# Research Papers — 2026-01 · bundle page 137 of 189 > Full-text markdown of papers #6801–6850 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/137 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-01/page/136.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-01/page/138.md) ### Are LLMs Vulnerable to Preference-Undermining Attacks (PUA)? A Factorial Analysis Methodology for Diagnosing the Trade-off between Preference Alignment and Real-World Validity Authors: Hongjun An, Yiliang Song, Jiangan Chen, Jiawei Shao, Chi Zhang, Xuelong Li Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06596v1 Large Language Model (LLM) training often optimizes for preference alignment, rewarding outputs that are perceived as helpful and interaction-friendly. However, this preference-oriented objective can be exploited: manipulative prompts can steer responses toward user-appeasing agreement and away from truth-oriented correction. In this work, we investigate whether aligned models are vulnerable to Preference-Undermining Attacks (PUA), a class of manipulative prompting strategies designed to exploit the model's desire to please user preferences at the expense of truthfulness. We propose a diagnostic methodology that provides a finer-grained and more directive analysis than aggregate benchmark scores, using a factorial evaluation framework to decompose prompt-induced shifts into interpretable effects of system objectives (truth- vs. preference-oriented) and PUA-style dialogue factors (directive control, personal derogation, conditional approval, reality denial) within a controlled $2 \times 2^4$ design. Surprisingly, more advanced models are sometimes more susceptible to manipulative prompts. Beyond the dominant reality-denial factor, we observe model-specific sign reversals and interactions with PUA-style factors, suggesting tailored defenses rather than uniform robustness. These findings offer a novel, reproducible factorial evaluation methodology that provides finer-grained diagnostics for post-training processes like RLHF, enabling better trade-offs in the product iteration of LLMs by offering a more nuanced understanding of preference alignment risks and the impact of manipulative prompts. --- ### Detecting LLM-Generated Text with Performance Guarantees Authors: Hongyi Zhou, Jin Zhu, Ying Yang, Chengchun Shi Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG, stat.AP, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06586v1 Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok have been deeply integrated into our daily life. They now support a wide range of tasks -- from dialogue and email drafting to assisting with teaching and coding, serving as search engines, and much more. However, their ability to produce highly human-like text raises serious concerns, including the spread of fake news, the generation of misleading governmental reports, and academic misconduct. To address this practical problem, we train a classifier to determine whether a piece of text is authored by an LLM or a human. Our detector is deployed on an online CPU-based platform https://huggingface.co/spaces/stats-powered-ai/StatDetectLLM, and contains three novelties over existing detectors: (i) it does not rely on auxiliary information, such as watermarks or knowledge of the specific LLM used to generate the text; (ii) it more effectively distinguishes between human- and LLM-authored text; and (iii) it enables statistical inference, which is largely absent in the current literature. Empirically, our classifier achieves higher classification accuracy compared to existing detectors, while maintaining type-I error control, high statistical power, and computational efficiency. --- ### Softly Induced Functional Simplicity: Implications for Neural Network Generalisation, Robustness, and Distillation Authors: Maciej Glowacki Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.LG, hep-ex arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06584v2 Learning robust and generalisable abstractions from high-dimensional input data is a central challenge in machine learning and its applications to high-energy physics (HEP). Solutions of lower functional complexity are known to produce abstractions that generalise more effectively and are more robust to input perturbations. In complex hypothesis spaces, inductive biases make such solutions learnable by shaping the loss geometry during optimisation. In a HEP classification task, we show that a soft symmetry respecting inductive bias creates approximate degeneracies in the loss, which we identify as pseudo-Goldstone modes. We quantify functional complexity using metrics derived from first principles Hessian analysis and via compressibility. Our results demonstrate that solutions of lower complexity give rise to abstractions that are more generalisable, robust, and efficiently distillable. --- ### Stylistic Evolution and LLM Neutrality in Singlish Language Authors: Linus Tze En Foo, Weihan Angela Ng, Wenkai Li, Lynnette Hui Xian Ng Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06580v2 Singlish is a creole rooted in Singapore's multilingual environment that continues to evolve alongside social and technological change. We examine diachronic stylistic change across a decade of informal digital messages and ask whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate temporally neutral outputs approximating the stable essence of the variety. Using lexical, pragmatic, psycholinguistic, and encoder-based features, we find that stylistic separability increases with temporal distance, driven primarily by structural features such as length and complexity. Evaluated against a null distribution baseline, most LLMs fail to achieve both authenticity and temporal neutrality simultaneously, revealing a structural trade-off: models generating realistic Singlish inherit its temporal biases, while temporally neutral models produce inauthentic outputs. These findings position temporal neutrality as a diagnostic metric for assessing sociolectal grounding in LLMs. --- ### Are Emotions Arranged in a Circle? Geometric Analysis of Emotion Representations via Hyperspherical Contrastive Learning Authors: Yusuke Yamauchi, Akiko Aizawa Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06575v2 Psychological research has long utilized circumplex models to structure emotions, placing similar emotions adjacently and opposing ones diagonally. Although frequently used to interpret deep learning representations, these models are rarely directly incorporated into the representation learning of language models, leaving their geometric validity unexplored. This paper proposes a method to induce circular emotion representations within language model embeddings via contrastive learning on a hypersphere. We show that while this circular alignment offers superior interpretability and robustness against dimensionality reduction, it underperforms compared to conventional designs in high-dimensional settings and fine-grained classification. Our findings elucidate the trade-offs involved in applying psychological circumplex models to deep learning architectures. --- ### APEX: Learning Adaptive Priorities for Multi-Objective Alignment in Vision-Language Generation Authors: Dongliang Chen, Xinlin Zhuang, Junjie Xu, Luojian Xie, Zehui Wang, Jiaxi Zhuang, Haolin Yang, Liang Dou, Xiao He, Xingjiao Wu, Ying Qian Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06574v1 Multi-objective alignment for text-to-image generation is commonly implemented via static linear scalarization, but fixed weights often fail under heterogeneous rewards, leading to optimization imbalance where models overfit high-variance, high-responsiveness objectives (e.g., OCR) while under-optimizing perceptual goals. We identify two mechanistic causes: variance hijacking, where reward dispersion induces implicit reweighting that dominates the normalized training signal, and gradient conflicts, where competing objectives produce opposing update directions and trigger seesaw-like oscillations. We propose APEX (Adaptive Priority-based Efficient X-objective Alignment), which stabilizes heterogeneous rewards with Dual-Stage Adaptive Normalization and dynamically schedules objectives via P^3 Adaptive Priorities that combine learning potential, conflict penalty, and progress need. On Stable Diffusion 3.5, APEX achieves improved Pareto trade-offs across four heterogeneous objectives, with balanced gains of +1.31 PickScore, +0.35 DeQA, and +0.53 Aesthetics while maintaining competitive OCR accuracy, mitigating the instability of multi-objective alignment. --- ### QMAVIS: Long Video-Audio Understanding using Fusion of Large Multimodal Models Authors: Zixing Lin, Jiale Wang, Gee Wah Ng, Lee Onn Mak, Chan Zhi Yang Jeriel, Jun Yang Lee, Yaohao Li Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.AI, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06573v1 Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) for video-audio understanding have traditionally been evaluated only on shorter videos of a few minutes long. In this paper, we introduce QMAVIS (Q Team-Multimodal Audio Video Intelligent Sensemaking), a novel long video-audio understanding pipeline built through a late fusion of LMMs, Large Language Models, and speech recognition models. QMAVIS addresses the gap in long-form video analytics, particularly for longer videos of a few minutes to beyond an hour long, opening up new potential applications in sensemaking, video content analysis, embodied AI, etc. Quantitative experiments using QMAVIS demonstrated a 38.75% improvement over state-of-the-art video-audio LMMs like VideoLlaMA2 and InternVL2 on the VideoMME (with subtitles) dataset, which comprises long videos with audio information. Evaluations on other challenging video understanding datasets like PerceptionTest and EgoSchema saw up to 2% improvement, indicating competitive performance. Qualitative