# Research Papers — 2026-01 · bundle page 126 of 189

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### MemoBrain: Executive Memory as an Agentic Brain for Reasoning

Authors: Hongjin Qian, Zhao Cao, Zheng Liu
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.IR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08079v1

Complex reasoning in tool-augmented agent frameworks is inherently long-horizon, causing reasoning traces and transient tool artifacts to accumulate and strain the bounded working context of large language models. Without explicit memory mechanisms, such accumulation disrupts logical continuity and undermines task alignment. This positions memory not as an auxiliary efficiency concern, but as a core component for sustaining coherent, goal-directed reasoning over long horizons. We propose MemoBrain, an executive memory model for tool-augmented agents that constructs a dependency-aware memory over reasoning steps, capturing salient intermediate states and their logical relations. Operating as a co-pilot alongside the reasoning agent, MemoBrain organizes reasoning progress without blocking execution and actively manages the working context. Specifically, it prunes invalid steps, folds completed sub-trajectories, and preserves a compact, high-salience reasoning backbone under a fixed context budget. Together, these mechanisms enable explicit cognitive control over reasoning trajectories rather than passive context accumulation. We evaluate MemoBrain on challenging long-horizon benchmarks, including GAIA, WebWalker, and BrowseComp-Plus, demonstrating consistent improvements over strong baselines.

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### Exploiting DINOv3-Based Self-Supervised Features for Robust Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation

Authors: Guoping Xu, Jayaram K. Udupa, Weiguo Lu, You Zhang
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CV, cs.CE, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08078v1

Deep learning-based automatic medical image segmentation plays a critical role in clinical diagnosis and treatment planning but remains challenging in few-shot scenarios due to the scarcity of annotated training data. Recently, self-supervised foundation models such as DINOv3, which were trained on large natural image datasets, have shown strong potential for dense feature extraction that can help with the few-shot learning challenge. Yet, their direct application to medical images is hindered by domain differences. In this work, we propose DINO-AugSeg, a novel framework that leverages DINOv3 features to address the few-shot medical image segmentation challenge. Specifically, we introduce WT-Aug, a wavelet-based feature-level augmentation module that enriches the diversity of DINOv3-extracted features by perturbing frequency components, and CG-Fuse, a contextual information-guided fusion module that exploits cross-attention to integrate semantic-rich low-resolution features with spatially detailed high-resolution features. Extensive experiments on six public benchmarks spanning five imaging modalities, including MRI, CT, ultrasound, endoscopy, and dermoscopy, demonstrate that DINO-AugSeg consistently outperforms existing methods under limited-sample conditions. The results highlight the effectiveness of incorporating wavelet-domain augmentation and contextual fusion for robust feature representation, suggesting DINO-AugSeg as a promising direction for advancing few-shot medical image segmentation. Code and data will be made available on https://github.com/apple1986/DINO-AugSeg.

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### Semantic Gravity Wells: Why Negative Constraints Backfire

Authors: Shailesh Rana
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08070v1

Negative constraints (instructions of the form "do not use word X") represent a fundamental test of instruction-following capability in large language models. Despite their apparent simplicity, these constraints fail with striking regularity, and the conditions governing failure have remained poorly understood. This paper presents the first comprehensive mechanistic investigation of negative instruction failure. We introduce semantic pressure, a quantitative measure of the model's intrinsic probability of generating the forbidden token, and demonstrate that violation probability follows a tight logistic relationship with pressure ($p=σ(-2.40+2.27\cdot P_0)$; $n=40{,}000$ samples; bootstrap $95%$ CI for slope: $(2.21,,2.33)$). Through layer-wise analysis using the logit lens technique, we establish that the suppression signal induced by negative instructions is present but systematically weaker in failures: the instruction reduces target probability by only 5.2 percentage points in failures versus 22.8 points in successes -- a $4.4\times$ asymmetry. We trace this asymmetry to two mechanistically distinct failure modes. In priming failure (87.5% of violations), the instruction's explicit mention of the forbidden word paradoxically activates rather than suppresses the target representation. In override failure (12.5%), late-layer feed-forward networks generate contributions of $+0.39$ toward the target probability -- nearly $4\times$ larger than in successes -- overwhelming earlier suppression signals. Activation patching confirms that layers 23--27 are causally responsible: replacing these layers' activations flips the sign of constraint effects. These findings reveal a fundamental tension in negative constraint design: the very act of naming a forbidden word primes the model to produce it.

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### A New Strategy for Verifying Reach-Avoid Specifications in Neural Feedback Systems

Authors: Samuel I. Akinwande, Sydney M. Katz, Mykel J. Kochenderfer, Clark Barrett
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08065v1

Forward reachability analysis is the predominant approach for verifying reach-avoid properties in neural feedback systems (dynamical systems controlled by neural networks). This dominance stems from the limited scalability of existing backward reachability methods. In this work, we introduce new algorithms that compute both over- and under-approximations of backward reachable sets for such systems. We further integrate these backward algorithms with established forward analysis techniques to yield a unified verification framework for neural feedback systems.

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### Calibration Is Not Enough: Evaluating Confidence Estimation Under Language Variations

Authors: Yuxi Xia, Dennis Ulmer, Terra Blevins, Yihong Liu, Hinrich Schütze, Benjamin Roth
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08064v3

Confidence estimation (CE) indicates how reliable the answers of large language models are and impacts user trust and decision-making. Existing evaluations mainly concern the alignment between confidence and correctness, but ignore the variability of language: confidence estimates should remain consistent under semantically equivalent prompts or answer variations, while changing when answer meaning differs, as this may indicate a change in correctness. Therefore, we introduce a novel evaluation framework based on three complementary properties: \textbf{robustness} to prompt perturbations, \textbf{stability} across semantically equivalent answers, and \textbf{sensitivity} to semantically different answers. We show that these metrics are largely independent from existing CE metrics, and that common CE methods often fail on them: while most methods achieve high robustness and stability, they struggle to distinguish semantically different answers, potentially because they do not effectively leverage generation-side information. Overall, our framework exposes overlooked limitations of current CE evaluations and provides guidance for selecting confidence estimators for real-world applications.

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### Universal computation is intrinsic to language model decoding

Authors: Alex Lewandowski, Marlos C. Machado, Dale Schuurmans
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08061v2

Language models now provide an interface to express and often solve general problems in natural language, yet their ultimate computational capabilities remain a major topic of scientific debate. Unlike a formal computer, a language model is trained to autoregressively predict successive elements in human-generated text. We prove that chaining a language model's autoregressive output is sufficient to perform universal computation. That is, a language model can simulate the execution of any algorithm on any input. The challenge of eliciting desired computational behaviour can thus be reframed in terms of programmability: the ease of finding a suitable prompt. Strikingly, we demonstrate that even randomly initialized language models are capable of universal computation before training. This implies that training does not give rise to computational expressiveness -- rather, it improves programmability, enabling a natural language interface for accessing these intrinsic capabilities.

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### Triggering Chain-of-Thought via Latent Feature Interventions in Large Language Models

Authors: Zhenghao He, Guangzhi Xiong, Bohan Liu, Sanchit Sinha, Aidong Zhang
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08058v2

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting often improves the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), but the internal signal that triggers this behavior remains poorly understood. Leveraging the sparse features captured by Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs), we propose a systematic framework to analyze and intervene on the internal representations of LLMs, identifying a small set of latent features that are linked to reasoning behavior and can be causally tested through targeted intervention. Across multiple model families and reasoning benchmarks, we show that steering one or a small number of reasoning-related latent features can substantially induce reasoning behavior without explicit CoT prompting, achieving accuracy comparable to CoT. We further show that the identified features are not tied to particular wording patterns or verbosity, and confirm their causal role in reasoning through suppression experiments that impair performance even under CoT prompting. These results suggest that CoT prompting activates specific latent features to trigger reasoning, and that targeted intervention on these features offers an alternative pathway to elicit efficient reasoning behavior without explicit CoT prompting. Code is available at https://github.com/Zhenghao-He/LatentCoT.

