a novel fairness model that ensures group fairness at a finer granularity level (referred to as block) within each sliding window. This formulation is particularly useful when the window size is large, making it desirable to enforce fairness at a finer granularity. Within this framework, we address two key challenges: efficiently monitoring whether each sliding window satisfies block-level group fairness, and reordering the current window as effectively as possible when fairness is violated. To enable real-time monitoring, we design sketch-based data structures that maintain attribute distributions with minimal overhead. We also develop optimal, efficient algorithms for the reordering task, supported by rigorous theoretical guarantees. Our evaluation on four real-world streaming scenarios demonstrates the practical effectiveness of our approach. We achieve millisecond-level processing and a throughput of approximately 30,000 queries per second on average, depending on system parameters. The stream reordering algorithm improves block-level group fairness by up to 95% in certain cases, and by 50-60% on average across datasets. A qualitative study further highlights the advantages of block-level fairness compared to window-level fairness. --- ### Machine Learning-Driven Creep Law Discovery Across Alloy Compositional Space Authors: Hongshun Chen, Ryan Zhou, Rujing Zha, Zihan Chen, Wenpan Li, Rowan Rolark, John Patrick Reidy, Jian Cao, Ping Guo, David C. Dunand, Horacio D. Espinosa Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cond-mat.mtrl-sci, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08970v1 Hihg-temperature creep characterization of structural alloys traditionally relies on serial uniaxial tests, which are highly inefficient for exploring the large search space of alloy compositions and for material discovery. Here, we introduce a machine-learning-assisted, high-throughput framework for creep law identification based on a dimple array bulge instrument (DABI) configuration, which enables parallel creep testing of 25 dimples, each fabricated from a different alloy, in a single experiment. Full-field surface displacements of dimples undergoing time-dependent creep-induced bulging under inert gas pressure are measured by 3D digital image correlation. We train a recurrent neural network (RNN) as a surrogate model, mapping creep parameters and loading conditions to the time-dependent deformation response of DABI. Coupling this surrogate with a particle swarm optimization scheme enables rapid and global inverse identification with sparsity regularization of creep parameters from experiment displacement-time histories. In addition, we propose a phenomenological creep law with a time-dependent stress exponent that captures the sigmoidal primary creep observed in wrought INCONEL 625 and extracts its temperature dependence from DABI test at multiple temperatures. Furthermore, we employ a general creep law combining several conventional forms together with regularized inversion to identify the creep laws for 47 additional Fe-, Ni-, and Co-rich alloys and to automatically select the dominant functional form for each alloy. This workflow combined with DABI experiment provides a quantitative, high-throughput creep characterization platform that is compatible with data mining, composition-property modeling, and nonlinear structural optimization with creep behavior across a large alloy design space. --- ### MLCBART: Multilabel Classification with Bayesian Additive Regression Trees Authors: Jiahao Tian, Hugh Chipman, Thomas Loughin Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: stat.ME, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08964v1 Multilabel Classification (MLC) deals with the simultaneous classification of multiple binary labels. The task is challenging because, not only may there be arbitrarily different and complex relationships between predictor variables and each label, but associations among labels may exist even after accounting for effects of predictor variables. In this paper, we present a Bayesian additive regression tree (BART) framework to model the problem. BART is a nonparametric and flexible model structure capable of uncovering complex relationships within the data. Our adaptation, MLCBART, assumes that labels arise from thresholding an underlying numeric scale, where a multivariate normal model allows explicit estimation of the correlation structure among labels. This enables the discovery of complicated relationships in various forms and improves MLC predictive performance. Our Bayesian framework not only enables uncertainty quantification for each predicted label, but our MCMC draws produce an estimated conditional probability distribution of label combinations for any predictor values. Simulation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model by comparing its performance with a set of models, including the oracle model with the correct functional form. Results show that our model predicts vectors of labels more accurately than other contenders and its performance is close to the oracle model. An example highlights how the method's ability to produce measures of uncertainty on predictions provides nuanced understanding of classification results. --- ### Breaking the Bottlenecks: Scalable Diffusion Models for 3D Molecular Generation Authors: Adrita Das, Peiran Jiang, Dantong Zhu, Barnabas Poczos, Jose Lugo-Martinez Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.LG, q-bio.QM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08963v1 Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful class of generative models for molecular design, capable of capturing complex structural distributions and achieving high fidelity in 3D molecule generation. However, their widespread use remains constrained by long sampling trajectories, stochastic variance in the reverse process, and limited structural awareness in denoising dynamics. The Directly Denoising Diffusion Model (DDDM) mitigates these inefficiencies by replacing stochastic reverse MCMC updates with deterministic denoising step, substantially reducing inference time. Yet, the theoretical underpinnings of such deterministic updates have remained opaque. In this work, we provide a principled reinterpretation of DDDM through the lens of the Reverse Transition Kernel (RTK) framework by Huang et al. 2024, unifying deterministic and stochastic diffusion under a shared probabilistic formalism. By expressing the DDDM reverse process as an approximate kernel operator, we show that the direct denoising process implicitly optimizes a structured transport map between noisy and clean samples. This perspective elucidates why deterministic denoising achieves efficient inference. Beyond theoretical clarity, this reframing resolves several long-standing bottlenecks in molecular diffusion. The RTK view ensures numerical stability by enforcing well-conditioned reverse kernels, improves sample consistency by eliminating stochastic variance, and enables scalable and symmetry-preserving denoisers that respect SE(3) equivariance. Empirically, we demonstrate that RTK-guided deterministic denoising achieves faster convergence and higher structural fidelity than stochastic diffusion models, while preserving chemical validity across GEOM-DRUGS dataset. Code, models, and datasets are publicly available in our project repository. --- ### Variance-Penalized MC-Dropout as a Learned Smoothing Prior for Brain Tumour Segmentation Authors: Satyaki Roy Chowdhury, Golrokh Mirzaei Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08956v1 Brain tumor segmentation is essential for diagnosis and treatment planning, yet many CNN and U-Net based approaches produce noisy boundaries in regions of tumor infiltration. We introduce UAMSA-UNet, an Uncertainty-Aware Multi-Scale Attention-based Bayesian U-Net that in- stead leverages Monte Carlo Dropout to learn a data-driven smoothing prior over its predictions, while fusing multi-scale features and attention maps to