experiments also showed that QMAVIS is able to extract the nuances of different scenes in a long video audio content while understanding the overarching narrative. Ablation studies were also conducted to ascertain the impact of each component in the fusion pipeline. --- ### Hellinger Multimodal Variational Autoencoders Authors: Huyen Vo, Isabel Valera Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06572v4 Multimodal variational autoencoders (VAEs) are widely used for weakly supervised generative learning with multiple modalities. Predominant methods aggregate unimodal inference distributions using either a product of experts (PoE), a mixture of experts (MoE), or their combinations to approximate the joint posterior. In this work, we revisit multimodal inference through the lens of probabilistic opinion pooling, an optimization-based approach. We start from Hölder pooling with $α=0.5$, which corresponds to the unique symmetric member of the $α\text{-divergence}$ family, and derive a moment-matching approximation, termed Hellinger. We then leverage such an approximation to propose HELVAE, a multimodal VAE that avoids sub-sampling, yielding an efficient yet effective model that: (i) learns more expressive latent representations as additional modalities are observed; and (ii) empirically achieves better trade-offs between generative coherence and quality, outperforming state-of-the-art multimodal VAE models. --- ### QCaption: Video Captioning and Q&A through Fusion of Large Multimodal Models Authors: Jiale Wang, Gee Wah Ng, Lee Onn Mak, Randall Cher, Ng Ding Hei Ryan, Davis Wang Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06566v1 This paper introduces QCaption, a novel video captioning and Q&A pipeline that enhances video analytics by fusing three models: key frame extraction, a Large Multimodal Model (LMM) for image-text analysis, and a Large Language Model (LLM) for text analysis. This approach enables integrated analysis of text, images, and video, achieving performance improvements over existing video captioning and Q&A models; all while remaining fully self-contained, adept for on-premises deployment. Experimental results using QCaption demonstrated up to 44.2% and 48.9% improvements in video captioning and Q&A tasks, respectively. Ablation studies were also performed to assess the role of LLM on the fusion on the results. Moreover, the paper proposes and evaluates additional video captioning approaches, benchmarking them against QCaption and existing methodologies. QCaption demonstrate the potential of adopting a model fusion approach in advancing video analytics. --- ### EVM-QuestBench: An Execution-Grounded Benchmark for Natural-Language Transaction Code Generation Authors: Pei Yang, Wanyi Chen, Ke Wang, Lynn Ai, Eric Yang, Tianyu Shi Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06565v6 Large language models are increasingly applied to various development scenarios. However, in on-chain transaction scenarios, even a minor error can cause irreversible loss for users. Existing evaluations often overlook execution accuracy and safety. We introduce EVM-QuestBench, an execution-grounded benchmark for natural-language transaction-script generation on EVM-compatible chains. The benchmark employs dynamic evaluation: instructions are sampled from template pools, numeric parameters are drawn from predefined intervals, and validators verify outcomes against these instantiated values. EVM-QuestBench contains 107 tasks (62 atomic, 45 composite). Its modular architecture enables rapid task development. The runner executes scripts on a forked EVM chain with snapshot isolation; composite tasks apply step-efficiency decay. We evaluate 20 models and find large performance gaps, with split scores revealing persistent asymmetry between single-action precision and multi-step workflow completion. Code: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/bsc_quest_bench-A9CF/. --- ### CSR-RAG: An Efficient Retrieval System for Text-to-SQL on the Enterprise Scale Authors: Rajpreet Singh, Novak Boškov, Lawrence Drabeck, Aditya Gudal, Manzoor A. Khan Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06564v1 Natural language to SQL translation (Text-to-SQL) is one of the long-standing problems that has recently benefited from advances in Large Language Models (LLMs). While most academic Text-to-SQL benchmarks request schema description as a part of natural language input, enterprise-scale applications often require table retrieval before SQL query generation. To address this need, we propose a novel hybrid Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system consisting of contextual, structural, and relational retrieval (CSR-RAG) to achieve computationally efficient yet sufficiently accurate retrieval for enterprise-scale databases. Through extensive enterprise benchmarks, we demonstrate that CSR-RAG achieves up to 40% precision and over 80% recall while incurring a negligible average query generation latency of only 30ms on commodity data center hardware, which makes it appropriate for modern LLM-based enterprise-scale systems. --- ### Mosaic: Unlocking Long-Context Inference for Diffusion LLMs via Global Memory Planning and Dynamic Peak Taming Authors: Liang Zheng, Bowen Shi, Yitao Hu, Jiawei Zhang, Ruofan Li, Sheng Chen, Wenxin Li, Keqiu Li Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06562v1 Diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm, utilizing simultaneous denoising to enable global planning and iterative refinement. While these capabilities are particularly advantageous for long-context generation, deploying such models faces a prohibitive memory capacity barrier stemming from severe system inefficiencies. We identify that existing inference systems are ill-suited for this paradigm: unlike autoregressive models constrained by the cumulative KV-cache, dLLMs are bottlenecked by transient activations recomputed at every step. Furthermore, general-purpose memory reuse mechanisms lack the global visibility to adapt to dLLMs' dynamic memory peaks, which toggle between logits and FFNs. To address these mismatches, we propose Mosaic, a memory-efficient inference system that shifts from local, static management to a global, dynamic paradigm. Mosaic integrates a mask-only logits kernel to eliminate redundancy, a lazy chunking optimizer driven by an online heuristic search to adaptively mitigate dynamic peaks, and a global memory manager to resolve fragmentation via virtual addressing. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Mosaic achieves an average 2.71$\times$ reduction in the memory peak-to-average ratio and increases the maximum inference sequence length supportable on identical hardware by 15.89-32.98$\times$. This scalability is achieved without compromising accuracy and speed, and in fact reducing latency by 4.12%-23.26%. --- ### ArrowGEV: Grounding Events in Video via Learning the Arrow of Time Authors: Fangxu Yu, Ziyao Lu, Liqiang Niu, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06559v2 Grounding events in videos serves as a fundamental capability in video analysis. While Vision Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly employed for this task, existing approaches predominantly train models to associate events with timestamps in the forward video only. This paradigm hinders VLMs from capturing the inherent temporal structure and directionality of events, thereby limiting robustness and generalization. To address this limitation, inspired by the arrow of time in physics, which characterizes the intrinsic directionality of temporal processes, we propose ArrowGEV, a reinforcement learning framework that explicitly models temporal directionality in events to improve both event grounding and temporal directionality understanding in VLMs. Specifically, we categorize events into time-sensitive (e.g., putting down a bag) and time-insensitive (e.g., holding a towel in the left hand). The former denote events whose reversal substantially alters their meaning, while the latter remain semantically unchanged under reversal. For time-sensitive events, ArrowGEV introduces a reward that encourages VLMs to discriminate between forward and backward videos, whereas for time-insensitive events, it enforces consistent grounding across both directions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ArrowGEV not only improves grounding precision and temporal directionality recognition, but also enhances general video understanding and reasoning ability. --- ### Robust Sparse Signal Recovery with Outliers: A Hard Thresholding Pursuit Approach Based on LAD Authors: Jiao Xu, Peng Li, Bing Zheng Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.IT, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06558v2 Recovering a sparse signal from outlier-contaminated measurements is a fundamental challenge in many applications. While existing algorithms predominantly address scenarios with bounded noise or assume known signal sparsity, few methods tackle the more practical problem of sparse recovery from gross outliers without prior knowledge of sparsity. To bridge this gap, we study the sparsity-constrained Least Absolute Deviations (LAD) minimization problem. This paper proposes the Graded Fast Hard Thresholding Pursuit (GFHTP$_1$) algorithm with a quantile-truncated step size for $\ell_1$-loss minimization. In contrast to most state-of-the-art methods, our GFHTP$_1$ requires no prior knowledge of the signal's sparsity level. We establish a theoretical convergence analysis under mild conditions and further prove that an $s$-sparse signal can be recovered exactly within at most $s$ iterations. To our knowledge, these results provide the first efficient recovery guarantees for sparse signal reconstruction from outlier-corrupted measurements without a sparsity prior. Numerical experiments demonstrate that GFHTP$_1$ consistently outperforms competing algorithms