# Research Papers — 2026-01 · bundle page 143 of 189 > Full-text markdown of papers #7101–7150 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/143 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-01/page/142.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-01/page/144.md) ### mHC-lite: You Don't Need 20 Sinkhorn-Knopp Iterations Authors: Yongyi Yang, Jianyang Gao Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05732v1 Hyper-Connections (HC) generalizes residual connections by introducing dynamic residual matrices that mix information across multiple residual streams, accelerating convergence in deep neural networks. However, unconstrained residual matrices can compromise training stability. To address this, DeepSeek's Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC) approximately projects these matrices onto the Birkhoff polytope via iterative Sinkhorn--Knopp (SK) normalization. We identify two limitations of this approach: (i) finite SK iterations do not guarantee exact doubly stochasticity, leaving an approximation gap that can accumulate through network depth and undermine stability; (ii) efficient SK implementation requires highly specialized CUDA kernels, raising engineering barriers and reducing portability. Motivated by the Birkhoff--von Neumann theorem, we propose mHC-lite, a simple reparameterization that explicitly constructs doubly stochastic matrices as convex combinations of permutation matrices. This approach guarantees exact doubly stochasticity by construction and can be implemented using only native matrix operations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that mHC-lite matches or exceeds mHC in performance while achieving higher training throughput with a naive implementation and eliminating the residual instabilities observed in both HC and mHC. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/FFTYYY/mhc-lite. --- ### TAGRPO: Boosting GRPO on Image-to-Video Generation with Direct Trajectory Alignment Authors: Jin Wang, Jianxiang Lu, Guangzheng Xu, Comi Chen, Haoyu Yang, Linqing Wang, Peng Chen, Mingtao Chen, Zhichao Hu, Longhuang Wu, Shuai Shao, Qinglin Lu et al. Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05729v2 Recent studies have demonstrated the efficacy of integrating Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) into flow matching models, particularly for text-to-image and text-to-video generation. However, we find that directly applying these techniques to image-to-video (I2V) models often fails to yield consistent reward improvements. To address this limitation, we present TAGRPO, a robust post-training framework for I2V models inspired by contrastive learning. Our approach is grounded in the observation that rollout videos generated from identical initial noise provide superior guidance for optimization. Leveraging this insight, we propose a novel GRPO loss applied to intermediate latents, encouraging direct alignment with high-reward trajectories while maximizing distance from low-reward counterparts. Furthermore, we introduce a memory bank for rollout videos to enhance diversity and reduce computational overhead. Despite its simplicity, TAGRPO achieves significant improvements over DanceGRPO in I2V generation. The deliverables will be updated at https://tagrpo.github.io/ . --- ### TAGRPO: Boosting GRPO on Image-to-Video Generation with Direct Trajectory Alignment Authors: Jin Wang, Jianxiang Lu, Guangzheng Xu, Comi Chen, Haoyu Yang, Linqing Wang, Peng Chen, Mingtao Chen, Zhichao Hu, Longhuang Wu, Shuai Shao, Qinglin Lu et al. Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05729v1 Recent studies have demonstrated the efficacy of integrating Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) into flow matching models, particularly for text-to-image and text-to-video generation. However, we find that directly applying these techniques to image-to-video (I2V) models often fails to yield consistent reward improvements. To address this limitation, we present TAGRPO, a robust post-training framework for I2V models inspired by contrastive learning. Our approach is grounded in the observation that rollout videos generated from identical initial noise provide superior guidance for optimization. Leveraging this insight, we propose a novel GRPO loss applied to intermediate latents, encouraging direct alignment with high-reward trajectories while maximizing distance from low-reward counterparts. Furthermore, we introduce a memory bank for rollout videos to enhance diversity and reduce computational overhead. Despite its simplicity, TAGRPO achieves significant improvements over DanceGRPO in I2V generation. --- ### Overcoming Joint Intractability with Lossless Hierarchical Speculative Decoding Authors: Yuxuan Zhou, Fei Huang, Heng Li, Fengyi Wu, Tianyu Wang, Jianwei Zhang, Junyang Lin, Zhi-Qi Cheng Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05724v2 Verification is a key bottleneck in improving inference speed while maintaining distribution fidelity in Speculative Decoding. Recent work has shown that sequence-level verification leads to a higher number of accepted tokens compared to token-wise verification. However, existing solutions often rely on surrogate approximations or are constrained by partial information, struggling with joint intractability. In this work, we propose Hierarchical Speculative Decoding (HSD), a provably lossless verification method that significantly boosts the expected number of accepted tokens and overcomes joint intractability by balancing excess and deficient probability mass across accessible branches. Our extensive large-scale experiments demonstrate that HSD yields consistent improvements in acceptance rates across diverse model families and benchmarks. Moreover, its strong explainability and generality make it readily integrable into a wide range of speculative decoding frameworks. Notably, integrating HSD into EAGLE-3 yields over a 12% performance gain, establishing state-of-the-art decoding efficiency without compromising distribution fidelity. Code is available at https://github.com/ZhouYuxuanYX/Hierarchical-Speculative-Decoding. --- ### Overcoming Joint Intractability with Lossless Hierarchical Speculative Decoding Authors: Yuxuan Zhou, Fei Huang, Heng Li, Fengyi Wu, Tianyu Wang, Jianwei Zhang, Junyang Lin, Zhi-Qi Cheng Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05724v1 Verification is a key bottleneck in improving inference speed while maintaining distribution fidelity in Speculative Decoding. Recent work has shown that sequence-level verification leads to a higher number of accepted tokens compared to token-wise verification. However, existing solutions often rely on surrogate approximations or are constrained by partial information, struggling with joint intractability. In this work, we propose Hierarchical Speculative Decoding (HSD), a provably lossless verification method that significantly boosts the expected number of accepted tokens and overcomes joint intractability by balancing excess and deficient probability mass across accessible branches. Our extensive large-scale experiments demonstrate that HSD yields consistent improvements in acceptance rates across diverse model families and benchmarks. Moreover, its strong explainability and generality make it readily integrable into a wide range of speculative decoding frameworks. Notably, integrating HSD into EAGLE-3 yields over a 12% performance gain, establishing state-of-the-art decoding efficiency without compromising distribution fidelity. Code is available at https://github.com/ZhouYuxuanYX/Hierarchical-Speculative-Decoding. --- ### Rotate Your Character: Revisiting Video Diffusion Models for High-Quality 3D Character Generation Authors: Jin Wang, Jianxiang Lu, Comi Chen, Guangzheng Xu, Haoyu Yang, Peng Chen, Na Zhang, Yifan Xu, Longhuang Wu, Shuai Shao, Qinglin Lu, Ping Luo Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05722v1 Generating high-quality 3D characters from single images remains a significant challenge in digital content creation, particularly due to complex body poses and self-occlusion. In this paper, we present RCM (Rotate your Character Model), an advanced image-to-video diffusion framework tailored for high-quality novel view synthesis (NVS) and 3D character generation. Compared to existing diffusion-based approaches, RCM offers several key advantages: (1) transferring characters with any complex poses into a canonical pose, enabling consistent novel view synthesis across the entire viewing orbit, (2) high-resolution orbital video generation at 1024x1024 resolution, (3) controllable observation