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### Forecast Aware Deep Reinforcement Learning for Efficient Electricity Load Scheduling in Dairy Farms

Authors: Nawazish Ali, Rachael Shaw, Karl Mason
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08052v2

Dairy farming is an energy intensive sector that relies heavily on grid electricity. With increasing renewable energy integration, sustainable energy management has become essential for reducing grid dependence and supporting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 7 on affordable and clean energy. However, the intermittent nature of renewables poses challenges in balancing supply and demand in real time. Intelligent load scheduling is therefore crucial to minimize operational costs while maintaining reliability. Reinforcement Learning has shown promise in improving energy efficiency and reducing costs. However, most RL-based scheduling methods assume complete knowledge of future prices or generation, which is unrealistic in dynamic environments. Moreover, standard PPO variants rely on fixed clipping or KL divergence thresholds, often leading to unstable training under variable tariffs. To address these challenges, this study proposes a Deep Reinforcement Learning framework for efficient load scheduling in dairy farms, focusing on battery storage and water heating under realistic operational constraints. The proposed Forecast Aware PPO incorporates short term forecasts of demand and renewable generation using hour of day and month based residual calibration, while the PID KL PPO variant employs a proportional integral derivative controller to regulate KL divergence for stable policy updates adaptively. Trained on real world dairy farm data, the method achieves up to 1% lower electricity cost than PPO, 4.8% than DQN, and 1.5% than SAC. For battery scheduling, PPO reduces grid imports by 13.1%, demonstrating scalability and effectiveness for sustainable energy management in modern dairy farming.

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### Integrating Attendance Tracking and Emotion Detection for Enhanced Student Engagement in Smart Classrooms

Authors: Keith Ainebyona, Ann Move Oguti, Joseph Walusimbi, Ritah Kobusingye
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08049v1

The increasing adoption of smart classroom technologies in higher education has mainly focused on automating attendance, with limited attention given to students' emotional and cognitive engagement during lectures. This limits instructors' ability to identify disengagement and adapt teaching strategies in real time. This paper presents SCASED (Smart Classroom Attendance System with Emotion Detection), an IoT-based system that integrates automated attendance tracking with facial emotion recognition to support classroom engagement monitoring. The system uses a Raspberry Pi camera and OpenCV for face detection, and a finetuned MobileNetV2 model to classify four learning-related emotional states: engagement, boredom, confusion, and frustration. A session-based mechanism is implemented to manage attendance and emotion monitoring by recording attendance once per session and performing continuous emotion analysis thereafter. Attendance and emotion data are visualized through a cloud-based dashboard to provide instructors with insights into classroom dynamics. Experimental evaluation using the DAiSEE dataset achieved an emotion classification accuracy of 89.5%. The results show that integrating attendance data with emotion analytics can provide instructors with additional insight into classroom dynamics and support more responsive teaching practices.

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### LUT-Compiled Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Lightweight DoS Detection on IoT Edge Devices

Authors: Oleksandr Kuznetsov
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08044v1

Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks pose a critical threat to Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems, yet deploying effective intrusion detection on resource-constrained edge devices remains challenging. Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) offer a compact alternative to Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) by placing learnable univariate spline functions on edges rather than fixed activations on nodes, achieving competitive accuracy with fewer parameters. However, runtime B-spline evaluation introduces significant computational overhead unsuitable for latency-critical IoT applications. We propose a lookup table (LUT) compilation pipeline that replaces expensive spline computations with precomputed quantized tables and linear interpolation, dramatically reducing inference latency while preserving detection quality. Our lightweight KAN model (50K parameters, 0.19~MB) achieves 99.0\% accuracy on the CICIDS2017 DoS dataset. After LUT compilation with resolution $L=8$, the model maintains 98.96\% accuracy (F1 degradation $<0.0004$) while achieving $\mathbf{68\times}$ speedup at batch size 256 and over $\mathbf{5000\times}$ speedup at batch size 1, with only $2\times$ memory overhead. We provide comprehensive evaluation across LUT resolutions, quantization schemes, and out-of-bounds policies, establishing clear Pareto frontiers for accuracy-latency-memory trade-offs. Our results demonstrate that LUT-compiled KANs enable real-time DoS detection on CPU-only IoT gateways with deterministic inference latency and minimal resource footprint.

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### The Role of Noisy Data in Improving CNN Robustness for Image Classification

Authors: Oscar H. Ramírez-Agudelo, Nicoleta Gorea, Aliza Reif, Lorenzo Bonasera, Michael Karl
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08043v1

Data quality plays a central role in the performance and robustness of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for image classification. While high-quality data is often preferred for training, real-world inputs are frequently affected by noise and other distortions. This paper investigates the effect of deliberately introducing controlled noise into the training data to improve model robustness. Using the CIFAR-10 dataset, we evaluate the impact of three common corruptions, namely Gaussian noise, Salt-and-Pepper noise, and Gaussian blur at varying intensities and training set pollution levels. Experiments using a Resnet-18 model reveal that incorporating just 10\% noisy data during training is sufficient to significantly reduce test loss and enhance accuracy under fully corrupted test conditions, with minimal impact on clean-data performance. These findings suggest that strategic exposure to noise can act as a simple yet effective regularizer, offering a practical trade-off between traditional data cleanliness and real-world resilience.

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### Rescind: Countering Image Misconduct in Biomedical Publications with Vision-Language and State-Space Modeling

Authors: Soumyaroop Nandi, Prem Natarajan
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08040v1

Scientific image manipulation in biomedical publications poses a growing threat to research integrity and reproducibility. Unlike natural image forensics, biomedical forgery detection is uniquely challenging due to domain-specific artifacts, complex textures, and unstructured figure layouts. We present the first vision-language guided framework for both generating and detecting biomedical image forgeries. By combining diffusion-based synthesis with vision-language prompting, our method enables realistic and semantically controlled manipulations, including duplication, splicing, and region removal, across diverse biomedical modalities. We introduce Rescind, a large-scale benchmark featuring fine-grained annotations and modality-specific splits, and propose Integscan, a structured state space modeling framework that integrates attention-enhanced visual encoding with prompt-conditioned semantic alignment for precise forgery localization. To ensure semantic fidelity, we incorporate a vision-language model based verification loop that filters generated forgeries based on consistency with intended prompts. Extensive experiments on Rescind and existing benchmarks demonstrate that Integscan achieves state of the art performance in both detection and localization, establishing a strong foundation for automated scientific integrity analysis.

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### Riemannian Zeroth-Order Gradient Estimation with Structure-Preserving Metrics for Geodesically Incomplete Manifolds

Authors: Shaocong Ma, Heng Huang
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.LG, math.OC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08039v2

In this paper, we study Riemannian zeroth-order optimization in settings where the underlying Riemannian metric $g$ is geodesically incomplete, and the goal is to approximate stationary points with respect to this incomplete metric. To address this challenge, we construct structure-preserving metrics that are geodesically complete while ensuring that every stationary point under the new metric remains stationary under the original one. Building on this foundation, we revisit the classical symmetric two-point zeroth-order estimator and analyze its mean-squared error from a purely intrinsic perspective, depending only on the manifold's geometry rather than any ambient embedding. Leveraging this intrinsic analysis, we establish convergence guarantees for stochastic gradient descent with this intrinsic estimator. Under additional suitable conditions, an $ε$-stationary point under the constructed metric $g'$ also corresponds to an $ε$-stationary point under the original metric $g$, thereby matching the best-known complexity in the geodesically complete setting. Empirical studies on synthetic problems confirm our theoretical findings, and experiments on a practical mesh optimization task demonstrate that our framework maintains stable convergence even in the absence of geodesic completeness.