in robustness to varying signal sparsity and outlier support size, while also achieving less computational time. --- ### L-RAG: Balancing Context and Retrieval with Entropy-Based Lazy Loading Authors: Sergii Voloshyn Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06551v1 Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as the predominant paradigm for grounding Large Language Model outputs in factual knowledge, effectively mitigating hallucinations. However, conventional RAG systems operate under a "retrieve-always" assumption, querying vector databases for every input regardless of query complexity. This static approach incurs substantial computational overhead and inference latency, particularly problematic for high-throughput production deployments. We introduce L-RAG (Lazy Retrieval-Augmented Generation), an adaptive framework that implements hierarchical context management through entropy-based gating. L-RAG employs a two-tier architecture: queries are first processed with a compact document summary, and expensive chunk retrieval is triggered only when the model's predictive entropy exceeds a calibrated threshold, signaling genuine uncertainty. Through experiments on SQuAD 2.0 (N=500) using the Phi-2 model, we demonstrate that L-RAG provides a tunable accuracy-efficiency trade-off: at a conservative threshold (tau=0.5), L-RAG achieves 78.2% accuracy, matching Standard RAG (77.8%), with 8% retrieval reduction; at a balanced threshold (tau=1.0), retrieval reduction increases to 26% with modest accuracy trade-off (76.0%). Latency analysis shows that L-RAG saves 80-210ms per query when retrieval latency exceeds 500ms. Analysis of entropy distributions reveals statistically significant separation (p < 0.001) between correct predictions (H=1.72) and errors (H=2.20), validating entropy as a reliable uncertainty signal. L-RAG offers a practical, training-free approach toward more efficient RAG deployment, providing system architects with a configurable knob to balance accuracy and throughput requirements. --- ### Generative Semantic Multi-Object Tracking: A Large-Scale Benchmark and an MLLM-Driven Reasoning Framework Authors: Pan Liao, Feng Yang, Di Wu, Jinwen Yu, Wang Zhao, Dingwen Zhang Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06550v4 Semantic Multi-Object Tracking (SMOT) is evolving from purely geometric localization toward comprehensive video understanding. However, existing paradigms predominantly rely on closed-set interaction tags and fragmented perception pipelines, creating a bottleneck that prevents the full utilization of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for dynamic scenes. In this paper, we elevate SMOT from rigid classification to an open-ended generative reasoning task. To support this paradigm shift, we introduce Grand-SMOT, a large-scale benchmark featuring high-density, dual-stream narratives. This dataset explicitly decouples micro-level individual dynamics from macro-level environmental contexts, directly resolving the semantic scarcity of prior tracking datasets. Furthermore, we propose LLMTrack, a unified MLLM-driven framework for dynamic SMOT. Guided by a verifiable ``\textit{Macro-Understanding-First}'' mechanism, LLMTrack employs a Spatio-Temporal Fusion Module to compress discrete geometric trajectories into continuous semantic tokens, effectively suppressing temporal hallucinations in long-sequence tracking. Extensive experiments, utilizing a novel decoupled evaluation protocol, validate that LLMTrack achieves state-of-the-art geometric tracking robustness while delivering a qualitative leap in generative semantic reasoning. The code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/liaopan-lp/LLMTrack-GrandSMOT. --- ### Mechanism-Faithful Queueing Simulation Model Translation with Large Language Model Support Authors: Jun-Qi Chen, Kun Zhang, Rui Zheng, Ying Zhong Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06543v2 Queueing simulation studies often require substantial manual effort to translate conceptual system descriptions into executable programs and to verify that the implemented mechanisms match the intended queueing logic. Although large language models (LLMs) may produce executable scripts, executability alone is insufficient when arrival, routing, interruption, or reporting logic is wrong. This study presents a simulation-oriented support framework for \texttt{SimPy}-based queueing model translation. We propose a category-template framework for mechanism coverage with a staged adaptation workflow that targets structured event logic and common simulation-specific failure modes. On held-out task instances, the adapted models improve executability, output-format compliance, and instruction-mechanism consistency across basic, behavioral, and networked queueing settings, so the generated scripts are more reliable as queueing simulation scripts. Error analysis shows better preservation of routing semantics and interruption-resume logic, while also exposing remaining weaknesses in multi-node transfer and residual-service updates. Overall, the results suggest that the proposed framework can act as a simulation-faithful generator for more standardized and reproducible queueing model construction. --- ### Resource-constrained Project Scheduling with Time-of-Use Energy Tariffs and Machine States: A Logic-based Benders Decomposition Approach Authors: Corentin Juvigny, Antonín Novák, Jan Mandík, Zdeněk Hanzálek Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: math.OC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06542v2 In this paper, we investigate the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP) with Time-of-Use (TOU) energy tariffs and machine states, a variant of RCPSP for production scheduling, where energy price is part of the criteria and one highly energy-demanding machine can be in one of the following three states: proc, idle, or off. The problem involves scheduling all tasks, respecting precedence constraints and resource limitations, while minimizing the combination of the overall makespan and the Total Energy Cost (TEC), which varies according to the TOU tariffs, which can take negative values. We propose two novel approaches to solve it: a monolithic Constraint Programming (CP) approach and a Logic-Based Benders Decomposition (LBBD) approach. The latter combines a master problem handling the energy cost solved using Integer Linear Programming (ILP) with a subproblem handling the RCPSP, resolved using CP. Both approaches outperform the monolithic compact ILP counterpart, but the LBBD significantly outperforms the monolithic CP in most cases, especially when the makespan criterion is not included in the objective function, solving to optimality instances with up to 480 tasks. Finally, we propose a way to generalize our LBBD approach to other problems sharing similar characteristics, and applied it to various problems, such as an RCPSP with blocking times & total weighted tardiness criterion, or a flexible job shop. --- ### Self-Organizing Dual-Buffer Adaptive Clustering Experience Replay (SODACER) for Safe Reinforcement Learning in Optimal Control Authors: Roya Khalili Amirabadi, Mohsen Jalaeian Farimani, Omid Solaymani Fard Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: eess.SY, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.RO, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06540v2 This paper proposes a novel reinforcement learning framework, named Self-Organizing Dual-buffer Adaptive Clustering Experience Replay (SODACER), designed to achieve safe and scalable optimal control of nonlinear systems. The proposed SODACER mechanism consisting of a Fast-Buffer for rapid adaptation to recent experiences and a Slow-Buffer equipped with a self-organizing adaptive clustering mechanism to maintain diverse and non-redundant historical experiences. The adaptive clustering mechanism dynamically prunes redundant samples, optimizing memory efficiency while retaining critical environmental patterns. The approach integrates SODACER with Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to guarantee safety by enforcing state and input constraints throughout the learning process. To enhance convergence and stability, the framework is combined with the Sophia optimizer, enabling adaptive second-order gradient updates. The proposed SODACER-Sophia's architecture ensures reliable, effective, and robust learning in dynamic, safety-critical environments, offering a generalizable solution for applications in robotics, healthcare, and large-scale system optimization. The proposed approach is validated on a nonlinear Human Papillomavirus (HPV) transmission model with multiple control inputs and safety constraints. Comparative evaluations against random and clustering-based experience replay methods demonstrate that SODACER achieves faster convergence, improved sample efficiency, and a superior bias-variance trade-off, while maintaining safe system trajectories, validated via the Friedman test. --- ### Towards Egocentric 3D Hand Pose Estimation in Unseen Domains Authors: Wiktor Mucha, Michael Wray, Martin Kampel Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06537v1 We present V-HPOT, a novel approach for improving the cross-domain performance of 3D hand pose estimation from egocentric images across diverse, unseen domains. State-of-the-art methods demonstrate strong performance when trained and tested within the same domain. However, they struggle to generalise to new environments due to limited training data and depth perception -- overfitting to specific camera intrinsics. Our method addresses this by estimating keypoint z-coordinates in a virtual camera space, normalised by focal length and image size, enabling camera-agnostic depth prediction. We further leverage this invariance to camera intrinsics to propose a self-supervised test-time optimisation strategy that refines the model's depth perception during inference. This is achieved by applying a 3D consistency loss between predicted and in-space scale-transformed hand poses, allowing the model to adapt to target domain characteristics without requiring ground truth annotations. V-HPOT significantly improves 3D hand pose estimation performance in cross-domain scenarios, achieving a 71% reduction in mean pose error on the H2O dataset and a 41% reduction on the AssemblyHands dataset. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, V-HPOT outperforms all single-stage approaches across all datasets and competes closely with two-stage methods, despite needing approximately x3.5 to x14 less data. --- ### Exposía: Teaching and Assessment of Academic Writing Skills for Research Project Proposals and Peer Feedback Authors: Dennis Zyska, Alla Rozovskaya, Ilia Kuznetsov, Iryna Gurevych Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06536v3 We present Exposía, the first public dataset that connects writing and feedback in higher education, enabling research on educationally grounded computational approaches to teaching and evaluating academic writing. Exposía includes student research project proposals and peer and instructor feedback consisting of comments and free-text reviews. The dataset was collected in the "Introduction to Scientific Work" course of the Computer Science. Exposía reflects the multi-stage nature of the academic writing process that includes drafting, receiving feedback, and revising the writing based on the feedback received. Both the project proposals and peer feedback are accompanied by human assessment scores based on a fine-grained, pedagogically-grounded schema for writing and feedback assessment that we develop. We use Exposía to benchmark state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) on two tasks: automated scoring of (1) the proposals and (2) the student reviews. We find that the two tasks are best served by different LLMs. Furthermore, closed-source models consistently outperform open-weight models, motivating further research on improving the performance of open-weight models preferred in classroom settings. Finally, we establish that a prompting strategy that scores multiple aspects of the writing together is the most effective, paving the way for more effective classroom deployment of modern LLMs. --- ### Short-term electricity load forecasting with multi-frequency reconstruction diffusion Authors: Qi Dong, Rubing Huang, Ling Zhou, Dave Towey, Jinyu Tian, Jianzhou Wang Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06533v1 Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful method in various applications. However, their application to Short-Term Electricity Load Forecasting (STELF) -- a typical scenario in energy systems -- remains largely unexplored. Considering the nonlinear and fluctuating characteristics of the load data, effectively utilizing the powerful modeling capabilities of diffusion models to enhance STELF accuracy remains a challenge. This paper proposes a novel diffusion model with multi-frequency reconstruction for STELF, referred to as the Multi-Frequency-Reconstruction-based Diffusion (MFRD) model. The MFRD model achieves accurate load forecasting through four key steps: (1) The original data is combined with the decomposed multi-frequency modes to form a new data representation; (2) The diffusion model adds noise to the new data, effectively reducing and weakening the noise in the original data; (3) The reverse process adopts a denoising network that combines Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Transformer to enhance noise removal; and (4) The inference process generates the final predictions based on the trained denoising network. To validate the effectiveness of the MFRD model, we conducted experiments on two data platforms: Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) and Independent System Operator of New England (ISO-NE). The experimental results show that our model consistently outperforms the compared models. --- ### Improving Day-Ahead Grid Carbon Intensity Forecasting by Joint Modeling of Local-Temporal and Cross-Variable Dependencies Across Different Frequencies Authors: Bowen Zhang, Hongda Tian, Adam Berry, A. Craig Roussac Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06530v1 Accurate forecasting of the grid carbon intensity factor (CIF) is critical for enabling demand-side management and reducing emissions in modern electricity systems. Leveraging multiple interrelated time series, CIF prediction is typically formulated as a multivariate time series forecasting problem. Despite advances in deep learning-based methods, it remains challenging to capture the fine-grained local-temporal dependencies, dynamic higher-order cross-variable dependencies, and complex multi-frequency patterns for CIF forecasting. To address these issues, we propose a novel model that integrates two parallel modules: 1) one enhances the extraction of local-temporal dependencies under multi-frequency by applying multiple wavelet-based convolutional kernels to overlapping patches of varying lengths; 2) the other captures dynamic cross-variable dependencies under multi-frequency to model how inter-variable relationships evolve across the time-frequency domain. Evaluations on four representative electricity markets from Australia, featuring varying levels of renewable penetration, demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art models. An ablation study further validates the complementary benefits of the two proposed modules. Designed with built-in interpretability, the proposed model also enables better understanding of its predictive behavior, as shown in a case study where it adaptively shifts attention to relevant variables and time intervals during a disruptive event. --- ### Atomic-SNLI: Fine-Grained Natural Language Inference through Atomic Fact Decomposition Authors: Minghui Huang Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06528v1 Current Natural Language Inference (NLI) systems primarily operate at the sentence level, providing black-box decisions that lack explanatory power. While atomic-level NLI offers a promising alternative by decomposing hypotheses into individual facts, we demonstrate that the conventional assumption that a hypothesis is entailed only when all its atomic facts are entailed fails in practice due to models' poor performance on fine-grained reasoning. Our analysis reveals that existing models perform substantially worse on atomic level inference compared to sentence level tasks. To address this limitation, we introduce Atomic-SNLI, a novel dataset constructed by decomposing SNLI and enriching it with carefully curated atomic level examples through linguistically informed generation strategies. Experimental results demonstrate that models fine-tuned on Atomic-SNLI achieve significant improvements in atomic reasoning capabilities while maintaining strong sentence level performance, enabling both accurate judgements and transparent, explainable results at the fact level. --- ### Toward Generalizable Deblurring: Leveraging Massive Blur Priors with Linear Attention for Real-World Scenarios Authors: Yuanting Gao, Shuo Cao, Xiaohui Li, Yuandong Pu, Yihao Liu, Kai Zhang Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06525v1 Image deblurring has advanced rapidly with deep learning, yet most methods exhibit poor generalization beyond their training datasets, with performance dropping significantly in real-world scenarios. Our analysis shows this limitation stems from two factors: datasets face an inherent trade-off between realism and coverage of diverse blur patterns, and algorithmic designs remain restrictive, as pixel-wise losses drive models toward local detail recovery while overlooking structural and semantic consistency, whereas diffusion-based approaches, though perceptually strong, still fail to generalize when trained on narrow datasets with simplistic strategies. Through systematic investigation, we identify blur pattern diversity as the decisive factor for robust generalization and propose Blur Pattern Pretraining (BPP), which acquires blur priors from simulation datasets and transfers them through joint fine-tuning on real data. We further introduce Motion and Semantic Guidance (MoSeG) to strengthen blur priors under severe degradation, and integrate it into GLOWDeblur, a Generalizable reaL-wOrld lightWeight Deblur model that combines convolution-based pre-reconstruction & domain alignment module with a lightweight diffusion backbone. Extensive experiments on six widely-used benchmarks and two real-world datasets validate our approach, confirming the importance of blur priors for robust generalization and demonstrating that the lightweight design of GLOWDeblur ensures practicality in real-world applications. The project page is available at https://vegdog007.github.io/GLOWDeblur_Website/. --- ### BabyVision: Visual Reasoning Beyond Language Authors: Liang Chen, Weichu Xie, Yiyan Liang, Hongfeng He, Hans Zhao, Zhibo Yang, Zhiqi Huang, Haoning Wu, Haoyu Lu, Y. charles, Yiping Bao, Yuantao Fan et al. Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06521v2 While humans develop core visual skills long before acquiring language, contemporary Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) still rely heavily on linguistic priors to compensate for their fragile visual understanding. We uncovered a crucial fact: state-of-the-art MLLMs consistently fail on basic visual tasks that humans, even 3-year-olds, can solve effortlessly. To systematically investigate this gap, we introduce BabyVision, a benchmark designed to assess core visual abilities independent of linguistic knowledge for MLLMs. BabyVision spans a wide range of tasks, with 388 items divided into 22 subclasses across four key categories. Empirical results and human evaluation reveal that leading MLLMs perform significantly below human baselines. Gemini3-Pro-Preview scores 49.7, lagging behind 6-year-old humans and falling well behind the average adult score of 94.1. These results show despite excelling in knowledge-heavy evaluations, current MLLMs still lack fundamental visual primitives. Progress in BabyVision represents a step toward human-level visual perception and reasoning capabilities. We also explore solving visual reasoning with generation models by proposing BabyVision-Gen and automatic evaluation toolkit. Our code and benchmark data are released at https://github.com/UniPat-AI/BabyVision for reproduction. --- ### MedRAGChecker: Claim-Level Verification for Biomedical Retrieval-Augmented Generation Authors: Yuelyu Ji, Min Gu Kwak, Hang Zhang, Xizhi Wu, Chenyu Li, Yanshan Wang Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06519v2 Biomedical retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can ground LLM answers in medical literature, yet long-form outputs often contain isolated unsupported or contradictory claims with safety implications. We introduce MedRAGChecker, a claim-level verification and diagnostic framework for biomedical RAG. Given a question, retrieved evidence, and a generated answer, MedRAGChecker decomposes the answer into atomic claims and estimates claim support by combining evidence-grounded natural language inference (NLI) with biomedical knowledge-graph (KG) consistency signals. Aggregating claim decisions yields answer-level diagnostics that help disentangle retrieval and generation failures, including faithfulness, under-evidence, contradiction, and safety-critical error rates. To enable scalable evaluation, we distill the pipeline into compact biomedical models and use an ensemble verifier with class-specific reliability weighting. Experiments on four biomedical QA benchmarks show that MedRAGChecker reliably flags unsupported and contradicted claims and reveals distinct risk profiles across generators, particularly on safety-critical biomedical relations. --- ### Bridging Robustness and Efficiency: Real-Time Low-Light Enhancement via Attention U-Net GAN Authors: Yash Thesia, Meera Suthar Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06518v1 Recent advancements in Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) have focused heavily on Diffusion Probabilistic Models, which achieve high perceptual quality but suffer from significant computational latency (often exceeding 2-4 seconds per image). Conversely, traditional CNN-based baselines offer real-time inference but struggle with "over-smoothing," failing to recover fine structural details in extreme low-light conditions. This creates a practical gap in the literature: the lack of a model that provides generative-level texture recovery at edge-deployable speeds. In this paper, we address this trade-off by proposing a hybrid Attention U-Net GAN. We demonstrate that the heavy iterative sampling of diffusion models is not strictly necessary for texture recovery. Instead, by integrating Attention Gates into a lightweight U-Net backbone and training within a conditional adversarial framework, we can approximate the high-frequency fidelity of generative models in a single forward pass. Extensive experiments on the SID dataset show that our method achieves a best-in-class LPIPS score of 0.112 among efficient models, significantly outperforming efficient baselines (SID, EnlightenGAN) while maintaining an inference latency of 0.06s. This represents a 40x speedup over latent diffusion models, making our approach suitable for near real-time applications. --- ### Pareto-Optimal Model Selection for Low-Cost, Single-Lead EMG Control in Embedded Systems Authors: Carl Vincent Ladres Kho Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.HC, cs.LG, eess.SP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06516v1 Consumer-grade biosensors offer a cost-effective alternative to medical-grade electromyography (EMG) systems, reducing hardware costs from thousands of dollars to approximately $13. However, these low-cost sensors introduce significant signal instability and motion artifacts. Deploying machine learning models on resource-constrained edge devices like the ESP32 presents a challenge: balancing classification accuracy with strict latency (<100ms) and memory (<320KB) constraints. Using a single-subject dataset comprising 1,540 seconds of raw data (1.54M data points, segmented into ~1,300 one-second windows), I evaluate 18 model architectures, ranging from statistical heuristics to deep transfer learning (ResNet50) and custom hybrid networks (MaxCRNN). While my custom "MaxCRNN" (Inception + Bi-LSTM + Attention) achieved the highest safety (99% Precision) and robustness, I identify Random Forest (74% accuracy) as the Pareto-optimal solution for embedded control on legacy microcontrollers. I demonstrate that reliable, low-latency EMG control is feasible on commodity hardware, with Deep Learning offering a path to near-perfect reliability on modern Edge AI accelerators. --- ### Inference-Time Alignment for Diffusion Models via Variationally Stable Doob's Matching Authors: Jinyuan Chang, Chenguang Duan, Yuling Jiao, Yi Xu, Jerry Zhijian Yang Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, math.NA, math.OC, math.ST arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06514v2 Inference-time alignment for diffusion models aims to adapt a pre-trained reference diffusion model toward a target distribution without retraining the reference score network, thereby preserving the generative capacity of the reference model while enforcing desired properties at the inference time. A central mechanism for achieving such alignment is guidance, which modifies the sampling dynamics through an additional drift term. In this work, we introduce variationally stable Doob's matching, a novel framework for provable guidance estimation grounded in Doob's $h$-transform. Our approach formulates guidance as the gradient of logarithm of an underlying Doob's $h$-function and employs gradient-regularized regression to simultaneously estimate both the $h$-function and its gradient, resulting in a consistent estimator of the guidance. Theoretically, we establish non-asymptotic convergence rates for the estimated guidance. Moreover, we analyze the resulting controllable diffusion processes and prove non-asymptotic convergence guarantees for the generated distributions in the 2-Wasserstein distance. Finally, we show that variationally stable guidance estimators are adaptive to unknown low dimensionality, effectively mitigating the curse of dimensionality under low-dimensional subspace assumptions. --- ### A novel RF-enabled Non-Destructive Inspection Method through Machine Learning and Programmable Wireless Environments Authors: Stavros Tsimpoukis, Dimitrios Tyrovolas, Sotiris Ioannidis, Maria Kafesaki, Ian F. Akyildiz, George K. Karagiannidis, Christos K. Liaskos Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.LG, cs.ET arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06512v1 Contemporary industrial Non-Destructive Inspection (NDI) methods require sensing capabilities that operate in occluded, hazardous, or access restricted environments. Yet, the current visual inspection based on optical cameras offers limited quality of service to that respect. In that sense, novel methods for workpiece inspection, suitable, for smart manufacturing are needed. Programmable Wireless Environments (PWE) could help towards that direction, by redefining the wireless Radio Frequency (RF) wave propagation as a controllable inspector entity. In this work, we propose a novel approach to Non-Destructive Inspection, leveraging an RF sensing pipeline based on RF wavefront encoding for retrieving workpiece-image entries from a designated database. This approach combines PWE-enabled RF wave manipulation with machine learning (ML) tools trained to produce visual outputs for quality inspection. Specifically, we establish correlation relationships between RF wavefronts and target industrial assets, hence yielding a dataset which links wavefronts to their corresponding images in a structured manner. Subsequently, a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) derives visual representations closely matching the database entries. Our results indicate that the proposed method achieves an SSIM 99.5% matching score in visual outputs, paving the way for next-generation quality control workflows in industry. --- ### Precision Meets Art: Autonomous Multi-UAV System for Large Scale Mural Drawing Authors: Andrei A. Korigodskii, Artem E. Vasiunik, Georgii A. Varin, Adilia M. Zukhurova, Matvei V. Urvantsev, Semen A. Osipenkov, Igor S. Efremov, Georgii E. Bondar Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06508v1 The integration of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into large-scale artistic projects has emerged as a new application in robotics. This paper presents the design, deployment, and testing of a novel multi-drone system for automated mural painting in outdoor settings. This technology makes use of new software that coordinates multiple drones simultaneously, utilizing state-machine algorithms for task execution. Key advancements are the complex positioning system that combines 2D localization using a single motion tracking camera with onboard LiDAR for precise positioning, and a novel flight control algorithm, which works differently along the trajectory and normally to it, ensuring smoothness and high precision of the drawings at the same time. A 100 square meters mural was created using the developed multi-drone system, validating the system's efficacy. Compared to single-drone approaches, our multi-UAV solution significantly improves scalability and operational speed while maintaining high stability even in harsh weather conditions. The findings highlight the potential of autonomous robotic swarms in creative applications, paving the way