positions given different initial camera poses, and (4) multi-view conditioning supporting up to 4 input images, accommodating diverse user scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RCM outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both novel view synthesis and 3D generation quality. --- ### Visualising Information Flow in Word Embeddings with Diffusion Tensor Imaging Authors: Thomas Fabian Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05713v2 Understanding how large language models (LLMs) represent natural language is a central challenge in natural language processing (NLP) research. Many existing methods extract word embeddings from an LLM, visualise the embedding space via point-plots, and compare the relative positions of certain words. However, this approach only considers single words and not whole natural language expressions, thus disregards the context in which a word is used. Here we present a novel tool for analysing and visualising information flow in natural language expressions by applying diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to word embeddings. We find that DTI reveals how embedding space representations change between tokens. Tracking these changes within the layers of an LLM allows for comparing different model structures and could potentially reveal opportunities for pruning an LLM's under-utilised layers. Our results show that our visualisation method permits novel insights into how LLMs represent actual natural language expressions, extending the comparison of isolated word embeddings and improving the interpretability of NLP models. --- ### Visualising Information Flow in Word Embeddings with Diffusion Tensor Imaging Authors: Thomas Fabian Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05713v1 Understanding how large language models (LLMs) represent natural language is a central challenge in natural language processing (NLP) research. Many existing methods extract word embeddings from an LLM, visualise the embedding space via point-plots, and compare the relative positions of certain words. However, this approach only considers single words and not whole natural language expressions, thus disregards the context in which a word is used. Here we present a novel tool for analysing and visualising information flow in natural language expressions by applying diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to word embeddings. We find that DTI reveals how information flows between word embeddings. Tracking information flows within the layers of an LLM allows for comparing different model structures and revealing opportunities for pruning an LLM's under-utilised layers. Furthermore, our model reveals differences in information flows for tasks like pronoun resolution and metaphor detection. Our results show that our model permits novel insights into how LLMs represent actual natural language expressions, extending the comparison of isolated word embeddings and improving the interpretability of NLP models. --- ### Multimodal In-context Learning for ASR of Low-resource Languages Authors: Zhaolin Li, Jan Niehues Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05707v2 Automatic speech recognition (ASR) still covers only a small fraction of the world's languages, mainly due to supervised data scarcity. In-context learning (ICL) with large language models (LLMs) addresses this problem, but prior work largely focuses on high-resource languages covered during training and text-only settings. This paper investigates whether speech LLMs can learn unseen languages with multimodal ICL (MICL), and how this learning can be used to improve ASR. We conduct experiments with two speech LLMs, Phi-4 and Qwen3-Omni, on three diverse endangered languages. Firstly, we find that MICL is effective for unseen languages, leveraging both speech and text modalities. We further show that cross-lingual transfer learning improves MICL efficiency on target languages without training on them. Moreover, we analyze attention patterns to interpret MICL mechanisms, and we observe layer-dependent preferences between audio and text context, with an overall bias towards text. Finally, we show that prompt-based ASR with speech LLMs performs poorly on unseen languages, motivating a simple ASR system that combines a stronger acoustic model with a speech LLM via MICL-based selection of acoustic hypotheses. Results show that MICL consistently improves ASR performance, and that cross-lingual transfer learning matches or outperforms corpus-trained language models without using target-language data. Our code is publicly available. --- ### Multimodal In-context Learning for ASR of Low-resource Languages Authors: Zhaolin Li, Jan Niehues Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05707v1 Automatic speech recognition (ASR) still covers only a small fraction of the world's languages, mainly due to supervised data scarcity. In-context learning (ICL) with large language models (LLMs) addresses this problem, but prior work largely focuses on high-resource languages covered during training and text-only settings. This paper investigates whether speech LLMs can learn unseen languages with multimodal ICL (MICL), and how this learning can be used to improve ASR. We conduct experiments with two speech LLMs, Phi-4 and Qwen3-Omni, on three diverse endangered languages. Firstly, we find that MICL is effective for unseen languages, leveraging both speech and text modalities. We further show that cross-lingual transfer learning improves MICL efficiency on target languages without training on them. Moreover, we analyze attention patterns to interpret MICL mechanisms, and we observe layer-dependent preferences between audio and text context, with an overall bias towards text. Finally, we show that prompt-based ASR with speech LLMs performs poorly on unseen languages, motivating a simple ASR system that combines a stronger acoustic model with a speech LLM via MICL-based selection of acoustic hypotheses. Results show that MICL consistently improves ASR performance, and that cross-lingual transfer learning matches or outperforms corpus-trained language models without using target-language data. Our code is publicly available. --- ### Logic-Parametric Neuro-Symbolic NLI: Controlling Logical Formalisms for Verifiable LLM Reasoning Authors: Ali Farjami, Luca Redondi, Marco Valentino Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05705v1 Large language models (LLMs) and theorem provers (TPs) can be effectively combined for verifiable natural language inference (NLI). However, existing approaches rely on a fixed logical formalism, a feature that limits robustness and adaptability. We propose a logic-parametric framework for neuro-symbolic NLI that treats the underlying logic not as a static background, but as a controllable component. Using the LogiKEy methodology, we embed a range of classical and non-classical formalisms into higher-order logic (HOL), enabling a systematic comparison of inference quality, explanation refinement, and proof behavior. We focus on normative reasoning, where the choice of logic has significant implications. In particular, we compare logic-external approaches, where normative requirements are encoded via axioms, with logic-internal approaches, where normative patterns emerge from the logic's built-in structure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that logic-internal strategies can consistently improve performance and produce more efficient hybrid proofs for NLI. In addition, we show that the effectiveness of a logic is domain-dependent, with first-order logic favouring commonsense reasoning, while deontic and modal logics excel in ethical domains. Our results highlight the value of making logic a first-class, parametric element in neuro-symbolic architectures for more robust, modular, and adaptable reasoning. --- ### AIBoMGen: Generating an AI Bill of Materials for Secure, Transparent, and Compliant Model Training Authors: Wiebe Vandendriessche, Jordi Thijsman, Laurens D'hooge, Bruno Volckaert, Merlijn Sebrechts Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05703v1 The rapid adoption of complex AI systems has outpaced the development of tools to ensure their transparency, security, and regulatory compliance. In this paper, the AI Bill of Materials (AIBOM), an extension of the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), is introduced as a standardized, verifiable record of trained AI models and their environments. Our proof-of-concept platform, AIBoMGen, automates the generation of signed AIBOMs by capturing datasets, model metadata, and environment details during training. The training platform acts as a neutral, third-party observer and root of trust. It enforces verifiable AIBOM creation for every job. The system uses cryptographic hashing, digital signatures, and in-toto attestations to ensure integrity and protect against threats such as artifact tampering by dishonest model creators. Our evaluation demonstrates that AIBoMGen reliably detects unauthorized modifications to all artifacts and can generate AIBOMs with negligible performance overhead. These results highlight the potential of AIBoMGen as a foundational step toward building secure and transparent AI ecosystems, enabling compliance with regulatory frameworks like the EUs AI Act. --- ### Afri-MCQA: Multimodal Cultural Question Answering for African Languages Authors: Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Srija Anand, Emilio Villa-Cueva, Israel Abebe Azime, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, Muhidin A. Mohamed, Debela Desalegn Yadeta, Negasi Haile Abadi, Abigail Oppong, Nnaemeka Casmir Obiefuna, Idris Abdulmumin, Naome A Etori et al. Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05699v2 Africa is home to over one-third of the world's languages, yet remains underrepresented in AI research. We introduce Afri-MCQA, the first Multilingual Cultural Question-Answering benchmark covering 7.5k Q&A pairs across 15 African languages from 12 countries. The benchmark offers parallel English-African language Q&A pairs across text and speech modalities and was entirely created by native speakers. Benchmarking large language models (LLMs) on Afri-MCQA shows that open-weight models perform poorly across evaluated cultures, with near-zero accuracy on open-ended VQA when queried in native language or speech. To evaluate linguistic competence, we include control experiments meant to assess this specific aspect separate from cultural knowledge, and we observe significant performance gaps between native languages and English for both text and speech. These findings underscore the need for speech-first approaches, culturally grounded pretraining, and cross-lingual cultural transfer. To support more inclusive multimodal AI development in African languages, we release our Afri-MCQA under academic license or CC BY-NC 4.0 on HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/datasets/Atnafu/Afri-MCQA) --- ### Afri-MCQA: Multimodal Cultural Question Answering for African Languages Authors: Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Srija Anand, Emilio Villa-Cueva, Israel Abebe Azime, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, Muhidin A. Mohamed, Debela Desalegn Yadeta, Negasi Haile Abadi, Abigail Oppong, Nnaemeka Casmir Obiefuna, Idris Abdulmumin, Naome A Etori et al. Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05699v1 Africa is home to over one-third of the world's languages, yet remains underrepresented in AI research. We introduce Afri-MCQA, the first Multilingual Cultural Question-Answering benchmark covering 7.5k Q&A pairs across 15 African languages from 12 countries. The benchmark offers parallel English-African language Q&A pairs across text and speech modalities and was entirely created by native speakers. Benchmarking large language models (LLMs) on Afri-MCQA shows that open-weight models perform poorly across evaluated cultures, with near-zero accuracy on open-ended VQA when queried in native language or speech. To evaluate linguistic competence, we include control experiments meant to assess this specific aspect separate from cultural knowledge, and we observe significant performance gaps between native languages and English for both text and speech. These findings underscore the need for speech-first approaches, culturally grounded pretraining, and cross-lingual cultural transfer. To support more inclusive multimodal AI development in African languages, we release our Afri-MCQA under academic license or CC BY-NC 4.0 on HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/datasets/Atnafu/Afri-MCQA) --- ### Circular Reasoning: Understanding Self-Reinforcing Loops in Large Reasoning Models Authors: Zenghao Duan, Liang Pang, Zihao Wei, Wenbin Duan, Yuxin Tian, Shicheng Xu, Jingcheng Deng, Zhiyi Yin, Xueqi Cheng Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05693v1 Despite the success of test-time scaling, Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) frequently encounter repetitive loops that lead to computational waste and inference failure. In this paper, we identify a distinct failure mode termed Circular Reasoning. Unlike traditional model degeneration, this phenomenon manifests as a self-reinforcing trap where generated content acts as a logical premise for its own recurrence, compelling the reiteration of preceding text. To systematically analyze this phenomenon, we introduce LoopBench, a dataset designed to capture two distinct loop typologies: numerical loops and statement loops. Mechanistically, we characterize circular reasoning as a state collapse exhibiting distinct boundaries, where semantic repetition precedes textual repetition. We reveal that reasoning impasses trigger the loop onset, which subsequently persists as an inescapable cycle driven by a self-reinforcing V-shaped attention mechanism. Guided by these findings, we employ the Cumulative Sum (CUSUM) algorithm to capture these precursors for early loop prediction. Experiments across diverse LRMs validate its accuracy and elucidate the stability of long-chain reasoning. --- ### SketchVL: Policy Optimization via Fine-Grained Credit Assignment for Chart Understanding and More Authors: Muye Huang, Lingling Zhang, Yifei Li, Yaqiang Wu, Jun Liu Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05688v1 Charts are high-density visual carriers of complex data and medium for information extraction and analysis. Due to the need for precise and complex visual reasoning, automated chart understanding poses a significant challenge to existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Many MLLMs trained with reinforcement learning (RL) face the challenge of credit assignment. Their advantage estimation, typically performed at the trajectory level, cannot distinguish between correct and incorrect reasoning steps within a single generated response. To address this limitation, we introduce SketchVL, a novel MLLM that optimized with FinePO, a new RL algorithm designed for fine-grained credit assignment within each trajectory. SketchVL's methodology involves drawing its intermediate reasoning steps as markers on the image and feeding the annotated image back to itself, creating a robust, multi-step reasoning process. During training, the FinePO algorithm leverages a Fine-grained Process Reward Model (FinePRM) to score each drawing action within a trajectory, thereby precisely assigning credit for each step. This mechanism allows FinePO to more strongly reward correct tokens when a trajectory is globally successful, and more heavily penalize incorrect tokens when the trajectory is globally suboptimal, thus achieving fine-grained reinforcement signals. Experiments show that SketchVL learns to align its step-level behavior with the FinePRM, achieving an average performance gain of 7.23\% over its base model across chart datasets, natural image datasets, and mathematics, providing a promising new direction for training powerful reasoning models. --- ### FLRQ: Faster LLM Quantization with Flexible Low-Rank Matrix Sketching Authors: Hongyaoxing Gul, Lijuan Hu, Shuzi Niu, Fangfang Liu Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05684v1 Traditional post-training quantization (PTQ) is considered an effective approach to reduce model size and accelerate inference of large-scale language models (LLMs). However, existing low-rank PTQ methods require costly fine-tuning to determine a compromise rank for diverse data and layers in large models, failing to exploit their full potential. Additionally, the current SVD-based low-rank approximation compounds the computational overhead. In this work, we thoroughly analyze the varying effectiveness of low-rank approximation across different layers in representative models. Accordingly, we introduce \underline{F}lexible \underline{L}ow-\underline{R}ank \underline{Q}uantization (FLRQ), a novel solution designed to quickly identify the accuracy-optimal ranks and aggregate them to achieve minimal storage combinations. FLRQ comprises two powerful components, Rank1-Sketch-based Flexible Rank Selection (R1-FLR) and Best Low-rank Approximation under Clipping (BLC). R1-FLR applies the R1-Sketch with Gaussian projection for the fast low-rank