capture both fine details and global context. Our smoothing-regularized loss augments binary cross-entropy with a variance penalty across stochas- tic forward passes, discouraging spurious fluctuations and yielding spatially coherent masks. On BraTS2023, UAMSA- UNet improves Dice Similarity Coefficient by up to 3.3% and mean IoU by up to 2.7% over U-Net; on BraTS2024, it delivers up to 4.5% Dice and 4.0% IoU gains over the best baseline. Remarkably, it also reduces FLOPs by 42.5% rel- ative to U-Net++ while maintaining higher accuracy. These results demonstrate that, by combining multi-scale attention with a learned smoothing prior, UAMSA-UNet achieves both better segmentation quality and computational efficiency, and provides a flexible foundation for future integration with transformer-based modules for further enhanced segmenta- tion results. --- ### Imagine-then-Plan: Agent Learning from Adaptive Lookahead with World Models Authors: Youwei Liu, Jian Wang, Hanlin Wang, Beichen Guo, Wenjie Li Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08955v3 Recent advances in world models have shown promise for modeling future dynamics of environmental states, enabling agents to reason and act without accessing real environments. Current methods mainly perform single-step or fixed-horizon rollouts, leaving their potential for complex task planning under-exploited. We propose Imagine-then-Plan (\texttt{ITP}), a unified framework for agent learning via lookahead imagination, where an agent's policy model interacts with the learned world model, yielding multi-step ``imagined'' trajectories. Since the imagination horizon may vary by tasks and stages, we introduce a novel adaptive lookahead mechanism by trading off the ultimate goal and task progress. The resulting imagined trajectories provide rich signals about future consequences, such as achieved progress and potential conflicts, which are fused with current observations, formulating a partially \textit{observable} and \textit{imaginable} Markov decision process to guide policy learning. We instantiate \texttt{ITP} with both training-free and reinforcement-trained variants. Extensive experiments across representative agent benchmarks demonstrate that \texttt{ITP} significantly outperforms competitive baselines. Further analyses validate that our adaptive lookahead largely enhances agents' reasoning capability, providing valuable insights into addressing broader, complex tasks. Our code and data will be publicly available at https://github.com/loyiv/ITP. --- ### Fairness risk and its privacy-enabled solution in AI-driven robotic applications Authors: Le Liu, Bangguo Yu, Nynke Vellinga, Ming Cao Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08953v1 Complex decision-making by autonomous machines and algorithms could underpin the foundations of future society. Generative AI is emerging as a powerful engine for such transitions. However, we show that Generative AI-driven developments pose a critical pitfall: fairness concerns. In robotic applications, although intuitions about fairness are common, a precise and implementable definition that captures user utility and inherent data randomness is missing. Here we provide a utility-aware fairness metric for robotic decision making and analyze fairness jointly with user-data privacy, deriving conditions under which privacy budgets govern fairness metrics. This yields a unified framework that formalizes and quantifies fairness and its interplay with privacy, which is tested in a robot navigation task. In view of the fact that under legal requirements, most robotic systems will enforce user privacy, the approach shows surprisingly that such privacy budgets can be jointly used to meet fairness targets. Addressing fairness concerns in the creative combined consideration of privacy is a step towards ethical use of AI and strengthens trust in autonomous robots deployed in everyday environments. --- ### PluriHarms: Benchmarking the Full Spectrum of Human Judgments on AI Harm Authors: Jing-Jing Li, Joel Mire, Eve Fleisig, Valentina Pyatkin, Anne Collins, Maarten Sap, Sydney Levine Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08951v2 Current AI safety frameworks, which often treat harmfulness as binary, lack the flexibility to handle borderline cases where humans meaningfully disagree. To build more pluralistic systems, it is essential to move beyond consensus and instead understand where and why disagreements arise. We introduce PluriHarms, a benchmark designed to systematically study human harm judgments across two key dimensions -- the harm axis (benign to harmful) and the agreement axis (agreement to disagreement). Our scalable framework generates prompts that capture diverse AI harms and human values while targeting cases with high disagreement rates, validated by human data. The benchmark includes 150 prompts with 15,000 ratings from 100 human annotators, enriched with demographic and psychological traits and prompt-level features of harmful actions, effects, and values. Our analyses show that prompts that relate to imminent risks and tangible harms amplify perceived harmfulness, while annotator traits (e.g., toxicity experience, education) and their interactions with prompt content explain systematic disagreement. We benchmark AI safety models and alignment methods on PluriHarms, finding that while personalization significantly improves prediction of human harm judgments, considerable room remains for future progress. By explicitly targeting value diversity and disagreement, our work provides a principled benchmark for moving beyond "one-size-fits-all" safety toward pluralistically safe AI. --- ### ConvoLearn: A Learning Sciences Grounded Dataset for Fine-Tuning Dialogic AI Tutors Authors: Mayank Sharma, Roy Pea, Hari Subramonyam Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.AI, cs.HC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08950v4 Despite their growing adoption in education, LLMs remain misaligned with the core principle of effective tutoring: the dialogic construction of knowledge. We introduce ConvoLearn, a dataset of 2,134 semi-synthetic tutor-student dialogues operationalizing six dimensions of dialogic tutoring grounded in knowledge-building theory, situated in a middle school Earth Science curriculum. We show that dimension-labeled dialogic training data captures meaningful pedagogical signal that generalizes beyond its semi-synthetic domain: scores from a classifier trained on ConvoLearn correlate significantly with expert-coded instructional quality in authentic classrooms across multiple subscales. As a proof of concept, we fine-tune Mistral-7B on ConvoLearn and show that dimension-level fine-tuning can steer a 7B open-weight model toward dialogic tutoring behavior that credentialed teachers rate as competitive with a strong proprietary baseline. With this work, we support the development of AI tutors capable of more dialogic interactions. --- ### DriftGuard: A Hierarchical Framework for Concept Drift Detection and Remediation in Supply Chain Forecasting Authors: Shahnawaz Alam, Mohammed Abdul Rahman, Bareera Sadeqa Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08928v1 Supply chain forecasting models degrade over time as real-world conditions change. Promotions shift, consumer preferences evolve, and supply disruptions alter demand patterns, causing what is known as concept drift. This silent degradation leads to stockouts or excess inventory without triggering any system warnings. Current industry practice relies on manual monitoring and scheduled retraining every 3-6 months, which wastes computational resources during stable periods while missing rapid drift events. Existing academic methods focus narrowly on drift detection without addressing diagnosis or remediation, and they ignore the hierarchical structure inherent in supply chain data. What retailers need is an end-to-end system that detects drift early, explains its root causes, and automatically corrects affected models. We propose