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### Fiducial Exoskeletons: Image-Centric Robot State Estimation

Authors: Cameron Smith, Basile Van Hoorick, Vitor Guizilini, Yue Wang
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08034v1

We introduce Fiducial Exoskeletons, an image-based reformulation of 3D robot state estimation that replaces cumbersome procedures and motor-centric pipelines with single-image inference. Traditional approaches - especially robot-camera extrinsic estimation - often rely on high-precision actuators and require time-consuming routines such as hand-eye calibration. In contrast, modern learning-based robot control is increasingly trained and deployed from RGB observations on lower-cost hardware. Our key insight is twofold. First, we cast robot state estimation as 6D pose estimation of each link from a single RGB image: the robot-camera base transform is obtained directly as the estimated base-link pose, and the joint state is recovered via a lightweight global optimization that enforces kinematic consistency with the observed link poses (optionally warm-started with encoder readings). Second, we make per-link 6D pose estimation robust and simple - even without learning - by introducing the fiducial exoskeleton: a lightweight 3D-printed mount with a fiducial marker on each link and known marker-link geometry. This design yields robust camera-robot extrinsics, per-link SE(3) poses, and joint-angle state from a single image, enabling robust state estimation even on unplugged robots. Demonstrated on a low-cost robot arm, fiducial exoskeletons substantially simplify setup while improving calibration, state accuracy, and downstream 3D control performance. We release code and printable hardware designs to enable further algorithm-hardware co-design.

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### InfGraND: An Influence-Guided GNN-to-MLP Knowledge Distillation

Authors: Amir Eskandari, Aman Anand, Elyas Rashno, Farhana Zulkernine
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08033v1

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are the go-to model for graph data analysis. However, GNNs rely on two key operations - aggregation and update, which can pose challenges for low-latency inference tasks or resource-constrained scenarios. Simple Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) offer a computationally efficient alternative. Yet, training an MLP in a supervised setting often leads to suboptimal performance. Knowledge Distillation (KD) from a GNN teacher to an MLP student has emerged to bridge this gap. However, most KD methods either transfer knowledge uniformly across all nodes or rely on graph-agnostic indicators such as prediction uncertainty. We argue this overlooks a more fundamental, graph-centric inquiry: "How important is a node to the structure of the graph?" We introduce a framework, InfGraND, an Influence-guided Graph KNowledge Distillation from GNN to MLP that addresses this by identifying and prioritizing structurally influential nodes to guide the distillation process, ensuring that the MLP learns from the most critical parts of the graph. Additionally, InfGraND embeds structural awareness in MLPs through one-time multi-hop neighborhood feature pre-computation, which enriches the student MLP's input and thus avoids inference-time overhead. Our rigorous evaluation in transductive and inductive settings across seven homophilic graph benchmark datasets shows InfGraND consistently outperforms prior GNN to MLP KD methods, demonstrating its practicality for numerous latency-critical applications in real-world settings.

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### FigEx2: Visual-Conditioned Panel Detection and Captioning for Scientific Compound Figures

Authors: Jifeng Song, Arun Das, Pan Wang, Hui Ji, Kun Zhao, Yufei Huang
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08026v5

Scientific compound figures combine multiple labeled panels into a single image, and downstream pretraining and retrieval require panel-aligned visual-text pairs. However, in a PubMed Central (PMC)-scale crawl of 346,567 compound figures, 16.3% have no caption and are discarded by existing caption-decomposition pipelines. We propose FigEx2, a visual-conditioned framework that takes only a compound figure as input and jointly produces labeled panel boxes and panel-wise captions. FigEx2 introduces an Entity-Attention Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularizer that aligns the detector's cross-attention with scientific entities annotated for each panel, providing a stable conditioning signal that also improves localization, and applies Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a panel-level Entity-F1 reward to optimize scientific faithfulness. We curate BioSci-Fig-Cap for in-domain supervision and contribute physics and chemistry test suites for cross-disciplinary evaluation. FigEx2 achieves 0.751 mAP@0.5:0.95 on BioSci-Fig-Cap, and outperforms Qwen3-VL-8B by 6.80 Entity-F1 on MedICaT for captioning. It also transfers zero-shot to out-of-distribution domains. The source code is available at https://github.com/Huang-AI4Medicine-Lab/FigEx2.

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### A Highly Efficient Diversity-based Input Selection for DNN Improvement Using VLMs

Authors: Amin Abbasishahkoo, Mahboubeh Dadkhah, Lionel Briand
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CV, cs.SE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08024v2

Maintaining or improving the performance of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) through fine-tuning requires labeling newly collected inputs, a process that is often costly and time-consuming. To alleviate this problem, input selection approaches have been developed in recent years to identify small, yet highly informative subsets for labeling. Diversity-based selection is one of the most effective approaches for this purpose. However, they are often computationally intensive and lack scalability for large input sets, limiting their practical applicability. To address this challenge, we introduce Concept-Based Diversity (CBD), a novel and highly efficient diversity metric for image inputs that leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Our results show that CBD exhibits a strong correlation with Geometric Diversity (GD), an established diversity metric, while requiring only a fraction of its computation time. Building on this finding, we propose a hybrid input selection approach that combines CBD with Margin, a simple uncertainty metric. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation across a diverse set of DNN models, input sets, selection budgets, and six most effective state-of-the-art selection baselines. The results demonstrate that the CBD-based selection consistently outperforms all baselines at guiding input selection to improve the DNN model. Furthermore, the CBD-based selection approach remains highly efficient, requiring selection times close to those of simple uncertainty-based methods such as Margin, even on larger input sets like ImageNet. These results confirm not only the effectiveness and computational advantage of the CBD-based approach, particularly compared to hybrid baselines, but also its scalability in repetitive and extensive input selection scenarios.

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### Training Free Zero-Shot Visual Anomaly Localization via Diffusion Inversion

Authors: Samet Hicsonmez, Abd El Rahman Shabayek, Djamila Aouada
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08022v1

Zero-Shot image Anomaly Detection (ZSAD) aims to detect and localise anomalies without access to any normal training samples of the target data. While recent ZSAD approaches leverage additional modalities such as language to generate fine-grained prompts for localisation, vision-only methods remain limited to image-level classification, lacking spatial precision. In this work, we introduce a simple yet effective training-free vision-only ZSAD framework that circumvents the need for fine-grained prompts by leveraging the inversion of a pretrained Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model (DDIM). Specifically, given an input image and a generic text description (e.g., "an image of an (object class)"), we invert the image to obtain latent representations and initiate the denoising process from a fixed intermediate timestep to reconstruct the image. Since the underlying diffusion model is trained solely on normal data, this process yields a normal-looking reconstruction. The discrepancy between the input image and the reconstructed one highlights potential anomalies. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on VISA dataset, demonstrating strong localisation capabilities without auxiliary modalities and facilitating a shift away from prompt dependence for zero-shot anomaly detection research. Code is available at https://github.com/giddyyupp/DIVAD.