approximation, enabling outlier-aware rank extraction for each layer. Meanwhile, BLC aims at minimizing the low-rank quantization error under the scaling and clipping strategy through an iterative method. FLRQ demonstrates strong effectiveness and robustness in comprehensive experiments, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both quantization quality and algorithm efficiency. --- ### Joint Optimization of Neural Autoregressors via Scoring rules Authors: Jonas Landsgesell Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cond-mat.soft, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05683v1 Non-parametric distributional regression has achieved significant milestones in recent years. Among these, the Tabular Prior-Data Fitted Network (TabPFN) has demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on various benchmarks. However, a challenge remains in extending these grid-based approaches to a truly multivariate setting. In a naive non-parametric discretization with $N$ bins per dimension, the complexity of an explicit joint grid scales exponentially and the paramer count of the neural networks rise sharply. This scaling is particularly detrimental in low-data regimes, as the final projection layer would require many parameters, leading to severe overfitting and intractability. --- ### Infinite-Precision Autoregressive Modeling for Vector Graphics and Layouts Authors: Yeonsang Shin, Insoo Kim, Bongkeun Kim, Keonwoo Bae, Bohyung Han Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05680v2 While Transformer-based autoregressive models excel in data generation, their token discretization strategy inherently limits their precision in continuous domains. We analyze the scalability limitations of existing discretization-based approaches for generating hybrid discrete-continuous sequences, particularly in high-precision domains such as logos, layouts, and semiconductor circuit designs, where precision loss potentially leads to visual artifacts, aesthetic degradation, and even functional failure. To address the challenge, we propose a novel unified framework that jointly models discrete and continuous values for variable-length sequences. Our approach employs a hybrid approach that combines categorical prediction for discrete values with diffusion-based modeling for continuous values, incorporating two key technical components: an end-of-sequence (EOS) logit adjustment mechanism that uses an MLP to dynamically adjust EOS token logits based on sequence context, and a length regularization term integrated into the loss function. Additionally, we present ContLayNet, a large-scale benchmark comprising 334K high-precision semiconductor layout samples with specialized evaluation metrics that capture functional correctness, where precision errors significantly impact performance. Experiments on multiple domains show that our approach achieves higher-fidelity hybrid vector representations than discretization-based and fixed-schema baselines, while effectively scaling to high-precision generation. --- ### AGDC: Autoregressive Generation of Variable-Length Sequences with Joint Discrete and Continuous Spaces Authors: Yeonsang Shin, Insoo Kim, Bongkeun Kim, Keonwoo Bae, Bohyung Han Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05680v1 Transformer-based autoregressive models excel in data generation but are inherently constrained by their reliance on discretized tokens, which limits their ability to represent continuous values with high precision. We analyze the scalability limitations of existing discretization-based approaches for generating hybrid discrete-continuous sequences, particularly in high-precision domains such as semiconductor circuit designs, where precision loss can lead to functional failure. To address the challenge, we propose AGDC, a novel unified framework that jointly models discrete and continuous values for variable-length sequences. AGDC employs a hybrid approach that combines categorical prediction for discrete values with diffusion-based modeling for continuous values, incorporating two key technical components: an end-of-sequence (EOS) logit adjustment mechanism that uses an MLP to dynamically adjust EOS token logits based on sequence context, and a length regularization term integrated into the loss function. Additionally, we present ContLayNet, a large-scale benchmark comprising 334K high-precision semiconductor layout samples with specialized evaluation metrics that capture functional correctness where precision errors significantly impact performance. Experiments on semiconductor layouts (ContLayNet), graphic layouts, and SVGs demonstrate AGDC's superior performance in generating high-fidelity hybrid vector representations compared to discretization-based and fixed-schema baselines, achieving scalable high-precision generation across diverse domains. --- ### Do Sparse Autoencoders Identify Reasoning Features in Language Models? Authors: George Ma, Zhongyuan Liang, Irene Y. Chen, Somayeh Sojoudi Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05679v7 We study how reliably sparse autoencoders (SAEs) support claims about reasoning-related internal features in large language models. We first give a stylized analysis showing that sparsity-regularized decoding can preferentially retain stable low-dimensional correlates while suppressing high-dimensional within-behavior variation, motivating the possibility that contrastively selected "reasoning" features may concentrate on cue-like structure when such cues are coupled with reasoning traces. Building on this perspective, we propose a falsification-based evaluation framework that combines causal token injection with LLM-guided counterexample construction. Across 22 configurations spanning multiple model families, layers, and reasoning datasets, we find that many contrastively selected candidates are highly sensitive to token-level interventions, with 45%-90% activating after injecting only a few associated tokens into non-reasoning text. For the remaining context-dependent candidates, LLM-guided falsification produces targeted non-reasoning inputs that trigger activation and meaning-preserving paraphrases of top-activating reasoning traces that suppress it. A small steering study yields minimal changes on the evaluated benchmarks. Overall, our results suggest that, in the settings we study, sparse decompositions can favor low-dimensional correlates that co-occur with reasoning, underscoring the need for falsification when attributing high-level behaviors to individual SAE features. Code is available at https://github.com/GeorgeMLP/reasoning-probing. --- ### Do Sparse Autoencoders Identify Reasoning Features in Language Models? Authors: George Ma, Zhongyuan Liang, Irene Y. Chen, Somayeh Sojoudi Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05679v1 We investigate whether sparse autoencoders (SAEs) identify genuine reasoning features in large language models (LLMs). Starting from features selected using standard contrastive activation methods, we introduce a falsification-oriented framework that combines causal token injection experiments and LLM-guided falsification to test whether feature activation reflects reasoning processes or superficial linguistic correlates. Across 20 configurations spanning multiple model families, layers, and reasoning datasets, we find that identified reasoning features are highly sensitive to token-level interventions. Injecting a small number of feature-associated tokens into non-reasoning text is sufficient to elicit strong activation for 59% to 94% of features, indicating reliance on lexical artifacts. For the remaining features that are not explained by simple token triggers, LLM-guided falsification consistently produces non-reasoning inputs that activate the feature and reasoning inputs that do not, with no analyzed feature satisfying our criteria for genuine reasoning behavior. Steering these features yields minimal changes or slight degradations in benchmark performance. Together, these results suggest that SAE features identified by contrastive approaches primarily capture linguistic correlates of reasoning rather than the underlying reasoning computations themselves. --- ### CHDP: Cooperative Hybrid Diffusion Policies for Reinforcement Learning in Parameterized Action Space Authors: Bingyi Liu, Jinbo He, Haiyong Shi, Enshu Wang, Weizhen Han, Jingxiang Hao, Peixi Wang, Zhuangzhuang Zhang Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05675v2 Hybrid action space, which combines discrete choices and continuous parameters, is prevalent in domains such as robot control and game AI. However, efficiently