DriftGuard, a five-module framework that addresses the complete drift lifecycle. The system combines an ensemble of four complementary detection methods, namely error-based monitoring, statistical tests, autoencoder anomaly detection, and Cumulative Sum (CUSUM) change-point analysis, with hierarchical propagation analysis to identify exactly where drift occurs across product lines. Once detected, Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) analysis diagnoses the root causes, and a cost-aware retraining strategy selectively updates only the most affected models. Evaluated on over 30,000 time series from the M5 retail dataset, DriftGuard achieves 97.8% detection recall within 4.2 days and delivers up to 417 return on investment through targeted remediation. --- ### W-DUALMINE: Reliability-Weighted Dual-Expert Fusion With Residual Correlation Preservation for Medical Image Fusion Authors: Md. Jahidul Islam Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV, math.NA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08920v2 Medical image fusion integrates complementary information from multiple imaging modalities to improve clinical interpretation. However, existing deep learningbased methods, including recent spatial-frequency frameworks such as AdaFuse and ASFE-Fusion, often suffer from a fundamental trade-off between global statistical similaritymeasured by correlation coefficient (CC) and mutual information (MI)and local structural fidelity. This paper proposes W-DUALMINE, a reliability-weighted dual-expert fusion framework designed to explicitly resolve this trade-off through architectural constraints and a theoretically grounded loss design. The proposed method introduces dense reliability maps for adaptive modality weighting, a dual-expert fusion strategy combining a global-context spatial expert and a wavelet-domain frequency expert, and a soft gradient-based arbitration mechanism. Furthermore, we employ a residual-to-average fusion paradigm that guarantees the preservation of global correlation while enhancing local details. Extensive experiments on CT-MRI, PET-MRI, and SPECT-MRI datasets demonstrate that W-DUALMINE consistently outperforms AdaFuse and ASFE-Fusion in CC and MI metrics while --- ### LLMs as Assessors: Right for the Right Reason? Authors: Sourav Saha, Mandar Mitra, Aditya Dutta Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.IR, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08919v2 A good deal of recent research has focused on how Large Language Models (LLMs) may be used as judges in place of humans to evaluate the quality of the output produced by various text / image processing systems. Within this broader context, a number of studies have investigated the specific question of how effectively LLMs can be used as relevance assessors for the standard ad hoc task in Information Retrieval (IR). We extend these studies by looking at additional questions. Most importantly, we use a Wikipedia based test collection created by the INEX initiative, and prompt LLMs to not only judge whether documents are relevant / non-relevant, but to highlight relevant passages in documents that it regards as useful. The human relevance assessors involved in creating this collection were given analogous instructions, i.e., they were asked to highlight all passages within a document that respond to the information need expressed in a query. This enables us to evaluate the quality of LLMs as judges not only at the document level, but to also quantify how often these judges are right for the right reasons. Our observations lead us to reiterate the cautionary note sounded in some earlier studies when it comes to using LLMs as assessors for creating IR datasets: while LLMs are unquestionably promising, and may be used judiciously to subtantially reduce the amount of human involvement required to generate high-quality benchmark datasets, they cannot replace humans as assessors. --- ### Towards a Self-Driving Trigger at the LHC: Adaptive Response in Real Time Authors: Shaghayegh Emami, Cecilia Tosciri, Giovanna Salvi, Zixin Ding, Yuxin Chen, Abhijith Gandrakota, Christian Herwig, David W. Miller, Jennifer Ngadiuba, Nhan Tran Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: physics.ins-det, cs.AI, hep-ex arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08910v1 Real-time data filtering and selection -- or trigger -- systems at high-throughput scientific facilities such as the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) must process extremely high-rate data streams under stringent bandwidth, latency, and storage constraints. Yet these systems are typically designed as static, hand-tuned menus of selection criteria grounded in prior knowledge and simulation. In this work, we further explore the concept of a self-driving trigger, an autonomous data-filtering framework that reallocates resources and adjusts thresholds dynamically in real-time to optimize signal efficiency, rate stability, and computational cost as instrumentation and environmental conditions evolve. We introduce a benchmark ecosystem to emulate realistic collider scenarios and demonstrate real-time optimization of a menu including canonical energy sum triggers as well as modern anomaly-detection algorithms that target non-standard event topologies using machine learning. Using simulated data streams and publicly available collision data from the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, we demonstrate the capability to dynamically and automatically optimize trigger performance under specific cost objectives without manual retuning. Our adaptive strategy shifts trigger design from static menus with heuristic tuning to intelligent, automated, data-driven control, unlocking greater flexibility and discovery potential in future high-energy physics analyses. --- ### Navigating Ideation Space: Decomposed Conceptual Representations for Positioning Scientific Ideas Authors: Yuexi Shen, Minqian Liu, Dawei Zhou, Lifu Huang Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08901v1 Scientific discovery is a cumulative process and requires new ideas to be situated within an ever-expanding landscape of existing knowledge. An emerging and critical challenge is how to identify conceptually relevant prior work from rapidly growing literature, and assess how a new idea differentiates from existing research. Current embedding approaches typically conflate distinct conceptual aspects into single representations and cannot support fine-grained literature retrieval; meanwhile, LLM-based evaluators are subject to sycophancy biases, failing to provide discriminative novelty assessment. To tackle these challenges, we introduce the Ideation Space, a structured representation that decomposes scientific knowledge into three distinct dimensions, i.e., research problem, methodology, and core findings, each learned through contrastive training. This framework enables principled measurement of conceptual distance between ideas, and modeling of ideation transitions that capture the logical connections within a proposed idea. Building upon this representation, we propose a Hierarchical Sub-Space Retrieval framework for efficient, targeted literature retrieval, and a Decomposed Novelty Assessment algorithm that identifies which aspects of an idea are novel. Extensive experiments demonstrate substantial improvements, where our approach achieves Recall@30 of 0.329 (16.7% over baselines), our ideation transition retrieval reaches Hit Rate@30 of 0.643, and novelty assessment attains 0.37 correlation with expert judgments. In summary, our work provides a promising paradigm for future research on accelerating and evaluating scientific discovery. --- ### Comprehensive Machine Learning Benchmarking for Fringe Projection Profilometry with Photorealistic Synthetic Data Authors: Anush Lakshman S, Adam Haroon, Beiwen Li Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08900v2 Machine learning approaches for fringe projection profilometry (FPP) are