for further advancements in large-scale robotic art. --- ### Neural Nonmyopic Bayesian Optimization in Dynamic Cost Settings Authors: Sang T. Truong, Duc Q. Nguyen, Willie Neiswanger, Ryan-Rhys Griffiths, Stefano Ermon, Nick Haber, Sanmi Koyejo Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06505v1 Bayesian optimization (BO) is a common framework for optimizing black-box functions, yet most existing methods assume static query costs and rely on myopic acquisition strategies. We introduce LookaHES, a nonmyopic BO framework designed for dynamic, history-dependent cost environments, where evaluation costs vary with prior actions, such as travel distance in spatial tasks or edit distance in sequence design. LookaHES combines a multi-step variant of $H$-Entropy Search with pathwise sampling and neural policy optimization, enabling long-horizon planning beyond twenty steps without the exponential complexity of existing nonmyopic methods. The key innovation is the integration of neural policies, including large language models, to effectively navigate structured, combinatorial action spaces such as protein sequences. These policies amortize lookahead planning and can be integrated with domain-specific constraints during rollout. Empirically, LookaHES outperforms strong myopic and nonmyopic baselines across nine synthetic benchmarks from two to eight dimensions and two real-world tasks: geospatial optimization using NASA night-light imagery and protein sequence design with constrained token-level edits. In short, LookaHES provides a general, scalable, and cost-aware solution for robust long-horizon optimization in complex decision spaces, which makes it a useful tool for researchers in machine learning, statistics, and applied domains. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/sangttruong/nonmyopia. --- ### DRAGON: LLM-Driven Decomposition and Reconstruction Agents for Large-Scale Combinatorial Optimization Authors: Shengkai Chen, Zhiguang Cao, Jianan Zhou, Yaoxin Wu, Senthilnath Jayavelu, Zhuoyi Lin, Xiaoli Li, Shili Xiang Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06502v2 Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown promise in addressing combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) through prompt-based strategies. However, their scalability and generalization remain limited, and their effectiveness diminishes as problem size increases, particularly in routing problems involving more than 30 nodes. We propose DRAGON, which stands for Decomposition and Reconstruction Agents Guided OptimizatioN, a novel framework that combines the strengths of metaheuristic design and LLM reasoning. Starting from an initial global solution, DRAGON autonomously identifies regions with high optimization potential and strategically decompose large-scale COPs into manageable subproblems. Each subproblem is then reformulated as a concise, localized optimization task and solved through targeted LLM prompting guided by accumulated experiences. Finally, the locally optimized solutions are systematically reintegrated into the original global context to yield a significantly improved overall outcome. By continuously interacting with the optimization environment and leveraging an adaptive experience memory, the agents iteratively learn from feedback, effectively coupling symbolic reasoning with heuristic search. Empirical results show that, unlike existing LLM-based solvers limited to small-scale instances, DRAGON consistently produces feasible solutions on TSPLIB, CVRPLIB, and Weibull-5k bin packing benchmarks, and achieves near-optimal results (0.16% gap) on knapsack problems with over 3M variables. This work shows the potential of feedback-driven language agents as a new paradigm for generalizable and interpretable large-scale optimization. --- ### The AI Pyramid A Conceptual Framework for Workforce Capability in the Age of AI Authors: Alok Khatri, Bishesh Khanal Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06500v2 Artificial intelligence (AI) represents a qualitative shift in technological change by extending cognitive labor itself rather than merely automating routine tasks. Recent evidence shows that generative AI disproportionately affects highly educated, white collar work, challenging existing assumptions about workforce vulnerability and rendering traditional approaches to digital or AI literacy insufficient. This paper introduces the concept of AI Nativity, the capacity to integrate AI fluidly into everyday reasoning, problem solving, and decision making, and proposes the AI Pyramid, a conceptual framework for organizing human capability in an AI mediated economy. The framework distinguishes three interdependent capability layers: AI Native capability as a universal baseline for participation in AI augmented environments; AI Foundation capability for building, integrating, and sustaining AI enabled systems; and AI Deep capability for advancing frontier AI knowledge and applications. Crucially, the pyramid is not a career ladder but a system level distribution of capabilities required at scale. Building on this structure, the paper argues that effective AI workforce development requires treating capability formation as infrastructure rather than episodic training, centered on problem based learning embedded in work contexts and supported by dynamic skill ontologies and competency based measurement. The framework has implications for organizations, education systems, and governments seeking to align learning, measurement, and policy with the evolving demands of AI mediated work, while addressing productivity, resilience, and inequality at societal scale. --- ### Spec-o3: A Tool-Augmented Vision-Language Agent for Rare Celestial Object Candidate Vetting via Automated Spectral Inspection Authors: Minghui Jia, Qichao Zhang, Ali Luo, Linjing Li, Shuo Ye, Hailing Lu, Wen Hou, Dongbin Zhao Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.CL, astro-ph.IM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06498v3 Due to the limited generalization and interpretability of deep learning classifiers, The final vetting of rare celestial object candidates still relies on expert visual inspection--a manually intensive process. In this process, astronomers leverage specialized tools to analyze spectra and construct reliable catalogs. However, this practice has become the primary bottleneck, as it is fundamentally incapable of scaling with the data deluge from modern spectroscopic surveys. To bridge this gap, we propose Spec-o3, a tool-augmented vision-language agent that performs astronomer-aligned spectral inspection via interleaved multimodal chain-of-thought reasoning. Spec-o3 is trained with a two-stage post-training recipe: cold-start supervised fine-tuning on expert inspection trajectories followed by outcome-based reinforcement learning on rare-type verification tasks. Evaluated on five rare-object identification tasks from LAMOST, Spec-o3 establishes a new State-of-the-Art, boosting the macro-F1 score from 28.3 to 76.5 with a 7B parameter base model and outperforming both proprietary VLMs and specialized deep models. Crucially, the agent demonstrates strong generalization to unseen inspection tasks across survey shifts (from LAMOST to SDSS/DESI). Expert evaluations confirm that its reasoning traces are coherent and physically consistent, supporting transparent and trustworthy decision-making. Code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/Maxwell-Jia/spec-o3. --- ### Coding in a Bubble? Evaluating LLMs in Resolving Context Adaptation Bugs During Code Adaptation Authors: Tanghaoran Zhang, Xinjun Mao, Shangwen Wang, Yuxin Zhao, Yao Lu, Zezhou Tang, Wenyu Xu, Longfei Sun, Changrong Xie, Kang Yang, Yue Yu Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06497v1 Code adaptation is a fundamental but challenging task in software development, requiring developers to modify existing code for new contexts. A key challenge is to resolve Context Adaptation Bugs (CtxBugs), which occurs when code correct in its original context violates constraints in the target environment. Unlike isolated bugs, CtxBugs cannot be resolved through local fixes and require cross-context reasoning to identify semantic mismatches. Overlooking them may lead to critical failures in adaptation. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) show great potential in automating code-related tasks, their ability to resolve CtxBugs remains a significant and unexplored obstacle to their practical use in code adaptation. To bridge this gap, we propose CtxBugGen, a novel framework for generating CtxBugs to evaluate LLMs. Its core idea is to leverage LLMs' tendency to generate plausible but context-free code when contextual constraints are absent. The framework generates CtxBugs through a four-step process to ensure their relevance and validity: (1) Adaptation Task Selection, (2) Task-specific Perturbation,(3) LLM-based Variant Generation and (4) CtxBugs Identification. Based on the benchmark constructed by CtxBugGen, we conduct an empirical study with four state-of-the-art LLMs. Our results reveal their unsatisfactory performance in CtxBug resolution. The best performing LLM, Kimi-K2, achieves 55.93% on Pass@1 and resolves just 52.47% of CtxBugs. The presence of CtxBugs degrades LLMs' adaptation performance by up to 30%. Failure analysis indicates that LLMs often overlook CtxBugs and replicate them in their outputs. Our study highlights a critical weakness in LLMs' cross-context reasoning and emphasize the need for new methods to enhance their context awareness for reliable code adaptation. --- ### 3D CoCa v2: Contrastive Learners with Test-Time Search for Generalizable Spatial Intelligence Authors: Hao Tang, Ting Huang, Zeyu Zhang Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06496v1 Spatial intelligence refers to the ability to perceive, reason about, and describe objects and their relationships within three-dimensional environments, forming a foundation for embodied perception and scene understanding. 