modeling and optimizing hybrid discrete-continuous action space remains a fundamental challenge, mainly due to limited policy expressiveness and poor scalability in high-dimensional settings. To address this challenge, we view the hybrid action space problem as a fully cooperative game and propose a \textbf{Cooperative Hybrid Diffusion Policies (CHDP)} framework to solve it. CHDP employs two cooperative agents that leverage a discrete and a continuous diffusion policy, respectively. The continuous policy is conditioned on the discrete action's representation, explicitly modeling the dependency between them. This cooperative design allows the diffusion policies to leverage their expressiveness to capture complex distributions in their respective action spaces. To mitigate the update conflicts arising from simultaneous policy updates in this cooperative setting, we employ a sequential update scheme that fosters co-adaptation. Moreover, to improve scalability when learning in high-dimensional discrete action space, we construct a codebook that embeds the action space into a low-dimensional latent space. This mapping enables the discrete policy to learn in a compact, structured space. Finally, we design a Q-function-based guidance mechanism to align the codebook's embeddings with the discrete policy's representation during training. On challenging hybrid action benchmarks, CHDP outperforms the state-of-the-art method by up to $19.3\%$ in success rate. --- ### Advancing credit mobility through stakeholder-informed AI design and adoption Authors: Yerin Kwak, Siddharth Adelkar, Zachary A. Pardos Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05666v1 Transferring from a 2-year to a 4-year college is crucial for socioeconomic mobility, yet students often face challenges ensuring their credits are fully recognized, leading to delays in their academic progress and unexpected costs. Determining whether courses at different institutions are equivalent (i.e., articulation) is essential for successful credit transfer, as it minimizes unused credits and increases the likelihood of bachelor's degree completion. However, establishing articulation agreements remains time- and resource-intensive, as all candidate articulations are reviewed manually. Although recent efforts have explored the use of artificial intelligence to support this work, its use in articulation practice remains limited. Given these challenges and the need for scalable support, this study applies artificial intelligence to suggest articulations between institutions in collaboration with the State University of New York system, one of the largest systems of higher education in the US. To develop our methodology, we first surveyed articulation staff and faculty to assess adoption rates of baseline algorithmic recommendations and gather feedback on perceptions and concerns about these recommendations. Building on these insights, we developed a supervised alignment method that addresses superficial matching and institutional biases in catalog descriptions, achieving a 5.5-fold improvement in accuracy over previous methods. Based on articulation predictions of this method and a 61% average surveyed adoption rate among faculty and staff, these findings project a 12-fold increase in valid credit mobility opportunities that would otherwise remain unrealized. This study suggests that stakeholder-informed design of AI in higher education administration can expand student credit mobility and help reshape current institutional decision-making in course articulation. --- ### Tracing Stereotypes in Pre-trained Transformers: From Biased Neurons to Fairer Models Authors: Gianmario Voria, Moses Openja, Foutse Khomh, Gemma Catolino, Fabio Palomba Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.SE, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05663v1 The advent of transformer-based language models has reshaped how AI systems process and generate text. In software engineering (SE), these models now support diverse activities, accelerating automation and decision-making. Yet, evidence shows that these models can reproduce or amplify social biases, raising fairness concerns. Recent work on neuron editing has shown that internal activations in pre-trained transformers can be traced and modified to alter model behavior. Building on the concept of knowledge neurons, neurons that encode factual information, we hypothesize the existence of biased neurons that capture stereotypical associations within pre-trained transformers. To test this hypothesis, we build a dataset of biased relations, i.e., triplets encoding stereotypes across nine bias types, and adapt neuron attribution strategies to trace and suppress biased neurons in BERT models. We then assess the impact of suppression on SE tasks. Our findings show that biased knowledge is localized within small neuron subsets, and suppressing them substantially reduces bias with minimal performance loss. This demonstrates that bias in transformers can be traced and mitigated at the neuron level, offering an interpretable approach to fairness in SE. --- ### Stephanie2: Thinking, Waiting, and Making Decisions Like Humans in Step-by-Step AI Social Chat Authors: Hao Yang, Hongyuan Lu, Dingkang Yang, Wenliang Yang, Peng Sun, Xiaochuan Zhang, Jun Xiao, Kefan He, Wai Lam, Yang Liu, Xinhua Zeng Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05657v1 Instant-messaging human social chat typically progresses through a sequence of short messages. Existing step-by-step AI chatting systems typically split a one-shot generation into multiple messages and send them sequentially, but they lack an active waiting mechanism and exhibit unnatural message pacing. In order to address these issues, we propose Stephanie2, a novel next-generation step-wise decision-making dialogue agent. With active waiting and message-pace adaptation, Stephanie2 explicitly decides at each step whether to send or wait, and models latency as the sum of thinking time and typing time to achieve more natural pacing. We further introduce a time-window-based dual-agent dialogue system to generate pseudo dialogue histories for human and automatic evaluations. Experiments show that Stephanie2 clearly outperforms Stephanie1 on metrics such as naturalness and engagement, and achieves a higher pass rate on human evaluation with the role identification Turing test. --- ### HAG: Hierarchical Demographic Tree-based Agent Generation for Topic-Adaptive Simulation Authors: Rongxin Chen, Tianyu Wu, Bingbing Xu, Jiatang Luo, Xiucheng Xu, Huawei Shen Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05656v3 High-fidelity agent initialization is crucial for credible Agent-Based Modeling across diverse domains. A robust framework should be Topic-Adaptive, capturing macro-level joint distributions while ensuring micro-level individual rationality. Existing approaches fall into two categories: static data-based retrieval methods that fail to adapt to unseen topics absent from the data, and LLM-based generation methods that lack macro-level distribution awareness, resulting in inconsistencies between micro-level persona attributes and reality. To address these problems, we propose HAG, a Hierarchical Agent Generation framework that formalizes population generation as a two-stage decision process. Firstly, utilizing a World Knowledge Model to infer hierarchical conditional probabilities to construct the Topic-Adaptive Tree, achieving macro-level distribution alignment. Then, grounded real-world data, instantiation and agentic augmentation are carried out to ensure micro-level consistency. Given the lack of specialized evaluation, we establish a multi-domain benchmark and a comprehensive PACE evaluation framework. Extensive experiments show that HAG significantly outperforms representative baselines, reducing population alignment errors by an average of 37.7% and enhancing sociological consistency by 18.8%. --- ### Learning to Retrieve User History and Generate User Profiles for Personalized Persuasiveness Prediction Authors: Sejun Park, Yoonah Park, Jongwon Lim, Yohan Jo Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05654v3 Estimating the persuasiveness of messages is critical in various applications, from recommender systems to safety assessment of LLMs. While it is imperative to consider the target persuadee's characteristics, such as their values, experiences, and reasoning styles, there is currently no established systematic framework to optimize leveraging a persuadee's past activities (e.g., conversations) to the benefit of a persuasiveness prediction model. To address