hindered by the lack of large, diverse datasets and standardized benchmarking protocols. This paper introduces the first open-source, photorealistic synthetic dataset for FPP, generated using NVIDIA Isaac Sim, comprising 15,600 fringe images and 300 depth reconstructions across 50 objects. We apply this dataset to single-shot FPP, where models predict 3D depth maps directly from individual fringe images without temporal phase shifting. Through systematic ablation studies, we identify optimal learning configurations for long-range (1.5-2.1 m) depth prediction. We compare three depth normalization strategies and show that individual normalization, which decouples object shape from absolute scale, yields a 9.1x improvement in object reconstruction accuracy over raw depth. We further show that removing background fringe patterns severely degrades performance across all normalizations, demonstrating that background fringes provide essential spatial phase reference rather than noise. We evaluate six loss functions and identify Hybrid L1 loss as optimal. Using the best configuration, we benchmark four architectures and find UNet achieves the strongest performance, though errors remain far above the sub-millimeter accuracy of classical FPP. The small performance gap between architectures indicates that the dominant limitation is information deficit rather than model design: single fringe images lack sufficient information for accurate depth recovery without explicit phase cues. This work provides a standardized benchmark and evidence motivating hybrid approaches combining phase-based FPP with learned refinement. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/aharoon/fpp-ml-bench and code at https://github.com/AnushLak/fpp-ml-bench. --- ### XGBoost Forecasting of NEPSE Index Log Returns with Walk Forward Validation Authors: Sahaj Raj Malla, Shreeyash Kayastha, Rumi Suwal, Harish Chandra Bhandari, Rajendra Adhikari Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, q-fin.ST arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08896v1 This study develops a robust machine learning framework for one-step-ahead forecasting of daily log-returns in the Nepal Stock Exchange (NEPSE) Index using the XGBoost regressor. A comprehensive feature set is engineered, including lagged log-returns (up to 30 days) and established technical indicators such as short- and medium-term rolling volatility measures and the 14-period Relative Strength Index. Hyperparameter optimization is performed using Optuna with time-series cross-validation on the initial training segment. Out-of-sample performance is rigorously assessed via walk-forward validation under both expanding and fixed-length rolling window schemes across multiple lag configurations, simulating real-world deployment and avoiding lookahead bias. Predictive accuracy is evaluated using root mean squared error, mean absolute error, coefficient of determination (R-squared), and directional accuracy on both log-returns and reconstructed closing prices. Empirical results show that the optimal configuration, an expanding window with 20 lags, outperforms tuned ARIMA and Ridge regression benchmarks, achieving the lowest log-return RMSE (0.013450) and MAE (0.009814) alongside a directional accuracy of 65.15%. While the R-squared remains modest, consistent with the noisy nature of financial returns, primary emphasis is placed on relative error reduction and directional prediction. Feature importance analysis and visual inspection further enhance interpretability. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of gradient boosting ensembles in modeling nonlinear dynamics in volatile emerging market time series and establish a reproducible benchmark for NEPSE Index forecasting. --- ### Spectral Generative Flow Models: A Physics-Inspired Replacement for Vectorized Large Language Models Authors: Andrew Kiruluta Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08893v2 We introduce Spectral Generative Flow Models (SGFMs), a physics-inspired alternative to transformer-based large language models. Instead of representing text or video as sequences of discrete tokens processed by attention, SGFMs treat generation as the evolution of a continuous field governed by constrained stochastic dynamics in a multiscale wavelet basis. This formulation replaces global attention with local operators, spectral projections, and Navier--Stokes-like transport, yielding a generative mechanism grounded in continuity, geometry, and physical structure. Our framework provides three key innovations: (i) a field-theoretic ontology in which text and video are unified as trajectories of a stochastic partial differential equation; (ii) a wavelet-domain representation that induces sparsity, scale separation, and computational efficiency; and (iii) a constrained stochastic flow that enforces stability, coherence, and uncertainty propagation. Together, these components define a generative architecture that departs fundamentally from autoregressive modeling and diffusion-based approaches. SGFMs offer a principled path toward long-range coherence, multimodal generality, and physically structured inductive bias in next-generation generative models. --- ### Evaluating Role-Consistency in LLMs for Counselor Training Authors: Eric Rudolph, Natalie Engert, Jens Albrecht Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08892v1 The rise of online counseling services has highlighted the need for effective training methods for future counselors. This paper extends research on VirCo, a Virtual Client for Online Counseling, designed to complement traditional role-playing methods in academic training by simulating realistic client interactions. Building on previous work, we introduce a new dataset incorporating adversarial attacks to test the ability of large language models (LLMs) to maintain their assigned roles (role-consistency). The study focuses on evaluating the role consistency and coherence of the Vicuna model's responses, comparing these findings with earlier research. Additionally, we assess and compare various open-source LLMs for their performance in sustaining role consistency during virtual client interactions. Our contributions include creating an adversarial dataset, evaluating conversation coherence and persona consistency, and providing a comparative analysis of different LLMs. --- ### Attention Consistency Regularization for Interpretable Early-Exit Neural Networks Authors: Yanhua Zhao Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08891v2 Early-exit neural networks enable adaptive inference by allowing predictions at intermediate layers, reducing computational cost. However, early exits often lack interpretability and may focus on different features than deeper layers, limiting trust and explainability. This paper presents Explanation-Guided Training (EGT), a multi-objective framework that improves interpretability and consistency in early-exit networks through attention-based regularization. EGT introduces an attention consistency loss that aligns early-exit attention maps with the final exit. The framework jointly optimizes classification accuracy and attention consistency through a weighted combination of losses. Experiments on a real-world image classification dataset demonstrate that EGT achieves up to 98.97% overall accuracy (matching baseline performance) with a 1.97x inference speedup through early exits, while improving attention consistency by up to 18.5% compared to baseline models. The proposed method provides more interpretable and consistent explanations across all exit points, making early-exit networks more suitable for explainable AI applications in resource-constrained environments. --- ### Adaptive few-shot learning for robust part quality classification in two-photon lithography Authors: Sixian Jia, Ruo-Syuan Mei, Chenhui Shao Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08885v1 Two-photon lithography (TPL) is an advanced additive manufacturing (AM) technique for fabricating