3D captioning aims to describe 3D scenes in natural language; however, it remains challenging due to the sparsity and irregularity of point clouds and, more critically, the weak grounding and limited out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization of existing captioners across drastically different environments, including indoor and outdoor 3D scenes. To address this challenge, we propose 3D CoCa v2, a generalizable 3D captioning framework that unifies contrastive vision-language learning with 3D caption generation and further improves robustness via test-time search (TTS) without updating the captioner parameters. 3D CoCa v2 builds on a frozen CLIP-based semantic prior, a spatially-aware 3D scene encoder for geometry, and a multimodal decoder jointly optimized with contrastive and captioning objectives, avoiding external detectors or handcrafted proposals. At inference, TTS produces diverse caption candidates and performs reward-guided selection using a compact scene summary. Experiments show improvements over 3D CoCa of +1.50 CIDEr@0.5IoU on ScanRefer and +1.61 CIDEr@0.5IoU on Nr3D, and +3.8 CIDEr@0.25 in zero-shot OOD evaluation on TOD3Cap. Code will be released at https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/3DCoCav2. --- ### ArenaRL: Scaling RL for Open-Ended Agents via Tournament-based Relative Ranking Authors: Qiang Zhang, Boli Chen, Fanrui Zhang, Ruixue Ding, Shihang Wang, Qiuchen Wang, Yinfeng Huang, Haonan Zhang, Rongxiang Zhu, Pengyong Wang, Ailin Ren, Xin Li et al. Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06487v3 Reinforcement learning has substantially improved the performance of LLM agents on tasks with verifiable outcomes, but it still struggles on open-ended agent tasks with vast solution spaces (e.g., complex travel planning). Due to the absence of objective ground-truth for these tasks, current RL algorithms largely rely on reward models that assign scalar scores to individual responses. We contend that such pointwise scoring suffers from an inherent discrimination collapse: the reward model struggles to distinguish subtle advantages among different trajectories, resulting in scores within a group being compressed into a narrow range. Consequently, the effective reward signal becomes dominated by noise from the reward model, leading to optimization stagnation. To address this, we propose ArenaRL, a reinforcement learning paradigm that shifts from pointwise scalar scoring to intra-group relative ranking. ArenaRL introduces a process-aware pairwise evaluation mechanism, employing multi-level rubrics to assign fine-grained relative scores to trajectories. Additionally, we construct an intra-group adversarial arena and devise a tournament-based ranking scheme to obtain stable advantage signals. Empirical results confirm that the built seeded single-elimination scheme achieves nearly equivalent advantage estimation accuracy to full pairwise comparisons with O(N^2) complexity, while operating with only O(N) complexity, striking an optimal balance between efficiency and precision. Furthermore, to address the lack of full-cycle benchmarks for open-ended agents, we build Open-Travel and Open-DeepResearch, two high-quality benchmarks featuring a comprehensive pipeline covering SFT, RL training, and multi-dimensional evaluation. Extensive experiments show that ArenaRL substantially outperforms standard RL baselines, enabling LLM agents to generate more robust solutions for complex real-world tasks. --- ### Learning Domain Agnostic Latent Embeddings of 3D Faces for Zero-shot Animal Expression Transfer Authors: Yue Wang, Lawrence Amadi, Xiang Gao, Yazheng Chen, Yuanpeng Liu, Ning Lu, Xianfeng Gu Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06484v1 We present a zero-shot framework for transferring human facial expressions to 3D animal face meshes. Our method combines intrinsic geometric descriptors (HKS/WKS) with a mesh-agnostic latent embedding that disentangles facial identity and expression. The ID latent space captures species-independent facial structure, while the expression latent space encodes deformation patterns that generalize across humans and animals. Trained only with human expression pairs, the model learns the embeddings, decoupling, and recoupling of cross-identity expressions, enabling expression transfer without requiring animal expression data. To enforce geometric consistency, we employ Jacobian loss together with vertex-position and Laplacian losses. Experiments show that our approach achieves plausible cross-species expression transfer, effectively narrowing the geometric gap between human and animal facial shapes. --- ### SRFlow: A Dataset and Regularization Model for High-Resolution Facial Optical Flow via Splatting Rasterization Authors: JiaLin Zhang, Dong Li Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06479v1 Facial optical flow supports a wide range of tasks in facial motion analysis. However, the lack of high-resolution facial optical flow datasets has hindered progress in this area. In this paper, we introduce Splatting Rasterization Flow (SRFlow), a high-resolution facial optical flow dataset, and Splatting Rasterization Guided FlowNet (SRFlowNet), a facial optical flow model with tailored regularization losses. These losses constrain flow predictions using masks and gradients computed via difference or Sobel operator. This effectively suppresses high-frequency noise and large-scale errors in texture-less or repetitive-pattern regions, enabling SRFlowNet to be the first model explicitly capable of capturing high-resolution skin motion guided by Gaussian splatting rasterization. Experiments show that training with the SRFlow dataset improves facial optical flow estimation across various optical flow models, reducing end-point error (EPE) by up to 42% (from 0.5081 to 0.2953). Furthermore, when coupled with the SRFlow dataset, SRFlowNet achieves up to a 48% improvement in F1-score (from 0.4733 to 0.6947) on a composite of three micro-expression datasets. These results demonstrate the value of advancing both facial optical flow estimation and micro-expression recognition. --- ### Deriving Decoder-Free Sparse Autoencoders from First Principles Authors: Alan Oursland Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06478v1 Gradient descent on log-sum-exp (LSE) objectives performs implicit expectation--maximization (EM): the gradient with respect to each component output equals its responsibility. The same theory predicts collapse without volume control analogous to the log-determinant in Gaussian mixture models. We instantiate the theory in a single-layer encoder with an LSE objective and InfoMax regularization for volume control. Experiments confirm the theory's predictions. The gradient--responsibility identity holds exactly; LSE alone collapses; variance prevents dead components; decorrelation prevents redundancy. The model exhibits EM-like optimization dynamics in which lower loss does not correspond to better features and adaptive optimizers offer no advantage. The resulting decoder-free model learns interpretable mixture components, confirming that implicit EM theory can prescribe architectures. --- ### IndRegBias: A Dataset for Studying Indian Regional Biases in English and Code-Mixed Social Media Comments Authors: Debasmita Panda, Akash Anil, Neelesh Kumar Shukla Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CY, cs.SI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06477v2 Warning: This paper consists of examples representing regional biases in Indian regions that might be offensive towards a particular region. While social biases corresponding to gender, race, socio-economic conditions, etc., have been extensively studied in the major applications of Natural Language Processing (NLP), biases corresponding to regions have garnered less attention. This is mainly because of (i) difficulty in the extraction of regional bias datasets, (ii) disagreements in annotation due to inherent human biases, and (iii) regional biases being studied in combination with other types of social biases and often being under-represented. This paper focuses on creating a dataset IndRegBias, consisting of regional biases in an Indian context reflected in users' comments on popular social media platforms, namely Reddit and YouTube. We carefully selected 25,000 comments appearing on various threads in Reddit and videos on YouTube discussing trending topics on regional issues in India. Furthermore, we propose a multilevel annotation strategy to annotate the comments describing the severity of regional biased statements. To detect the presence of regional bias and its severity in IndRegBias, we evaluate open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) and Indic Language Models (ILMs) using zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning strategies. We observe that zero-shot and few-shot approaches show lower accuracy in detecting regional biases and severity in the majority of the LLMs and ILMs. However, the fine-tuning approach significantly enhances the performance of the LLM in detecting Indian regional bias along with its severity. --- ### VVTRec: Radio Interferometric Reconstruction through Visual and Textual Modality Enrichment Authors: Kai Cheng, Ruoqi Wang, Qiong Luo Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06475v1 Radio astronomy is an indispensable discipline for observing distant celestial objects. Measurements of wave signals from radio telescopes, called visibility, need to be transformed into images for astronomical observations. These dirty images blend information from real sources and artifacts. Therefore, astronomers usually perform reconstruction before imaging to obtain cleaner images. Existing methods consider only a single modality of sparse visibility