this problem, we propose a context-aware user profiling framework with two trainable components: a query generator that generates optimal queries to retrieve persuasion-relevant records from a user's history, and a profiler that summarizes these records into a profile to effectively inform the persuasiveness prediction model. Our evaluation on the ChangeMyView Reddit dataset shows consistent improvements over existing methods across multiple predictor models, raising F1 from 33% to 47% on Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct. Further analysis shows that effective user profiles are context-dependent and predictor-specific, rather than relying on static attributes or surface-level similarity. Together, these results highlight the importance of task-oriented, context-dependent user profiling for personalized persuasiveness prediction. --- ### From Global to Local: Cluster-Aware Learning for Wi-Fi Fingerprinting Indoor Localisation Authors: Miguel Matey-Sanz, Joaquín Torres-Sospedra, Joaquín Huerta, Sergio Trilles Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05650v1 Wi-Fi fingerprinting remains one of the most practical solutions for indoor positioning, however, its performance is often limited by the size and heterogeneity of fingerprint datasets, strong Received Signal Strength Indicator variability, and the ambiguity introduced in large and multi-floor environments. These factors significantly degrade localisation accuracy, particularly when global models are applied without considering structural constraints. This paper introduces a clustering-based method that structures the fingerprint dataset prior to localisation. Fingerprints are grouped using either spatial or radio features, and clustering can be applied at the building or floor level. In the localisation phase, a clustering estimation procedure based on the strongest access points assigns unseen fingerprints to the most relevant cluster. Localisation is then performed only within the selected clusters, allowing learning models to operate on reduced and more coherent subsets of data. The effectiveness of the method is evaluated on three public datasets and several machine learning models. Results show a consistent reduction in localisation errors, particularly under building-level strategies, but at the cost of reducing the floor detection accuracy. These results demonstrate that explicitly structuring datasets through clustering is an effective and flexible approach for scalable indoor positioning. --- ### Open World Knowledge Aided Single-Cell Foundation Model with Robust Cross-Modal Cell-Language Pre-training Authors: Haoran Wang, Xuanyi Zhang, Shuangsang Fang, Longke Ran, Ziqing Deng, Yong Zhang, Yuxiang Li, Shaoshuai Li Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: q-bio.GN, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05648v1 Recent advancements in single-cell multi-omics, particularly RNA-seq, have provided profound insights into cellular heterogeneity and gene regulation. While pre-trained language model (PLM) paradigm based single-cell foundation models have shown promise, they remain constrained by insufficient integration of in-depth individual profiles and neglecting the influence of noise within multi-modal data. To address both issues, we propose an Open-world Language Knowledge-Aided Robust Single-Cell Foundation Model (OKR-CELL). It is built based on a cross-modal Cell-Language pre-training framework, which comprises two key innovations: (1) leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) based workflow with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enriches cell textual descriptions using open-world knowledge; (2) devising a Cross-modal Robust Alignment (CRA) objective that incorporates sample reliability assessment, curriculum learning, and coupled momentum contrastive learning to strengthen the model's resistance to noisy data. After pretraining on 32M cell-text pairs, OKR-CELL obtains cutting-edge results across 6 evaluation tasks. Beyond standard benchmarks such as cell clustering, cell-type annotation, batch-effect correction, and few-shot annotation, the model also demonstrates superior performance in broader multi-modal applications, including zero-shot cell-type annotation and bidirectional cell-text retrieval. --- ### Transformer Is Inherently a Causal Learner Authors: Xinyue Wang, Stephen Wang, Biwei Huang Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05647v1 We reveal that transformers trained in an autoregressive manner naturally encode time-delayed causal structures in their learned representations. When predicting future values in multivariate time series, the gradient sensitivities of transformer outputs with respect to past inputs directly recover the underlying causal graph, without any explicit causal objectives or structural constraints. We prove this connection theoretically under standard identifiability conditions and develop a practical extraction method using aggregated gradient attributions. On challenging cases such as nonlinear dynamics, long-term dependencies, and non-stationary systems, this approach greatly surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art discovery algorithms, especially as data heterogeneity increases, exhibiting scaling potential where causal accuracy improves with data volume and heterogeneity, a property traditional methods lack. This unifying view lays the groundwork for a future paradigm where causal discovery operates through the lens of foundation models, and foundation models gain interpretability and enhancement through the lens of causality. --- ### Multilingual Amnesia: On the Transferability of Unlearning in Multilingual LLMs Authors: Alireza Dehghanpour Farashah, Aditi Khandelwal, Marylou Fauchard, Zhuan Shi, Negar Rostamzadeh, Golnoosh Farnadi Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05641v1 As multilingual large language models become more widely used, ensuring their safety and fairness across diverse linguistic contexts presents unique challenges. While existing research on machine unlearning has primarily focused on monolingual settings, typically English, multilingual environments introduce additional complexities due to cross-lingual knowledge transfer and biases embedded in both pretraining and fine-tuning data. In this work, we study multilingual unlearning using the Aya-Expanse 8B model under two settings: (1) data unlearning and (2) concept unlearning. We extend benchmarks for factual knowledge and stereotypes to ten languages through translation: English, French, Arabic, Japanese, Russian, Farsi, Korean, Hindi, Hebrew, and Indonesian. These languages span five language families and a wide range of resource levels. Our experiments show that unlearning in high-resource languages is generally more stable, with asymmetric transfer effects observed between typologically related languages. Furthermore, our analysis of linguistic distances indicates that syntactic similarity is the strongest predictor of cross-lingual unlearning behavior. --- ### SGDrive: Scene-to-Goal Hierarchical World Cognition for Autonomous Driving Authors: Jingyu Li, Junjie Wu, Dongnan Hu, Xiangkai Huang, Bin Sun, Zhihui Hao, Xianpeng Lang, Xiatian Zhu, Li Zhang Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05640v2 Recent end-to-end autonomous driving approaches have leveraged Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to enhance planning capabilities in complex driving scenarios. However, VLMs are inherently trained as generalist models, lacking specialized understanding of driving-specific reasoning in 3D space and time. When applied to autonomous driving, these models struggle to establish structured spatial-temporal representations that capture geometric relationships, scene context, and motion patterns critical for safe trajectory planning. To address these limitations, we propose SGDrive, a novel framework that explicitly structures the VLM's representation learning around driving-specific knowledge hierarchies. Built upon a pre-trained VLM backbone, SGDrive decomposes driving understanding into a scene-agent-goal hierarchy that mirrors human driving cognition: drivers first perceive the overall environment (scene context), then attend to safety-critical agents and their behaviors, and finally formulate short-term goals before executing actions. This hierarchical decomposition provides the structured spatial-temporal representation that generalist VLMs lack, integrating multi-level information into a compact yet comprehensive format for trajectory planning. Extensive experiments on the NAVSIM benchmark