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### Representations of Text and Images Align From Layer One

Authors: Evžen Wybitul, Javier Rando, Florian Tramèr, Stanislav Fort
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08017v1

We show that for a variety of concepts in adapter-based vision-language models, the representations of their images and their text descriptions are meaningfully aligned from the very first layer. This contradicts the established view that such image-text alignment only appears in late layers. We show this using a new synthesis-based method inspired by DeepDream: given a textual concept such as "Jupiter", we extract its concept vector at a given layer, and then use optimisation to synthesise an image whose representation aligns with that vector. We apply our approach to hundreds of concepts across seven layers in Gemma 3, and find that the synthesised images often depict salient visual features of the targeted textual concepts: for example, already at layer 1, more than 50 % of images depict recognisable features of animals, activities, or seasons. Our method thus provides direct, constructive evidence of image-text alignment on a concept-by-concept and layer-by-layer basis. Unlike previous methods for measuring multimodal alignment, our approach is simple, fast, and does not require auxiliary models or datasets. It also offers a new path towards model interpretability, by providing a way to visualise a model's representation space by backtracing through its image processing components.

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### Beyond the Next Port: A Multi-Task Transformer for Forecasting Future Voyage Segment Durations

Authors: Nairui Liu, Fang He, Xindi Tang, Yineng Wang
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08013v2

Accurate forecasts of segment-level sailing durations are fundamental to enhancing maritime schedule reliability and optimizing long-term port operations. However, conventional estimated time of arrival (ETA) models are primarily designed for the immediate next port of call and rely heavily on real-time automatic identification system (AIS) data, which is inherently unavailable for future voyage segments. To address this gap, the study reformulates future-port ETA prediction as a segment-level time-series forecasting problem. We develop a transformer-based architecture that integrates historical sailing durations, destination port congestion proxies, and static vessel descriptors. The proposed framework employs a causally masked attention mechanism to capture long-range temporal dependencies and a multi-task learning head to jointly predict segment sailing durations and port congestion states, leveraging shared latent signals to mitigate high uncertainty. Evaluation on a real-world global dataset from 2021 demonstrates the proposed model consistently outperforms a comprehensive suite of competitive baselines. The result shows a relative reduction of 4.70% in mean absolute error (MAE), 4.95% in mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and 2.59% in root mean squared error (RMSE) compared with sequential deep learning models. The relative reductions compared with gradient boosting machines are 7.03% in MAE, 39.49% in MAPE and 4.37% in RMSE. The case study conducted on one major destination port further illustrates the model's superior accuracy.

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### TP-Blend: Textual-Prompt Attention Pairing for Precise Object-Style Blending in Diffusion Models

Authors: Xin Jin, Yichuan Zhong, Yapeng Tian
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.MM
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08011v4

Current text-conditioned diffusion editors handle single object replacement well but struggle when a new object and a new style must be introduced simultaneously. We present Twin-Prompt Attention Blend (TP-Blend), a lightweight training-free framework that receives two separate textual prompts, one specifying a blend object and the other defining a target style, and injects both into a single denoising trajectory. TP-Blend is driven by two complementary attention processors. Cross-Attention Object Fusion (CAOF) first averages head-wise attention to locate spatial tokens that respond strongly to either prompt, then solves an entropy-regularised optimal transport problem that reassigns complete multi-head feature vectors to those positions. CAOF updates feature vectors at the full combined dimensionality of all heads (e.g., 640 dimensions in SD-XL), preserving rich cross-head correlations while keeping memory low. Self-Attention Style Fusion (SASF) injects style at every self-attention layer through Detail-Sensitive Instance Normalization. A lightweight one-dimensional Gaussian filter separates low- and high-frequency components; only the high-frequency residual is blended back, imprinting brush-stroke-level texture without disrupting global geometry. SASF further swaps the Key and Value matrices with those derived from the style prompt, enforcing context-aware texture modulation that remains independent of object fusion. Extensive experiments show that TP-Blend produces high-resolution, photo-realistic edits with precise control over both content and appearance, surpassing recent baselines in quantitative fidelity, perceptual quality, and inference speed.

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### CASHEW: Stabilizing Multimodal Reasoning via Iterative Trajectory Aggregation

Authors: Chaoyu Li, Fei Tao, Pooyan Fazli
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08010v3

Vision-language models achieve strong performance across a wide range of multimodal understanding and reasoning tasks, yet their multi-step reasoning remains unstable. Repeated sampling over the same input often produces divergent reasoning trajectories and inconsistent final predictions. To address this, we introduce two complementary approaches inspired by test-time scaling: (1) CASHEW, an inference-time framework that stabilizes reasoning by iteratively aggregating multiple candidate trajectories into higher-quality reasoning traces, with explicit visual verification filtering hallucinated steps and grounding reasoning in visual evidence, and (2) CASHEW-RL, a learned variant that internalizes this aggregation behavior within a single model. CASHEW-RL is trained using Group Sequence Policy Optimization (GSPO) with a composite reward that encourages correct answers grounded in minimal yet sufficient visual evidence, while adaptively allocating reasoning effort based on task difficulty. This training objective enables robust self-aggregation at inference. Extensive experiments on 13 image understanding, video understanding, and video reasoning benchmarks show significant performance improvements, including gains of up to +26.2 percentage points on ScienceQA and +9.1 percentage points on EgoSchema.

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### Internal Deployment Gaps in AI Regulation

Authors: Joe Kwon, Stephen Casper
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08005v3

Frontier AI regulations primarily focus on systems deployed to external users, where deployment is more visible and subject to outside scrutiny. However, high-stakes applications can occur internally when companies deploy highly capable systems within their own organizations, such as for automating R&D, accelerating critical business processes, and handling sensitive proprietary data. This paper examines how frontier AI regulations in the United States and European Union in 2025 handle internal deployment. We identify three gaps that could cause internally-deployed systems to evade intended oversight: (1) scope ambiguity that allows internal systems to evade regulatory obligations, (2) point-in-time compliance assessments that fail to capture the continuous evolution of internal systems, and (3) information asymmetries that subvert regulatory awareness and oversight. We then analyze why these gaps persist, examining tensions around measurability, incentives, and information access. Finally, we map potential approaches to address them and their associated tradeoffs. By understanding these patterns, we hope that policy choices around internally deployed AI systems can be made deliberately rather than incidentally.

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### LLM Review: Enhancing Creative Writing via Blind Peer Review Feedback

Authors: Weiyue Li, Mingxiao Song, Zhenda Shen, Dachuan Zhao, Yunfan Long, Yi Li, Yongce Li, Ruyi Yang, Mengyu Wang
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.MA
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08003v1

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with creative generation, and multi-agent frameworks that improve reasoning through interaction can paradoxically hinder creativity by inducing content homogenization. We introduce LLM Review, a peer-review-inspired framework implementing Blind Peer Review: agents exchange targeted feedback while revising independently, preserving divergent creative trajectories. To enable rigorous evaluation, we propose SciFi-100, a science fiction writing dataset with a unified framework combining LLM-as-a-judge scoring, human annotation, and rule-based novelty metrics. Experiments demonstrate that LLM Review consistently outperforms multi-agent baselines, and smaller models with our framework can surpass larger single-agent models, suggesting interaction structure may substitute for model scale.

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### Operator learning for models of tear film breakup

Authors: Qinying Chen, Arnab Roy, Tobin A. Driscoll
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: math.NA, cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08001v2

Tear film (TF) breakup is a key driver of understanding dry eye disease, yet estimating TF thickness and osmolarity from fluorescence (FL) imaging typically requires solving computationally expensive inverse problems. We propose an operator learning framework that replaces traditional inverse solvers with neural operators trained on simulated TF dynamics. This approach offers a scalable path toward rapid, data-driven analysis of tear film dynamics.