data, resulting in images with remaining artifacts and insufficient modeling of correlation. To enhance the extraction of visibility information and emphasize output quality in the image domain, we propose VVTRec, a multimodal radio interferometric data reconstruction method with visibility-guided visual and textual modality enrichment. In our VVTRec, sparse visibility is transformed into image-form and text-form features to obtain enhancements in terms of spatial and semantic information, improving the structural integrity and accuracy of images. Also, we leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to achieve additional training-free performance improvements. VVTRec enables sparse visibility, as a foreign modality unseen by VLMs, to accurately extract pre-trained knowledge as a supplement. Our experiments demonstrate that VVTRec effectively enhances imaging results by exploiting multimodal information without introducing excessive computational overhead. --- ### SparseOccVLA: Bridging Occupancy and Vision-Language Models via Sparse Queries for Unified 4D Scene Understanding and Planning Authors: Chenxu Dang, Jie Wang, Guang Li, Zhiwen Hou, Zihan You, Hangjun Ye, Jie Ma, Long Chen, Yan Wang Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06474v2 In autonomous driving, Vision Language Models (VLMs) excel at high-level reasoning , whereas semantic occupancy provides fine-grained details. Despite significant progress in individual fields, there is still no method that can effectively integrate both paradigms. Conventional VLMs struggle with token explosion and limited spatiotemporal reasoning, while semantic occupancy provides a unified, explicit spatial representation but is too dense to integrate efficiently with VLMs. To address these challenges and bridge the gap between VLMs and occupancy, we propose SparseOccVLA, a novel vision-language-action model that unifies scene understanding, occupancy forecasting, and trajectory planning powered by sparse occupancy queries. Starting with a lightweight Sparse Occupancy Encoder, SparseOccVLA generates compact yet highly informative sparse occupancy queries that serve as the single bridge between vision and language. These queries are aligned into the language space and reasoned by the LLM for unified scene understanding and future occupancy forecasting. Furthermore, we introduce an LLM-guided Anchor-Diffusion Planner featuring decoupled anchor scoring and denoising, as well as cross-model trajectory-condition fusion. SparseOccVLA achieves a 7% relative improvement in CIDEr over the state-of-the-art on OmniDrive-nuScenes, a 0.5 increase in mIoU score on Occ3D-nuScenes, and sets state-of-the-art open-loop planning metric on nuScenes benchmark, demonstrating its strong holistic capability. --- ### Hybrid LSTM-UKF Framework: Ankle Angle and Ground Reaction Force Estimation Authors: Mundla Narasimhappa, Praveen Kumar Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: eess.SY, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06473v1 Accurate prediction of joint kinematics and kinetics is essential for advancing gait analysis and developing intelligent assistive systems such as prosthetics and exoskeletons. This study presents a hybrid LSTM-UKF framework for estimating ankle angle and ground reaction force (GRF) across varying walking speeds. A multimodal sensor fusion strategy integrates force plate data, knee angle, and GRF signals to enrich biomechanical context. Model performance was evaluated using RMSE and $R^2$ under subject-specific validation. The LSTM-UKF consistently outperformed standalone LSTM and UKF models, achieving up to 18.6\% lower RMSE for GRF prediction at 3 km/h. Additionally, UKF integration improved robustness, reducing ankle angle RMSE by up to 22.4\% compared to UKF alone at 1 km/h. These results underscore the effectiveness of hybrid architectures for reliable gait prediction across subjects and walking conditions. --- ### StablePDENet: Enhancing Neural Operator Stability through Physics-Informed Residual-Sensitivity Regularization Authors: Chutian Huang, Chang Ma, Kaibo Wang, Yang Xiang Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06472v2 Learning solution operators for differential equations with neural networks has shown great potential in scientific computing, but ensuring their stability under input perturbations remains a critical challenge. We introduce the StablePDENet, a physics-informed adversarial training method that regularizes the residual sensitivity with respect to an input perturbation. The operator learning task is formulated as a min--max optimization problem, where the inner model searches admissible input perturbations by physics-based projected-gradient adversary, while the outer problem combines the attacked physics loss with a normalized residual-sensitivity penalty. Moreover, residual-sensitivity regularization is included to ensure that the local Lipschitz constant of the learned operator is a more accurate approximation to that of the exact operator. We evaluate the StablePDENet on several benchmark problems. Compared with PI-DeepONet and its adversarially trained variant, StablePDENet achieves higher accuracy under adversarial input perturbations while maintaining competitive accuracy on clean inputs. The numerical results also demonstrate that the StablePDENet can effectively improve the generalization accuracy for operator learning. The Helmholtz study further distinguishes learned-model sensitivity from amplification intrinsic to an ill-conditioned solution operator. The results support residual-sensitivity regularization as a practical route to more stable and physically consistent neural PDE operators. --- ### PRISP: Privacy-Safe Few-Shot Personalization via Lightweight Adaptation Authors: Junho Park, Dohoon Kim, Taesup Moon Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06471v2 Large language model (LLM) personalization aims to adapt general-purpose models to individual users. Most existing methods, however, are developed under data-rich and resource-abundant settings, often incurring privacy risks. In contrast, realistic personalization typically occurs after deployment under (i) extremely limited user data, (ii) constrained computational resources, and (iii) strict privacy requirements. We propose PRISP, a lightweight and privacy-safe personalization framework tailored to these constraints. PRISP leverages a Text-to-LoRA hypernetwork to generate task-aware LoRA parameters from task descriptions, and enables efficient user personalization by optimizing a small subset of task-aware LoRA parameters together with minimal additional modules using few-shot user data. Experiments on a few-shot variant of the LaMP benchmark demonstrate that PRISP achieves strong overall performance compared to prior approaches, while reducing computational overhead and eliminating privacy risks. --- ### R$^3$D: Regional-guided Residual Radar Diffusion Authors: Hao Li, Xinqi Liu, Yaoqing Jin Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06465v1 Millimeter-wave radar enables robust environment perception in autonomous systems under adverse conditions yet suffers from sparse, noisy point clouds with low angular resolution. Existing diffusion-based radar enhancement methods either incur high learning complexity by modeling full LiDAR distributions or fail to prioritize critical structures due to uniform regional processing. To address these issues, we propose R3D, a regional-guided residual radar diffusion framework that integrates residual diffusion modeling-focusing on the concentrated LiDAR-radar residual encoding complementary high-frequency details to reduce learning difficulty-and sigma-adaptive regional guidance-leveraging radar-specific signal properties to generate attention maps and applying lightweight guidance only in low-noise stages to avoid gradient imbalance while refining key regions. Extensive experiments on the ColoRadar dataset demonstrate that R3D outperforms state-of-the-art methods, providing a practical solution for radar perception enhancement. Our anonymous code and pretrained models are released here: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/r3d-F836 --- ### On the Adversarial Robustness of 3D Large Vision-Language Models Authors: Chao Liu, Ngai-Man Cheung Published: 2026-01-10 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06464v1 3D Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as PointLLM and GPT4Point, have shown strong reasoning and generalization abilities in 3D understanding tasks. However, their adversarial robustness remains largely unexplored. Prior work in 2D VLMs has shown that the integration of visual inputs significantly increases vulnerability to adversarial attacks, making these models easier to manipulate into generating toxic or misleading outputs. In this paper, we investigate whether incorporating 3D vision similarly compromises the robustness of 3D VLMs. To this end, we present the first systematic study of adversarial robustness in point-based 3D VLMs. We propose two complementary attack strategies: \textit{Vision Attack}, which perturbs the visual token features produced by the 3D encoder and projector to assess the robustness of vision-language alignment; and \textit{Caption Attack}, which directly manipulates output token sequences to evaluate end-to-end system robustness. Each attack includes both untargeted and targeted variants to measure general vulnerability and susceptibility to controlled manipulation. Our experiments reveal that 3D VLMs exhibit significant adversarial vulnerabilities under untargeted attacks, while demonstrating greater resilience against targeted attacks aimed at forcing specific harmful outputs, compared to their 2D counterparts. These findings highlight the importance of improving the adversarial robustness of 3D VLMs, especially as they are deployed in safety-critical applications. ---