high-precision micro-structures. While computer vision (CV) is proofed for automated quality control, existing models are often static, rendering them ineffective in dynamic manufacturing environments. These models typically cannot detect new, unseen defect classes, be efficiently updated from scarce data, or adapt to new part geometries. To address this gap, this paper presents an adaptive CV framework for the entire life-cycle of quality model maintenance. The proposed framework is built upon a same, scale-robust backbone model and integrates three key methodologies: (1) a statistical hypothesis testing framework based on Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) for novelty detection, (2) a two-stage, rehearsal-based strategy for few-shot incremental learning, and (3) a few-shot Domain-Adversarial Neural Network (DANN) for few-shot domain adaptation. The framework was evaluated on a TPL dataset featuring hemisphere as source domain and cube as target domain structures, with each domain categorized into good, minor damaged, and damaged quality classes. The hypothesis testing method successfully identified new class batches with 99-100% accuracy. The incremental learning method integrated a new class to 92% accuracy using only K=20 samples. The domain adaptation model bridged the severe domain gap, achieving 96.19% accuracy on the target domain using only K=5 shots. These results demonstrate a robust and data-efficient solution for deploying and maintaining CV models in evolving production scenarios. --- ### RAVEN: Erasing Invisible Watermarks via Novel View Synthesis Authors: Fahad Shamshad, Nils Lukas, Karthik Nandakumar Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08832v1 Invisible watermarking has become a critical mechanism for authenticating AI-generated image content, with major platforms deploying watermarking schemes at scale. However, evaluating the vulnerability of these schemes against sophisticated removal attacks remains essential to assess their reliability and guide robust design. In this work, we expose a fundamental vulnerability in invisible watermarks by reformulating watermark removal as a view synthesis problem. Our key insight is that generating a perceptually consistent alternative view of the same semantic content, akin to re-observing a scene from a shifted perspective, naturally removes the embedded watermark while preserving visual fidelity. This reveals a critical gap: watermarks robust to pixel-space and frequency-domain attacks remain vulnerable to semantic-preserving viewpoint transformations. We introduce a zero-shot diffusion-based framework that applies controlled geometric transformations in latent space, augmented with view-guided correspondence attention to maintain structural consistency during reconstruction. Operating on frozen pre-trained models without detector access or watermark knowledge, our method achieves state-of-the-art watermark suppression across 15 watermarking methods--outperforming 14 baseline attacks while maintaining superior perceptual quality across multiple datasets. --- ### 3AM: 3egment Anything with Geometric Consistency in Videos Authors: Yang-Che Sun, Cheng Sun, Chin-Yang Lin, Fu-En Yang, Min-Hung Chen, Yen-Yu Lin, Yu-Lun Liu Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08831v5 Video object segmentation methods like SAM2 achieve strong performance through memory-based architectures but struggle under large viewpoint changes due to reliance on appearance features. Traditional 3D instance segmentation methods address viewpoint consistency but require camera poses, depth maps, and expensive preprocessing. We introduce 3AM, a training-time enhancement that integrates 3D-aware features from MUSt3R into SAM2. Our lightweight Feature Merger fuses multi-level MUSt3R features that encode implicit geometric correspondence. Combined with SAM2's appearance features, the model achieves geometry-consistent recognition grounded in both spatial position and visual similarity. We propose a field-of-view aware sampling strategy ensuring frames observe spatially consistent object regions for reliable 3D correspondence learning. Critically, our method requires only RGB input at inference, with no camera poses or preprocessing. On challenging datasets with wide-baseline motion (ScanNet++, Replica), 3AM substantially outperforms SAM2 and extensions, achieving 90.6% IoU and 71.7% Tracking Recall on ScanNet++'s Selected Subset, improving over state-of-the-art VOS methods by +15.9 and +30.4 points. Project page: https://jayisaking.github.io/3AM-Page/ --- ### Modeling LLM Agent Reviewer Dynamics in Elo-Ranked Review System Authors: Hsiang-Wei Huang, Junbin Lu, Kuang-Ming Chen, Jenq-Neng Hwang Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08829v1 In this work, we explore the Large Language Model (LLM) agent reviewer dynamics in an Elo-ranked review system using real-world conference paper submissions. Multiple LLM agent reviewers with different personas are engage in multi round review interactions moderated by an Area Chair. We compare a baseline setting with conditions that incorporate Elo ratings and reviewer memory. Our simulation results showcase several interesting findings, including how incorporating Elo improves Area Chair decision accuracy, as well as reviewers' adaptive review strategy that exploits our Elo system without improving review effort. Our code is available at https://github.com/hsiangwei0903/EloReview. --- ### Motion Attribution for Video Generation Authors: Xindi Wu, Despoina Paschalidou, Jun Gao, Antonio Torralba, Laura Leal-Taixé, Olga Russakovsky, Sanja Fidler, Jonathan Lorraine Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.MM, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08828v2 Despite the rapid progress of video generation models, the role of data in influencing motion is poorly understood. We present Motive (MOTIon attribution for Video gEneration), a motion-centric, gradient-based data attribution framework that scales to modern, large, high-quality video datasets and models. We use this to study which fine-tuning clips improve or degrade temporal dynamics. Motive isolates temporal dynamics from static appearance via motion-weighted loss masks, yielding efficient and scalable motion-specific influence computation. On text-to-video models, Motive identifies clips that strongly affect motion and guides data curation that improves temporal consistency and physical plausibility. With Motive-selected high-influence data, our method improves both motion smoothness and dynamic degree on VBench, achieving a 74.1% human preference win rate compared with the pretrained base model. To our knowledge, this is the first framework to attribute motion rather than visual appearance in video generative models and to use it to curate fine-tuning data. --- ### MemRec: Collaborative Memory-Augmented Agentic Recommender System Authors: Weixin Chen, Yuhan Zhao, Jingyuan Huang, Zihe Ye, Clark Mingxuan Ju, Tong Zhao, Neil Shah, Li Chen, Yongfeng Zhang Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08816v3 The evolution of recommender systems has shifted from traditional collaborative filtering to LLM-based agentic systems, which rely on semantic user and item memories to make predictions. However, existing agents maintain these memories in isolation. This overlooks crucial collaborative signals, such as user-item co-engagements and peer relationships across the community, which significantly limits their ability to uncover hidden preferences and accurately infer user needs, particularly for data-sparse users. To bridge this gap, we introduce collaborative memory, a paradigm that connects isolated semantics to enable the sharing of relational insights. Yet, naively utilizing collaborative memory causes severe context overload and introduces noise to downstream LLMs, alongside prohibitive computational costs. To resolve this, we propose MemRec, a framework that architecturally decouples memory management from reasoning. MemRec introduces a dedicated, lightweight language model (LM_Mem) to efficiently manage and synthesize a dynamic collaborative memory graph in the background. It provides only distilled, high-signal contexts to a downstream, heavyweight large language model (LLM_Rec) for the final recommendation. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that MemRec achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code: https://github.com/rutgerswiselab/memrec and Homepage: https://memrec.weixinchen.com/ --- ### Reasoning Matters for 3D Visual Grounding Authors: Hsiang-Wei Huang, Kuang-Ming Chen, Wenhao Chai, Cheng-Yen Yang, Jen-Hao Cheng, Jenq-Neng Hwang Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08811v1 The recent development of Large Language Models (LLMs) with strong reasoning ability has driven research in various domains such as mathematics, coding, and scientific discovery. Meanwhile, 3D visual grounding, as a fundamental task in 3D understanding, still remains challenging due to the limited reasoning ability of recent 3D visual grounding models. Most of the current methods incorporate a text encoder and visual feature encoder to generate cross-modal fuse features and predict the referring object. These models often require supervised training on extensive 3D annotation data. On the other hand, recent research also focus on scaling synthetic data to train stronger 3D visual grounding LLM, however, the performance gain remains limited and non-proportional to the data collection cost. In this work, we propose a 3D visual grounding data pipeline, which is capable of automatically synthesizing 3D visual grounding data along with corresponding reasoning process. Additionally, we leverage the generated data for LLM fine-tuning and introduce Reason3DVG-8B, a strong 3D visual grounding LLM that outperforms previous LLM-based method 3D-GRAND using only 1.6% of their training data, demonstrating the effectiveness of our data and the importance of reasoning in 3D visual grounding. --- ### Multiplex Thinking: Reasoning via Token-wise Branch-and-Merge Authors: Yao Tang, Li Dong, Yaru Hao, Qingxiu Dong, Furu Wei, Jiatao Gu Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08808v1 Large language models often solve complex reasoning tasks more effectively with Chain-of-Thought (CoT), but at the cost of long, low-bandwidth token sequences. Humans, by contrast, often reason softly by maintaining a distribution over plausible next steps. Motivated by this, we propose Multiplex Thinking, a stochastic soft reasoning mechanism that, at each thinking step, samples K candidate tokens and aggregates their embeddings into a single continuous multiplex token. This preserves the vocabulary embedding prior and the sampling dynamics of standard discrete generation, while inducing a tractable probability distribution over multiplex rollouts. Consequently, multiplex trajectories can be directly optimized with on-policy reinforcement learning (RL). Importantly, Multiplex Thinking is self-adaptive: when the model is confident, the multiplex token is nearly discrete and behaves like standard CoT; when it is uncertain, it compactly represents multiple plausible next steps without increasing sequence length. Across challenging math reasoning benchmarks, Multiplex Thinking consistently outperforms strong discrete CoT and RL baselines from Pass@1 through Pass@1024, while producing shorter sequences. The code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/GMLR-Penn/Multiplex-Thinking. --- ### S3-CLIP: Video Super Resolution for Person-ReID Authors: Tamas Endrei, Gyorgy Cserey Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08807v1 Tracklet quality is often treated as an afterthought in most person re-identification (ReID) methods, with the majority of research presenting architectural modifications to foundational models. Such approaches neglect an important limitation, posing challenges when deploying ReID systems in real-world, difficult scenarios. In this paper, we introduce S3-CLIP, a video super-resolution-based CLIP-ReID framework developed for the VReID-XFD challenge at WACV 2026. The proposed method integrates recent advances in super-resolution networks with task-driven super-resolution pipelines, adapting them to the video-based person re-identification setting. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first systematic investigation of video super-resolution as a means of enhancing tracklet quality for person ReID, particularly under challenging cross-view conditions. Experimental results demonstrate performance competitive with the baseline, achieving 37.52% mAP in aerial-to-ground and 29.16% mAP in ground-to-aerial scenarios. In the ground-to-aerial setting, S3-CLIP achieves substantial gains in ranking accuracy, improving Rank-1, Rank-5, and Rank-10 performance by 11.24%, 13.48%, and 17.98%, respectively. --- ### APEX-SWE Authors: Abhi Kottamasu, Chirag Mahapatra, Sam Lee, Ben Pan, Aakash Barthwal, Akul Datta, Anurag Gupta, Pranav Mehta, Ajay Arun, Silas Alberti, Adarsh Hiremath, Brendan Foody et al. Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08806v3 We introduce the AI Productivity Index for Software Engineering (APEX-SWE), a benchmark for assessing whether frontier AI models can execute economically valuable software engineering work. Unlike existing evaluations that focus on narrow, well-defined tasks, APEX-SWE assesses two novel task types that reflect real-world software engineering: (1) Integration tasks (n=100), which require constructing end-to-end systems across heterogeneous cloud primitives, business applications, and infrastructure-as-code services, and (2) Observability tasks (n=100), which require debugging production failures using telemetry signals such as logs and dashboards, as well as unstructured context. We evaluated eleven frontier models for the APEX-SWE leaderboard. Claude Opus 4.6 leads the APEX-SWE leaderboard with 40.5% Pass@1, followed by Claude Opus 4.5 at 38.7%. Our analysis shows that strong performance is primarily driven by epistemic discipline, defined as the capacity to distinguish between assumptions and verified facts. It is often combined with systematic verification prior to acting. We open-source the APEX-SWE evaluation harness and a dev set (n=50). --- ### Near-perfect photo-ID of the Hula painted frog with zero-shot deep local-feature matching Authors: Maayan Yesharim, R. G. Bina Perl, Uri Roll, Sarig Gafny, Eli Geffen, Yoav Ram Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.CV, q-bio.QM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08798v1 Accurate individual identification is essential for monitoring rare amphibians, yet invasive marking is often unsuitable for critically endangered species. We evaluate state-of-the-art computer-vision methods for photographic re-identification of the Hula painted frog (Latonia nigriventer) using 1,233 ventral images from 191 individuals collected during 2013-2020 capture-recapture surveys. We compare deep local-feature matching in a zero-shot setting with deep global-feature embedding models. The local-feature pipeline achieves 98% top-1 closed-set identification accuracy, outperforming all global-feature models; fine-tuning improves the best global-feature model to 60% top-1 (91% top-10) but remains below local matching. To combine scalability with accuracy, we implement a two-stage workflow in which a fine-tuned global-feature model retrieves a short candidate list that is re-ranked by local-feature matching, reducing end-to-end runtime from 6.5-7.8 hours to ~38 minutes while maintaining ~96% top-1 closed-set accuracy on the labeled dataset. Separation of match scores between same- and different-individual pairs supports thresholding for open-set identification, enabling practical handling of novel individuals. We deploy this pipeline as a web application for routine field use, providing rapid, standardized, non-invasive identification to support conservation monitoring and capture-recapture analyses. Overall, in this