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### Reasoning over Precedents Alongside Statutes: Case-Augmented Deliberative Alignment for LLM Safety

Authors: Can Jin, Rui Wu, Tong Che, Qixin Zhang, Hongwu Peng, Jiahui Zhao, Zhenting Wang, Wenqi Wei, Ligong Han, Zhao Zhang, Yuan Cao, Ruixiang Tang et al.
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.AI, cs.SE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08000v1

Ensuring that Large Language Models (LLMs) adhere to safety principles without refusing benign requests remains a significant challenge. While OpenAI introduces deliberative alignment (DA) to enhance the safety of its o-series models through reasoning over detailed ``code-like'' safety rules, the effectiveness of this approach in open-source LLMs, which typically lack advanced reasoning capabilities, is understudied. In this work, we systematically evaluate the impact of explicitly specifying extensive safety codes versus demonstrating them through illustrative cases. We find that referencing explicit codes inconsistently improves harmlessness and systematically degrades helpfulness, whereas training on case-augmented simple codes yields more robust and generalized safety behaviors. By guiding LLMs with case-augmented reasoning instead of extensive code-like safety rules, we avoid rigid adherence to narrowly enumerated rules and enable broader adaptability. Building on these insights, we propose CADA, a case-augmented deliberative alignment method for LLMs utilizing reinforcement learning on self-generated safety reasoning chains. CADA effectively enhances harmlessness, improves robustness against attacks, and reduces over-refusal while preserving utility across diverse benchmarks, offering a practical alternative to rule-only DA for improving safety while maintaining helpfulness.

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### Predicting Region of Interest in Human Visual Search Based on Statistical Texture and Gabor Features

Authors: Hongwei Lin, Diego Andrade, Mini Das, Howard C. Gifford
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CV, eess.IV, eess.SP, physics.med-ph
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07998v1

Understanding human visual search behavior is a fundamental problem in vision science and computer vision, with direct implications for modeling how observers allocate attention in location-unknown search tasks. In this study, we investigate the relationship between Gabor-based features and gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) based texture features in modeling early-stage visual search behavior. Two feature-combination pipelines are proposed to integrate Gabor and GLCM features for narrowing the region of possible human fixations. The pipelines are evaluated using simulated digital breast tomosynthesis images. Results show qualitative agreement among fixation candidates predicted by the proposed pipelines and a threshold-based model observer. A strong correlation is observed between GLCM mean and Gabor feature responses, indicating that these features encode related image information despite their different formulations. Eye-tracking data from human observers further suggest consistency between predicted fixation regions and early-stage gaze behavior. These findings highlight the value of combining structural and texture-based features for modeling visual search and support the development of perceptually informed observer models.

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### Is Sentiment Banana-Shaped? Exploring the Geometry and Portability of Sentiment Concept Vectors

Authors: Laurits Lyngbaek, Pascale Feldkamp, Yuri Bizzoni, Kristoffer L. Nielbo, Kenneth Enevoldsen
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07995v2

Use cases of sentiment analysis in the humanities often require contextualized, continuous scores. Concept Vector Projections (CVP) offer a recent solution: by modeling sentiment as a direction in embedding space, they produce continuous, multilingual scores that align closely with human judgments. Yet the method's portability across domains and underlying assumptions remain underexplored. We evaluate CVP across genres, historical periods, languages, and affective dimensions, finding that concept vectors trained on one corpus transfer well to others with minimal performance loss. To understand the patterns of generalization, we further examine the linearity assumption underlying CVP. Our findings suggest that while CVP is a portable approach that effectively captures generalizable patterns, its linearity assumption is approximate, pointing to potential for further development. Code available at: github.com/lauritswl/representation-transfer

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### DYCP: Dynamic Context Pruning for Long-Form Dialogue with LLMs

Authors: Nayoung Choi, Jonathan Zhang, Jinho D. Choi
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07994v5

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly operate over long-form dialogues with frequent topic shifts. While recent LLMs support extended context windows, efficient management of dialogue history in practice is needed due to inference cost and latency constraints. We present DyCP, a lightweight context management method implemented outside the LLM that dynamically identifies and retrieves relevant dialogue segments conditioned on the current turn, without offline memory construction. DyCP manages dialogue context while preserving the sequential nature of dialogue without predefined topic boundaries, enabling adaptive and efficient context selection. Across three long-form dialogue benchmarks-LoCoMo, MT-Bench+, and SCM4LLMs-and multiple LLM backends, DyCP achieves competitive answer quality in downstream generation, with more selective context usage and improved inference efficiency.

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### From Word Sequences to Behavioral Sequences: Adapting Modeling and Evaluation Paradigms for Longitudinal NLP

Authors: Adithya V Ganesan, Vasudha Varadarajan, Oscar NE Kjell, Whitney R Ringwald, Scott Feltman, Benjamin J Luft, Roman Kotov, Ryan L Boyd, H Andrew Schwartz
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07988v2

While NLP typically treats documents as independent and unordered samples, in longitudinal studies, this assumption rarely holds: documents are nested within authors and ordered in time, forming person-indexed, time-ordered $\textit{behavioral sequences}$. Here, we demonstrate the need for and propose a longitudinal modeling and evaluation paradigm that consequently updates four parts of the NLP pipeline: (1) evaluation splits aligned to generalization over people ($\textit{cross-sectional}$) and/or time ($\textit{prospective}$); (2) accuracy metrics separating between-person differences from within-person dynamics; (3) sequence inputs to incorporate history by default; and (4) model internals that support different $\textit{coarseness}$ of latent state over histories (pooled summaries, explicit dynamics, or interaction-based models). We demonstrate the issues ensued by traditional pipeline and our proposed improvements on a dataset of 17k daily diary transcripts paired with PTSD symptom severity from 238 participants, finding that traditional document-level evaluation can yield substantially different and sometimes reversed conclusions compared to our ecologically valid modeling and evaluation. We tie our results to a broader discussion motivating a shift from word-sequence evaluation toward $\textit{behavior-sequence}$ paradigms for NLP.

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### VULCA-Bench: A Multicultural Vision-Language Benchmark for Evaluating Cultural Understanding

Authors: Haorui Yu, Diji Yang, Hang He, Fengrui Zhang, Qiufeng Yi
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CL, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07986v3

We introduce VULCA-Bench, a multicultural art-critique benchmark for evaluating Vision-Language Models' (VLMs) cultural understanding beyond surface-level visual perception. Existing VLM benchmarks predominantly measure L1-L2 capabilities (object recognition, scene description, and factual question answering) while under-evaluate higher-order cultural interpretation. VULCA-Bench contains 7,410 matched image-critique pairs spanning eight cultural traditions, with Chinese-English bilingual coverage. We operationalise cultural understanding using a five-layer framework (L1-L5, from Visual Perception to Philosophical Aesthetics), instantiated as 225 culture-specific dimensions and supported by expert-written bilingual critiques. Our pilot results indicate that higher-layer reasoning (L3-L5) is consistently more challenging than visual and technical analysis (L1-L2). The dataset, evaluation scripts, and annotation tools are available under CC BY 4.0 at https://github.com/yha9806/VULCA-Bench.