demonstrate that SGDrive achieves state-of-the-art performance among camera-only methods on both PDMS and EPDMS, validating the effectiveness of hierarchical knowledge structuring for adapting generalist VLMs to autonomous driving. --- ### Efficient training for compact compression models via sequential distillation Authors: Caroline Mazini Rodrigues, Nicolas Keriven, Thomas Maugey Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05639v2 Deep learning models for image compression often face practical limitations in hardware-constrained applications. Although these models achieve high-quality reconstructions, they are typically complex, heavyweight, and require substantial training data and computational resources. We propose a methodology to significantly reduce autoencoder-based compression networks in a more stable Knowledge Distillation process. The intuition is that highly reduced architectures benefit from simplified optimization objectives in early training, with complexity gradually introduced later. Therefore, our approach begins with a sequential encoder--decoder distillation stage that provides a robust initialization for the lightweight model. This is followed by standard training that can be regularized with latent distillation. We evaluate the resulting lightweight autoencoders across two different architectures on the image compression task. Experiments show that our method preserves reconstruction quality and statistical fidelity in early epochs better than training lightweight autoencoders with the original loss, making it practical for resource-limited environments. --- ### GenCtrl -- A Formal Controllability Toolkit for Generative Models Authors: Emily Cheng, Carmen Amo Alonso, Federico Danieli, Arno Blaas, Luca Zappella, Pau Rodriguez, Xavier Suau Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05637v1 As generative models become ubiquitous, there is a critical need for fine-grained control over the generation process. Yet, while controlled generation methods from prompting to fine-tuning proliferate, a fundamental question remains unanswered: are these models truly controllable in the first place? In this work, we provide a theoretical framework to formally answer this question. Framing human-model interaction as a control process, we propose a novel algorithm to estimate the controllable sets of models in a dialogue setting. Notably, we provide formal guarantees on the estimation error as a function of sample complexity: we derive probably-approximately correct bounds for controllable set estimates that are distribution-free, employ no assumptions except for output boundedness, and work for any black-box nonlinear control system (i.e., any generative model). We empirically demonstrate the theoretical framework on different tasks in controlling dialogue processes, for both language models and text-to-image generation. Our results show that model controllability is surprisingly fragile and highly dependent on the experimental setting. This highlights the need for rigorous controllability analysis, shifting the focus from simply attempting control to first understanding its fundamental limits. --- ### Continual Pretraining on Encrypted Synthetic Data for Privacy-Preserving LLMs Authors: Honghao Liu, Xuhui Jiang, Chengjin Xu, Cehao Yang, Yiran Cheng, Lionel Ni, Jian Guo Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.CR, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05635v2 Preserving privacy in sensitive data while pretraining large language models on small, domain-specific corpora presents a significant challenge. In this work, we take an exploratory step toward privacy-preserving continual pretraining by proposing an entity-based framework that synthesizes encrypted training data to protect personally identifiable information (PII). Our approach constructs a weighted entity graph to guide data synthesis and applies deterministic encryption to PII entities, enabling LLMs to encode new knowledge through continual pretraining while granting authorized access to sensitive data through decryption keys. Our results on limited-scale datasets demonstrate that our pretrained models outperform base models and ensure PII security, while exhibiting a modest performance gap compared to models trained on unencrypted synthetic data. We further show that increasing the number of entities and leveraging graph-based synthesis improves model performance, and that encrypted models retain instruction-following capabilities with long retrieved contexts. We discuss the security implications and limitations of deterministic encryption, positioning this work as an initial investigation into the design space of encrypted data pretraining for privacy-preserving LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/DataArcTech/SoE. --- ### GIFT: Games as Informal Training for Generalizable LLMs Authors: Nuoyan Lyu, Bingbing Xu, Xueyun Tian, Weihao Meng, Yige Yuan, Yang Zhang, Zhiyong Huang, Tat-Seng Chua, Huawei Shen Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05633v2 Recent LLMs excel at formal tasks such as mathematical reasoning and code generation, but still struggle with broader abilities such as planning, creativity, and social intelligence. Inspired by human learning, where formal instruction and informal experience jointly shape intelligence, we introduce informal learning into LLM training and use games as annotation-free, feedback-driven environments. To cover diverse abilities including abstract reasoning, planning, creativity, and social interaction, we combine formal math tasks with three representative game tasks, including Matrix Games, TicTacToe, and Who's the Spy. However, directly mixing these tasks under a unified RL objective can blur task-specific learning signals and provides no explicit guidance for coordinating task-gradient directions. To combat these, we propose Coordinated Subtask Training (CST), which replaces a single mixed update with sequential subtask-specific updates, separating heterogeneous RL signals while implicitly promoting coordination among subtasks. Experiments on ability-oriented benchmarks show that game-based informal learning improves generalization beyond formal training alone, while CST further enhances multi-task RL by preserving in-domain subtask performance and improving broader general abilities. Code and data are publicly available. --- ### Cumulative Path-Level Semantic Reasoning for Inductive Knowledge Graph Completion Authors: Jiapu Wang, Xinghe Cheng, Zezheng Wu, Ruiqi Ma, Rui Wang, Zhichao Yan, Haoran Luo, Yuhao Jiang, Kai Sun Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05629v1 Conventional Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) methods aim to infer missing information in incomplete Knowledge Graphs (KGs) by leveraging existing information, which struggle to perform effectively in scenarios involving emerging entities. Inductive KGC methods can handle the emerging entities and relations in KGs, offering greater dynamic adaptability. While existing inductive KGC methods have achieved some success, they also face challenges, such as susceptibility to noisy structural information during reasoning and difficulty in capturing long-range dependencies in reasoning paths. To address these challenges, this paper proposes the Cumulative Path-Level Semantic Reasoning for inductive knowledge graph completion (CPSR) framework, which simultaneously captures both the structural and semantic information of KGs to enhance the inductive KGC task. Specifically, the proposed CPSR employs a query-dependent masking module to adaptively mask noisy structural information while retaining important information closely related to the targets. Additionally, CPSR introduces a global semantic scoring module that evaluates both the individual contributions and the collective impact of nodes along the reasoning path within KGs. The experimental results demonstrate that CPSR achieves state-of-the-art performance. --- ### Text Detoxification in isiXhosa and Yorùbá: A Cross-Lingual Machine Learning Approach for Low-Resource African Languages Authors: Abayomi O. Agbeyangi Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05624v1 Toxic language is one of the major barrier to safe online participation, yet robust mitigation tools are scarce for African languages. This study addresses this critical gap by investigating automatic text detoxification (toxic to neutral rewriting) for two low-resource African languages, isiXhosa and Yorùbá. The work contributes a novel, pragmatic hybrid methodology: a lightweight, interpretable TF-IDF and Logistic Regression