species, zero-shot deep local-feature matching outperformed global-feature embedding and provides a strong default for photo-identification. --- ### DentalX: Context-Aware Dental Disease Detection with Radiographs Authors: Zhi Qin Tan, Xiatian Zhu, Owen Addison, Yunpeng Li Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08797v1 Diagnosing dental diseases from radiographs is time-consuming and challenging due to the subtle nature of diagnostic evidence. Existing methods, which rely on object detection models designed for natural images with more distinct target patterns, struggle to detect dental diseases that present with far less visual support. To address this challenge, we propose {\bf DentalX}, a novel context-aware dental disease detection approach that leverages oral structure information to mitigate the visual ambiguity inherent in radiographs. Specifically, we introduce a structural context extraction module that learns an auxiliary task: semantic segmentation of dental anatomy. The module extracts meaningful structural context and integrates it into the primary disease detection task to enhance the detection of subtle dental diseases. Extensive experiments on a dedicated benchmark demonstrate that DentalX significantly outperforms prior methods in both tasks. This mutual benefit arises naturally during model optimization, as the correlation between the two tasks is effectively captured. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhiqin1998/DentYOLOX. --- ### Aggregating Diverse Cue Experts for AI-Generated Image Detection Authors: Lei Tan, Shuwei Li, Mohan Kankanhalli, Robby T. Tan Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08790v1 The rapid emergence of image synthesis models poses challenges to the generalization of AI-generated image detectors. However, existing methods often rely on model-specific features, leading to overfitting and poor generalization. In this paper, we introduce the Multi-Cue Aggregation Network (MCAN), a novel framework that integrates different yet complementary cues in a unified network. MCAN employs a mixture-of-encoders adapter to dynamically process these cues, enabling more adaptive and robust feature representation. Our cues include the input image itself, which represents the overall content, and high-frequency components that emphasize edge details. Additionally, we introduce a Chromatic Inconsistency (CI) cue, which normalizes intensity values and captures noise information introduced during the image acquisition process in real images, making these noise patterns more distinguishable from those in AI-generated content. Unlike prior methods, MCAN's novelty lies in its unified multi-cue aggregation framework, which integrates spatial, frequency-domain, and chromaticity-based information for enhanced representation learning. These cues are intrinsically more indicative of real images, enhancing cross-model generalization. Extensive experiments on the GenImage, Chameleon, and UniversalFakeDetect benchmark validate the state-of-the-art performance of MCAN. In the GenImage dataset, MCAN outperforms the best state-of-the-art method by up to 7.4% in average ACC across eight different image generators. --- ### Uncovering Political Bias in Large Language Models using Parliamentary Voting Records Authors: Jieying Chen, Karen de Jong, Andreas Poole, Jan Burakowski, Elena Elderson Nosti, Joep Windt, Chendi Wang Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08785v1 As large language models (LLMs) become deeply embedded in digital platforms and decision-making systems, concerns about their political biases have grown. While substantial work has examined social biases such as gender and race, systematic studies of political bias remain limited, despite their direct societal impact. This paper introduces a general methodology for constructing political bias benchmarks by aligning model-generated voting predictions with verified parliamentary voting records. We instantiate this methodology in three national case studies: PoliBiasNL (2,701 Dutch parliamentary motions and votes from 15 political parties), PoliBiasNO (10,584 motions and votes from 9 Norwegian parties), and PoliBiasES (2,480 motions and votes from 10 Spanish parties). Across these benchmarks, we assess ideological tendencies and political entity bias in LLM behavior. As part of our evaluation framework, we also propose a method to visualize the ideology of LLMs and political parties in a shared two-dimensional CHES (Chapel Hill Expert Survey) space by linking their voting-based positions to the CHES dimensions, enabling direct and interpretable comparisons between models and real-world political actors. Our experiments reveal fine-grained ideological distinctions: state-of-the-art LLMs consistently display left-leaning or centrist tendencies, alongside clear negative biases toward right-conservative parties. These findings highlight the value of transparent, cross-national evaluation grounded in real parliamentary behavior for understanding and auditing political bias in modern LLMs. --- ### On the use of graph models to achieve individual and group fairness Authors: Arturo Pérez-Peralta, Sandra Benítez-Peña, Rosa E. Lillo Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: stat.ML, cs.CY, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08784v1 Machine Learning algorithms are ubiquitous in key decision-making contexts such as justice, healthcare and finance, which has spawned a great demand for fairness in these procedures. However, the theoretical properties of such models in relation with fairness are still poorly understood, and the intuition behind the relationship between group and individual fairness is still lacking. In this paper, we provide a theoretical framework based on Sheaf Diffusion to leverage tools based on dynamical systems and homology to model fairness. Concretely, the proposed method projects input data into a bias-free space that encodes fairness constrains, resulting in fair solutions. Furthermore, we present a collection of network topologies handling different fairness metrics, leading to a unified method capable of dealing with both individual and group bias. The resulting models have a layer of interpretability in the form of closed-form expressions for their SHAP values, consolidating their place in the responsible Artificial Intelligence landscape. Finally, these intuitions are tested on a simulation study and standard fairness benchmarks, where the proposed methods achieve satisfactory results. More concretely, the paper showcases the performance of the proposed models in terms of accuracy and fairness, studying available trade-offs on the Pareto frontier, checking the effects of changing the different hyper-parameters, and delving into the interpretation of its outputs. --- ### Fast and explainable clustering in the Manhattan and Tanimoto distance Authors: Stefan Güttel, Kaustubh Roy Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08781v1 The CLASSIX algorithm is a fast and explainable approach to data clustering. In its original form, this algorithm exploits the sorting of the data points by their first principal component to truncate the search for nearby data points, with nearness being defined in terms of the Euclidean distance. Here we extend CLASSIX to other distance metrics, including the Manhattan distance and the Tanimoto distance. Instead of principal components, we use an appropriate norm of the data vectors as the sorting criterion, combined with the triangle inequality for search termination. In the case of Tanimoto distance, a provably sharper intersection inequality is used to further boost the performance of the new algorithm. On a real-world chemical fingerprint benchmark, CLASSIX Tanimoto is about 30 times faster than the Taylor--Butina algorithm, and about 80 times faster than DBSCAN, while computing higher-quality clusters in both cases. --- ### Pervasive Annotation Errors Break Text-to-SQL Benchmarks and Leaderboards Authors: Tengjun Jin, Yoojin Choi, Yuxuan Zhu, Daniel Kang Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.AI, cs.DB arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08778v3 Researchers have proposed numerous text-to-SQL techniques to streamline data analytics and accelerate the development of data-driven applications. To compare these techniques and select the best one for deployment, the community depends on public benchmarks and their leaderboards. Since these benchmarks heavily rely on human annotations during question construction and answer evaluation, the validity of the annotations is crucial. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study that (i) benchmarks annotation error rates for two widely used text-to-SQL benchmarks, BIRD and Spider 2.0-Snow, and (ii) corrects a subset of the BIRD development (Dev) set to measure the impact of annotation errors on text-to-SQL agent performance and leaderboard rankings. Through expert analysis, we show that BIRD Mini-Dev and Spider 2.0-Snow have error rates of 52.8% and 62.8%, respectively. We re-evaluate all 16 open-source agents from the BIRD leaderboard on both the original and the corrected BIRD Dev subsets. We show that performance changes range from -7% to 31% (in relative terms) and rank changes range from $-9$ to $+9$ positions. We further assess whether these impacts generalize to the full BIRD Dev set. We find that the rankings of agents on the uncorrected subset correlate strongly with those on the full Dev set (Spearman's $r_s$=0.85, $p$=3.26e-5), whereas they correlate weakly with those on the corrected subset (Spearman's $r_s$=0.32, $p$=0.23). These findings show that annotation errors can significantly distort reported performance and rankings, potentially misguiding research directions or deployment choices. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/uiuc-kang-lab/text_to_sql_benchmarks. --- ### Asymptotic Universal Alignment: A New Alignment Framework via Test-Time Scaling Authors: Yang Cai, Weiqiang Zheng Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.GT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08777v1 Aligning large language models (LLMs) to serve users with heterogeneous and potentially conflicting preferences is a central challenge for personalized and trustworthy AI. We formalize an ideal notion of universal alignment through test-time scaling: for each prompt, the model produces $k\ge 1$ candidate responses and a user selects their preferred one. We introduce $(k,f(k))$-robust alignment, which requires the $k$-output model to have win rate $f(k)$ against any other single-output model, and asymptotic universal alignment (U-alignment), which requires $f(k)\to 1$ as $k\to\infty$. Our main result characterizes the optimal convergence rate: there exists a family of single-output policies whose $k$-sample product policies achieve U-alignment at rate $f(k)=\frac{k}{k+1}$, and no method can achieve a faster rate in general. We show that popular post-training methods, including Nash learning from human feedback (NLHF), can fundamentally underutilize the benefits of test-time scaling. Even though NLHF is optimal for $k=1$, sampling from the resulting (often deterministic) policy cannot guarantee win rates above $\tfrac{1}{2}$ except for an arbitrarily small slack. This stems from a lack of output diversity: existing alignment methods can collapse to a single majority-preferred response, making additional samples redundant. In contrast, our approach preserves output diversity and achieves the optimal test-time scaling rate. In particular, we propose a family of symmetric multi-player alignment games and prove that any symmetric Nash equilibrium policy of the $(k+1)$-player alignment game achieves the optimal $(k,\frac{k}{k+1})$-robust alignment. Finally, we provide theoretical convergence guarantees for self-play learning dynamics in these games and extend the framework to opponents that also generate multiple responses. --- ### An Example for Domain Adaptation Using CycleGAN Authors: Yanhua Zhao Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08776v3 Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Network (CycleGAN) is very promising in domain adaptation. In this report, an example in medical domain will be explained. We present struecture of a CycleGAN model for unpaired image-to-image translation from microscopy to pseudo H\&E stained histopathology images. --- ### Reliable Graph-RAG for Codebases: AST-Derived Graphs vs LLM-Extracted Knowledge Graphs Authors: Manideep Reddy Chinthareddy Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08773v1 Retrieval-Augmented Generation for software engineering often relies on vector similarity search, which captures topical similarity but can fail on multi-hop architectural reasoning such as controller to service to repository chains, interface-driven wiring, and inheritance. This paper benchmarks three retrieval pipelines on Java codebases (Shopizer, with additional runs on ThingsBoard and OpenMRS Core): (A) vector-only No-Graph RAG, (B) an LLM-generated knowledge graph RAG (LLM-KB), and (C) a deterministic AST-derived knowledge graph RAG (DKB) built with Tree-sitter and bidirectional traversal. Using 15 architecture and code-tracing queries per repository, we measure indexing time, query latency, corpus coverage, cost, and answer correctness. DKB builds its graph in seconds, while LLM-KB requires much longer graph generation. LLM-KB also shows indexing incompleteness: on Shopizer, 377 files are skipped or missed, reducing embedded chunk coverage and graph size compared to DKB. End-to-end cost is modest for DKB relative to the vector-only baseline but much higher for LLM-KB, especially as repository scale increases. Query latency is similar for No-Graph and DKB, while LLM-KB is slower and more variable. On the Shopizer question suite, DKB achieves the highest correctness, LLM-KB is close behind, and the vector-only baseline performs worst on upstream architectural queries and has the highest hallucination risk. Overall, deterministic AST-derived graphs provide more reliable coverage and multi-hop grounding than LLM-extracted graphs at substantially lower indexing cost. --- ### AI as Entertainment Authors: Cody Kommers, Ari Holtzman Published: 2026-01-13 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08768v1 Generative AI systems are predominantly designed, evaluated, and marketed as intelligent systems which will benefit society by augmenting or automating human cognitive labor, promising to increase personal, corporate, and macroeconomic productivity. But this mainstream narrative about what AI is and what it can do is in tension with another emerging use case: entertainment. We argue that the field of AI is unprepared to measure or respond to how the proliferation of entertaining AI-generated content will impact society. Emerging data suggest AI is already widely adopted for entertainment purposes -- especially by young people -- and represents a large potential source of revenue. We contend that entertainment will become a primary business model for major AI corporations seeking returns on massive infrastructure investments; this will exert a powerful influence on the technology these companies produce in the coming years. Examining current evaluation practices, we identify a critical asymmetry: while AI assessments rigorously measure both benefits and harms of intelligence, they focus almost exclusively on cultural harms. We lack frameworks for articulating how cultural outputs might be actively beneficial. Drawing on insights from the humanities, we propose "thick entertainment" as a framework for evaluating AI-generated cultural content -- one that considers entertainment's role in meaning-making, identity formation, and social connection rather than simply minimizing harm. While AI is often touted for its potential to revolutionize productivity, in the long run we may find that AI turns out to be as much about "intelligence" as social media is about social connection. ---