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### Multilingual, Multimodal Pipeline for Creating Authentic and Structured Fact-Checked Claim Dataset

Authors: Z. Melce Hüsünbeyi, Virginie Mouilleron, Leonie Uhling, Daniel Foppe, Tatjana Scheffler, Djamé Seddah
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07985v3

The rapid proliferation of misinformation across online platforms underscores the urgent need for robust, up-to-date, explainable, and multilingual fact-checking resources. However, existing datasets are limited in scope, often lacking multimodal evidence, structured annotations, and detailed links between claims, evidence, and verdicts. This paper introduces a comprehensive data collection and processing pipeline that constructs multimodal fact-checking datasets in French and German languages by aggregating ClaimReview feeds, scraping full debunking articles, normalizing heterogeneous claim verdicts, and enriching them with structured metadata and aligned visual content. We used state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) and multimodal LLMs for (i) evidence extraction under predefined evidence categories and (ii) justification generation that links evidence to verdicts. Evaluation with G-Eval and human assessment demonstrates that our pipeline enables fine-grained comparison of fact-checking practices across different organizations or media markets, facilitates the development of more interpretable and evidence-grounded fact-checking models, and lays the groundwork for future research on multilingual, multimodal misinformation verification.

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### Cross-Cultural Expert-Level Art Critique Evaluation with Vision-Language Models

Authors: Haorui Yu, Xuehang Wen, Fengrui Zhang, Qiufeng Yi
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07984v3

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at visual description yet remain under-validated for cultural interpretation. Existing benchmarks assess perception without interpretation, and common evaluation proxies, such as automated metrics and LLM-judge averaging, are unreliable for culturally sensitive generative tasks. We address this measurement gap with a tri-tier evaluation framework grounded in art-theoretical constructs (Section 2). The framework operationalises cultural understanding through five levels (L1--L5) and 165 culture-specific dimensions across six traditions: Tier I computes automated quality indicators, Tier II applies rubric-based single-judge scoring, and Tier III calibrates the aggregate score to human expert ratings via sigmoid calibration. Applied to 15 VLMs across 294 evaluation pairs, the validated instrument reveals that (i) automated metrics and judge scoring measure different constructs, establishing single-judge calibration as the more reliable alternative; (ii) cultural understanding degrades from visual description (L1--L2) to cultural interpretation (L3--L5); and (iii) Western art samples consistently receive higher scores than non-Western ones. To our knowledge, this is the first cross-cultural evaluation instrument for generative art critique, providing a reproducible methodology for auditing VLM cultural competence. Framework code is available at https://github.com/yha9806/VULCA-Framework.

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### Likelihood ratio for a binary Bayesian classifier under a noise-exclusion model

Authors: Howard C. Gifford
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CV, math.ST, stat.CO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07982v1

We develop a new statistical ideal observer model that performs holistic visual search (or gist) processing in part by placing thresholds on minimum extractable image features. In this model, the ideal observer reduces the number of free parameters thereby shrinking down the system. The applications of this novel framework is in medical image perception (for optimizing imaging systems and algorithms), computer vision, benchmarking performance and enabling feature selection/evaluations. Other applications are in target detection and recognition in defense/security as well as evaluating sensors and detectors.

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### Spatial Covariance Constraints for Gaussian Mixture Models

Authors: Hanzhang Lu, Keiran Malott, Venkat Suprabath Bitra, Kirsty Milligan, Sanjeena Subedi, Edana Cassol, Vinita Chauhan, Connor McNairn, Bryan Muir, Prarthana Pasricha, Sangeeta Murugkar, Rowan Thomson et al.
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: stat.ME, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07979v1

Although extensive research exists in spatial modeling, few studies have addressed finite mixture model-based clustering methods for spatial data. Finite mixture models, especially Gaussian mixture models, particularly suffer from high dimensionality due to the number of free covariance parameters. This study introduces a spatial covariance constraint for Gaussian mixture models that requires only four free parameters for each component, independent of dimensionality. Using a coordinate system, the spatially constrained Gaussian mixture model enables clustering of multi-way spatial data and inference of spatial patterns. The parameter estimation is conducted by combining the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm with the generalized least squares (GLS) estimator. Simulation studies and applications to Raman spectroscopy data are provided to demonstrate the proposed model.

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### Application of Ideal Observer for Thresholded Data in Search Task

Authors: Hongwei Lin, Howard C. Gifford
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV, eess.SP, physics.med-ph
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07976v1

This study advances task-based image quality assessment by developing an anthropomorphic thresholded visual-search model observer. The model is an ideal observer for thresholded data inspired by the human visual system, allowing selective processing of high-salience features to improve discrimination performance. By filtering out irrelevant variability, the model enhances diagnostic accuracy and computational efficiency. The observer employs a two-stage framework: candidate selection and decision-making. Using thresholded data during candidate selection refines regions of interest, while stage-specific feature processing optimizes performance. Simulations were conducted to evaluate the effects of thresholding on feature maps, candidate localization, and multi-feature scenarios. Results demonstrate that thresholding improves observer performance by excluding low-salience features, particularly in noisy environments. Intermediate thresholds often outperform no thresholding, indicating that retaining only relevant features is more effective than keeping all features. Additionally, the model demonstrates effective training with fewer images while maintaining alignment with human performance. These findings suggest that the proposed novel framework can predict human visual search performance in clinically realistic tasks and provide solutions for model observer training with limited resources. Our novel approach has applications in other areas where human visual search and detection tasks are modeled such as in computer vision, machine learning, defense and security image analysis.

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### An Efficient Additive Kolmogorov-Arnold Transformer for Point-Level Maize Localization in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Imagery

Authors: Fei Li, Lang Qiao, Jiahao Fan, Yijia Xu, Shawn M. Kaeppler, Zhou Zhang
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07975v1

High-resolution UAV photogrammetry has become a key technology for precision agriculture, enabling centimeter-level crop monitoring and point-level plant localization. However, point-level maize localization in UAV imagery remains challenging due to (1) extremely small object-to-pixel ratios, typically less than 0.1%, (2) prohibitive computational costs of quadratic attention on ultra-high-resolution images larger than 3000 x 4000 pixels, and (3) agricultural scene-specific complexities such as sparse object distribution and environmental variability that are poorly handled by general-purpose vision models. To address these challenges, we propose the Additive Kolmogorov-Arnold Transformer (AKT), which replaces conventional multilayer perceptrons with Pade Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (PKAN) modules to enhance functional expressivity for small-object feature extraction, and introduces PKAN Additive Attention (PAA) to model multiscale spatial dependencies with reduced computational complexity. In addition, we present the Point-based Maize Localization (PML) dataset, consisting of 1,928 high-resolution UAV images with approximately 501,000 point annotations collected under real field conditions. Extensive experiments show that AKT achieves an average F1-score of 62.8%, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 4.2%, while reducing FLOPs by 12.6% and improving inference throughput by 20.7%. For downstream tasks, AKT attains a mean absolute error of 7.1 in stand counting and a root mean square error of 1.95-1.97 cm in interplant spacing estimation. These results demonstrate that integrating Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theory with efficient attention mechanisms offers an effective framework for high-resolution agricultural remote sensing.

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### Explaining Generalization of AI-Generated Text Detectors Through Linguistic Analysis

Authors: Yuxi Xia, Kinga Stańczak, Benjamin Roth
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07974v2

AI-text detectors achieve high accuracy on in-domain benchmarks, but often struggle to generalize across different generation conditions such as unseen prompts, model families, or domains. While prior work has reported these generalization gaps, there are limited insights about the underlying causes. In this work, we present a systematic study aimed at explaining generalization behavior through linguistic analysis. We construct a comprehensive benchmark that spans 6 prompting strategies, 7 large language models (LLMs), and 4 domain datasets, resulting in a diverse set of human- and AI-generated texts. Using this dataset, we fine-tune classification-based detectors on various generation settings and evaluate their cross-prompt, cross-model, and cross-dataset generalization. To explain the performance variance, we compute correlations between generalization accuracies and feature shifts of 80 linguistic features between training and test conditions. Our analysis reveals that generalization performance for specific detectors and evaluation conditions is significantly associated with linguistic features such as tense usage and pronoun frequency.

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### Cultural Compass: A Framework for Organizing Societal Norms to Detect Violations in Human-AI Conversations

Authors: Myra Cheng, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Alice Oh, Hayk Stepanyan, Aishwarya Verma, Charu Kalia, Erin MacMurray van Liemt, Sunipa Dev
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07973v1

Generative AI models ought to be useful and safe across cross-cultural contexts. One critical step toward this goal is understanding how AI models adhere to sociocultural norms. While this challenge has gained attention in NLP, existing work lacks both nuance and coverage in understanding and evaluating models' norm adherence. We address these gaps by introducing a taxonomy of norms that clarifies their contexts (e.g., distinguishing between human-human norms that models should recognize and human-AI interactional norms that apply to the human-AI interaction itself), specifications (e.g., relevant domains), and mechanisms (e.g., modes of enforcement). We demonstrate how our taxonomy can be operationalized to automatically evaluate models' norm adherence in naturalistic, open-ended settings. Our exploratory analyses suggest that state-of-the-art models frequently violate norms, though violation rates vary by model, interactional context, and country. We further show that violation rates also vary by prompt intent and situational framing. Our taxonomy and demonstrative evaluation pipeline enable nuanced, context-sensitive evaluation of cultural norm adherence in realistic settings.

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### Knowing But Not Doing: Convergent Morality and Divergent Action in LLMs

Authors: Jen-tse Huang, Jiantong Qin, Xueli Qiu, Sharon Levy, Michelle R. Kaufman, Mark Dredze
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07972v1

Value alignment is central to the development of safe and socially compatible artificial intelligence. However, how Large Language Models (LLMs) represent and enact human values in real-world decision contexts remains under-explored. We present ValAct-15k, a dataset of 3,000 advice-seeking scenarios derived from Reddit, designed to elicit ten values defined by Schwartz Theory of Basic Human Values. Using both the scenario-based questions and the traditional value questionnaire, we evaluate ten frontier LLMs (five from U.S. companies, five from Chinese ones) and human participants ($n = 55$). We find near-perfect cross-model consistency in scenario-based decisions (Pearson $r \approx 1.0$), contrasting sharply with the broad variability observed among humans ($r \in (-0.79, 0.98)$). Yet, both humans and LLMs show weak correspondence between self-reported and enacted values ($r = 0.4, 0.3$), revealing a systematic knowledge-action gap. When instructed to "hold" a specific value, LLMs' performance declines up to $6.6%$ compared to merely selecting the value, indicating a role-play aversion. These findings suggest that while alignment training yields normative value convergence, it does not eliminate the human-like incoherence between knowing and acting upon values.

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### Sesame Plant Segmentation Dataset: A YOLO Formatted Annotated Dataset

Authors: Sunusi Ibrahim Muhammad, Ismail Ismail Tijjani, Saadatu Yusuf Jumare, Fatima Isah Jibrin
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07970v1

This paper presents the Sesame Plant Segmentation Dataset, an open source annotated image dataset designed to support the development of artificial intelligence models for agricultural applications, with a specific focus on sesame plants. The dataset comprises 206 training images, 43 validation images, and 43 test images in YOLO compatible segmentation format, capturing sesame plants at early growth stages under varying environmental conditions. Data were collected using a high resolution mobile camera from farms in Jirdede, Daura Local Government Area, Katsina State, Nigeria, and annotated using the Segment Anything Model version 2 with farmer supervision. Unlike conventional bounding box datasets, this dataset employs pixel level segmentation to enable more precise detection and analysis of sesame plants in real world farm settings. Model evaluation using the Ultralytics YOLOv8 framework demonstrated strong performance for both detection and segmentation tasks. For bounding box detection, the model achieved a recall of 79 percent, precision of 79 percent, mean average precision at IoU 0.50 of 84 percent, and mean average precision from 0.50 to 0.95 of 58 percent. For segmentation, it achieved a recall of 82 percent, precision of 77 percent, mean average precision at IoU 0.50 of 84 percent, and mean average precision from 0.50 to 0.95 of 52 percent. The dataset represents a novel contribution to sesame focused agricultural vision datasets in Nigeria and supports applications such as plant monitoring, yield estimation, and agricultural research.

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### Tuberculosis Screening from Cough Audio: Baseline Models, Clinical Variables, and Uncertainty Quantification

Authors: George P. Kafentzis, Efstratios Selisios
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: eess.AS, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.SD
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07969v2

In this paper, we propose a standardized framework for automatic tuberculosis (TB) detection from cough audio and routinely collected clinical data using machine learning. While TB screening from audio has attracted growing interest, progress is difficult to measure because existing studies vary substantially in datasets, cohort definitions, feature representations, model families, validation protocols, and reported metrics. Consequently, reported gains are often not directly comparable, and it remains unclear whether improvements stem from modeling advances or from differences in data and evaluation. We address this gap by establishing a strong, well-documented baseline for TB prediction using cough recordings and accompanying clinical metadata from a recently compiled dataset from several countries. Our pipeline is reproducible end-to-end, covering feature extraction, multimodal fusion, cougher-independent evaluation, and uncertainty quantification, and it reports a consistent suite of clinically relevant metrics to enable fair comparison. We further quantify performance for cough audio-only and fused (audio + clinical metadata) models, and release the full experimental protocol to facilitate benchmarking. This baseline is intended to serve as a common reference point and to reduce methodological variance that currently holds back progress in the field.

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### DataScribe: An AI-Native, Policy-Aligned Web Platform for Multi-Objective Materials Design and Discovery

Authors: Divyanshu Singh, Doguhan Sarıtürk, Cameron Lea, Md Shafiqul Islam, Raymundo Arroyave, Vahid Attari
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.LG, cond-mat.mtrl-sci
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07966v1

The acceleration of materials discovery requires digital platforms that go beyond data repositories to embed learning, optimization, and decision-making directly into research workflows. We introduce DataScribe, an AI-native, cloud-based materials discovery platform that unifies heterogeneous experimental and computational data through ontology-backed ingestion and machine-actionable knowledge graphs. The platform integrates FAIR-compliant metadata capture, schema and unit harmonization, uncertainty-aware surrogate modeling, and native multi-objective multi-fidelity Bayesian optimization, enabling closed-loop propose-measure-learn workflows across experimental and computational pipelines. DataScribe functions as an application-layer intelligence stack, coupling data governance, optimization, and explainability rather than treating them as downstream add-ons. We validate the platform through case studies in electrochemical materials and high-entropy alloys, demonstrating end-to-end data fusion, real-time optimization, and reproducible exploration of multi-objective trade spaces. By embedding optimization engines, machine learning, and unified access to public and private scientific data directly within the data infrastructure, and by supporting open, free use for academic and non-profit researchers, DataScribe functions as a general-purpose application-layer backbone for laboratories of any scale, including self-driving laboratories and geographically distributed materials acceleration platforms, with built-in support for performance, sustainability, and supply-chain-aware objectives.

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### When Models Know When They Do Not Know: Calibration, Cascading, and Cleaning

Authors: Chenjie Hao, Weyl Lu, Yuko Ishiwaka, Zengyi Li, Weier Wan, Yubei Chen
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07965v2

When a model knows when it does not know, many possibilities emerge. The first question is how to enable a model to recognize that it does not know. A promising approach is to use confidence, computed from the model's internal signals, to reflect its ignorance. Prior work in specific domains has shown that calibration can provide reliable confidence estimates. In this work, we propose a simple, effective, and universal training-free method that applies to both vision and language models, performing model calibration, cascading, and data cleaning to better exploit a model's ability to recognize when it does not know. We first highlight two key empirical observations: higher confidence corresponds to higher accuracy within a single model, and models calibrated on the validation set remain calibrated on a held-out test set. These findings empirically establish the reliability and comparability of calibrated confidence. Building on this, we introduce two applications: (1) model cascading with calibrated advantage routing and (2) data cleaning based on model ensemble. Using the routing signal derived from the comparability of calibrated confidences, we cascade large and small models to improve efficiency with almost no compromise in accuracy, and we further cascade two models of comparable scale to achieve performance beyond either model alone. Leveraging multiple experts and their calibrated confidences, we design a simple yet effective data-cleaning method that balances precision and detection rate to identify mislabeled samples in ImageNet and Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) datasets. Our results demonstrate that enabling models to recognize when they do not know is a practical step toward more efficient, reliable, and trustworthy AI.

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### Executable Ontologies in Game Development: From Algorithmic Control to Semantic World Modeling

Authors: Alexander Boldachev
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07964v1

This paper examines the application of Executable Ontologies (EO), implemented through the boldsea framework, to game development. We argue that EO represents a paradigm shift: a transition from algorithmic behavior programming to semantic world modeling, where agent behavior emerges naturally from declarative domain rules rather than being explicitly coded. Using a survival game scenario (Winter Feast), we demonstrate how EO achieves prioritybased task interruption through dataflow conditions rather than explicit preemption logic. Comparison with Behavior Trees (BT) and Goal-Oriented Action Planning (GOAP) reveals that while these approaches model what agents should do, EO models when actions become possible - a fundamental difference that addresses the semantic-process gap in game AI architecture. We discuss integration strategies, debugging advantages inherent to temporal event graphs, and the potential for LLM-driven runtime model generation.

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### 3DGS-Drag: Dragging Gaussians for Intuitive Point-Based 3D Editing

Authors: Jiahua Dong, Yu-Xiong Wang
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07963v1

The transformative potential of 3D content creation has been progressively unlocked through advancements in generative models. Recently, intuitive drag editing with geometric changes has attracted significant attention in 2D editing yet remains challenging for 3D scenes. In this paper, we introduce 3DGS-Drag -- a point-based 3D editing framework that provides efficient, intuitive drag manipulation of real 3D scenes. Our approach bridges the gap between deformation-based and 2D-editing-based 3D editing methods, addressing their limitations to geometry-related content editing. We leverage two key innovations: deformation guidance utilizing 3D Gaussian Splatting for consistent geometric modifications and diffusion guidance for content correction and visual quality enhancement. A progressive editing strategy further supports aggressive 3D drag edits. Our method enables a wide range of edits, including motion change, shape adjustment, inpainting, and content extension. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of 3DGS-Drag in various scenes, achieving state-of-the-art performance in geometry-related 3D content editing. Notably, the editing is efficient, taking 10 to 20 minutes on a single RTX 4090 GPU.

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### Language Markers of Emotion Flexibility Predict Depression and Anxiety Treatment Outcomes

Authors: Benjamin Brindle, George A. Bonanno, Thomas Derrick Hull, Nicolas Charon, Matteo Malgaroli
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CL, stat.AP
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07961v2

Predicting treatment non-response for anxiety and depression is challenging, in part because of sparse symptom assessments in real-world care. We examined whether passively captured, fine-grained emotions serve as linguistic markers of treatment outcomes by analyzing 12 weeks of de-identified teletherapy transcripts from 12,043 U.S. patients with moderate-to-severe anxiety and depression symptoms. A transformer-based small language model extracted patients' emotions at the talk-turn level; a state-space model (VISTA-SSM) clustered subgroups based on emotion dynamics over time and produced temporal networks. Two groups emerged: an improving group (n=8,230) and a non-response group (n=3,813) showing increased odds of symptom deterioration, and lower likelihood of clinically significant improvement. Temporal networks indicated that sadness and fear exerted most influence on emotion dynamics in non-responders, whereas improving patients showed balanced joy, sadness, and neutral expressions. Findings suggest that linguistic markers of emotional inflexibility can serve as scalable, interpretable, and theoretically grounded indicators for treatment risk stratification.

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### LJ-Spoof: A Generatively Varied Corpus for Audio Anti-Spoofing and Synthesis Source Tracing

Authors: Surya Subramani, Hashim Ali, Hafiz Malik
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI, eess.AS
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07958v1

Speaker-specific anti-spoofing and synthesis-source tracing are central challenges in audio anti-spoofing. Progress has been hampered by the lack of datasets that systematically vary model architectures, synthesis pipelines, and generative parameters. To address this gap, we introduce LJ-Spoof, a speaker-specific, generatively diverse corpus that systematically varies prosody, vocoders, generative hyperparameters, bona fide prompt sources, training regimes, and neural post-processing. The corpus spans one speakers-including studio-quality recordings-30 TTS families, 500 generatively variant subsets, 10 bona fide neural-processing variants, and more than 3 million utterances. This variation-dense design enables robust speaker-conditioned anti-spoofing and fine-grained synthesis-source tracing. We further position this dataset as both a practical reference training resource and a benchmark evaluation suite for anti-spoofing and source tracing.

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### LWMSCNN-SE: A Lightweight Multi-Scale Network for Efficient Maize Disease Classification on Edge Devices

Authors: Fikadu Weloday, Jianmei Su
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07957v1

Maize disease classification plays a vital role in mitigating yield losses and ensuring food security. However, the deployment of traditional disease detection models in resource-constrained environments, such as those using smartphones and drones, faces challenges due to high computational costs. To address these challenges, we propose LWMSCNN-SE, a lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) that integrates multi-scale feature extraction, depthwise separable convolutions, and squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) attention mechanisms. This novel combination enables the model to achieve 96.63% classification accuracy with only 241,348 parameters and 0.666 GFLOPs, making it suitable for real-time deployment in field applications. Our approach addresses the accuracy--efficiency trade-off by delivering high accuracy while maintaining low computational costs, demonstrating its potential for efficient maize disease diagnosis on edge devices in precision farming systems.

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### A Human-Centric Pipeline for Aligning Large Language Models with Chinese Medical Ethics

Authors: Haoan Jin, Han Ying, Jiacheng Ji, Hanhui Xu, Mengyue Wu
Published: 2026-01-12
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07954v1

Recent advances in large language models have enabled their application to a range of healthcare tasks. However, aligning LLMs with the nuanced demands of medical ethics, especially under complex real world scenarios, remains underexplored. In this work, we present MedES, a dynamic, scenario-centric benchmark specifically constructed from 260 authoritative Chinese medical, ethical, and legal sources to reflect the challenges in clinical decision-making. To facilitate model alignment, we introduce a guardian-in-the-loop framework that leverages a dedicated automated evaluator (trained on expert-labeled data and achieving over 97% accuracy within our domain) to generate targeted prompts and provide structured ethical feedback. Using this pipeline, we align a 7B-parameter LLM through supervised fine-tuning and domain-specific preference optimization. Experimental results, conducted entirely within the Chinese medical ethics context, demonstrate that our aligned model outperforms notably larger baselines on core ethical tasks, with observed improvements in both quality and composite evaluation metrics. Our work offers a practical and adaptable framework for aligning LLMs with medical ethics in the Chinese healthcare domain, and suggests that similar alignment pipelines may be instantiated in other legal and cultural environments through modular replacement of the underlying normative corpus.

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