model for transparent toxicity detection, and a controlled lexicon- and token-guided rewriting component. A parallel corpus of toxic to neutral rewrites, which captures idiomatic usage, diacritics, and code switching, was developed to train and evaluate the model. The detection component achieved stratified K-fold accuracies of 61-72% (isiXhosa) and 72-86% (Yorùbá), with per-language ROC-AUCs up to 0.88. The rewriting component successfully detoxified all detected toxic sentences while preserving 100% of non-toxic sentences. These results demonstrate that scalable, interpretable machine learning detectors combined with rule-based edits offer a competitive and resource-efficient solution for culturally adaptive safety tooling, setting a new benchmark for low-resource Text Style Transfer (TST) in African languages. --- ### Continual Learning of Achieving Forgetting-free and Positive Knowledge Transfer Authors: Zhi Wang, Zhongbin Wu, Yanni Li, Bing Liu, Guangxi Li, Yuping Wang Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05623v1 Existing research on continual learning (CL) of a sequence of tasks focuses mainly on dealing with catastrophic forgetting (CF) to balance the learning plasticity of new tasks and the memory stability of old tasks. However, an ideal CL agent should not only be able to overcome CF, but also encourage positive forward and backward knowledge transfer (KT), i.e., using the learned knowledge from previous tasks for the new task learning (namely FKT), and improving the previous tasks' performance with the knowledge of the new task (namely BKT). To this end, this paper first models CL as an optimization problem in which each sequential learning task aims to achieve its optimal performance under the constraint that both FKT and BKT should be positive. It then proposes a novel Enhanced Task Continual Learning (ETCL) method, which achieves forgetting-free and positive KT. Furthermore, the bounds that can lead to negative FKT and BKT are estimated theoretically. Based on the bounds, a new strategy for online task similarity detection is also proposed to facilitate positive KT. To overcome CF, ETCL learns a set of task-specific binary masks to isolate a sparse sub-network for each task while preserving the performance of a dense network for the task. At the beginning of a new task learning, ETCL tries to align the new task's gradient with that of the sub-network of the previous most similar task to ensure positive FKT. By using a new bi-objective optimization strategy and an orthogonal gradient projection method, ETCL updates only the weights of previous similar tasks at the classification layer to achieve positive BKT. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that the proposed ETCL markedly outperforms strong baselines on dissimilar, similar, and mixed task sequences. --- ### Dual-Phase LLM Reasoning: Self-Evolved Mathematical Frameworks Authors: ShaoZhen Liu, Xinting Huang, Houwen Peng, Xin Chen, Xinyang Song, Qi Li, Zhenan Sun Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05616v1 In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in complex reasoning tasks like mathematical problem-solving. However, existing research predominantly relies on reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks while overlooking supervised fine-tuning (SFT) methods. This paper proposes a new two-stage training framework that enhances models' self-correction capabilities through self-generated long chain-of-thought (CoT) data. During the first stage, a multi-turn dialogue strategy guides the model to generate CoT data incorporating verification, backtracking, subgoal decomposition, and backward reasoning, with predefined rules filtering high-quality samples for supervised fine-tuning. The second stage employs a difficulty-aware rejection sampling mechanism to dynamically optimize data distribution, strengthening the model's ability to handle complex problems. The approach generates reasoning chains extended over 4 times longer while maintaining strong scalability, proving that SFT effectively activates models' intrinsic reasoning capabilities and provides a resource-efficient pathway for complex task optimization. Experimental results demonstrate performance improvements on mathematical benchmarks including GSM8K and MATH500, with the fine-tuned model achieving a substantial improvement on competition-level problems like AIME24. Code will be open-sourced. --- ### PiXTime: A Model for Federated Time Series Forecasting with Heterogeneous Data across Nodes Authors: Yiming Zhou, Jiahao Wang, Mingyue Cheng, Hao Wang, Defu Lian, Enhong Chen Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05613v2 While collaborative forecasting on distributed time series is highly desirable, directly pooling localized datasets is often impractical due to data sharing constraints. Federated learning offers a promising alternative, yet conventional federated learning algorithms require homogeneous model architectures, which are incompatible with the structural discrepancies, such as unaligned temporal resolutions and mismatched variable channels, commonly observed across decentralized nodes. To bridge this gap, we introduce PiXTime, a novel Transformer-based framework designed to natively accommodate and leverage structurally heterogeneous temporal data. At its core, PiXTime adopts a parameter-decoupling architecture, strategically partitioning the model into localized personalized modules and a globally aggregated shared backbone. Specifically, node-specific local modules act as dimensional adapters, projecting raw sequences of diverse lengths into a unified representation space. Concurrently, a globally synchronized VE Table injects consistent categorical identities into the feature space, allowing the shared backbone to collaboratively learn and generalize representations across inconsistent variable distributions. Comprehensive evaluations on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that PiXTime achieves state-of-the-art performance in heterogeneous federated environments, while maintaining robust superiority in standard homogeneous and centralized forecasting settings. --- ### FLARE: Learning Future-Aware Latent Representations from Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving Authors: Chengen Xie, Chonghao Sima, Tianyu Li, Bin Sun, Junjie Wu, Zhihui Hao, Hongyang Li Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05611v2 While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer rich world knowledge for end-to-end autonomous driving, current approaches heavily rely on labor-intensive language annotations (e.g., VQA) to bridge perception and control. This paradigm suffers from a fundamental mismatch between discrete linguistic tokens and continuous driving trajectories, often leading to suboptimal control policies and inefficient utilization of pre-trained knowledge. To address these challenges, we propose FLARE (Future-aware LAtent REpresentation), a novel framework that activates the visual-semantic capabilities of pre-trained VLMs without requiring language supervision. Instead of aligning with text, we introduce a self-supervised future feature prediction objective. This mechanism compels the model to anticipate scene dynamics and ego-motion directly in the latent space, enabling the learning of robust driving representations from large-scale unlabeled trajectory data. Furthermore, we integrate Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) into the planning process to refine decision-making quality. Extensive experiments on the NAVSIM benchmark demonstrate that FLARE achieves state-of-the-art performance, validating the effectiveness of leveraging VLM knowledge via predictive self-supervision rather than explicit language generation. --- ### Data Augmented Pipeline for Legal Information Extraction and Reasoning Authors: Nguyen Minh Phuong, Ha-Thanh Nguyen, May Myo Zin, Ken Satoh Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05609v1 In this paper, we propose a pipeline leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for data augmentation in Information Extraction tasks within the legal domain. The proposed method is both simple and effective, significantly reducing the manual effort required for data annotation while enhancing the robustness of Information Extraction systems. Furthermore, the method is generalizable, making it applicable to various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks beyond the legal domain. --- ### Orchestrating Tokens and Sequences: Dynamic Hybrid Policy Optimization for RLVR Authors: Zijun Min, Bingshuai Liu, Ante Wang, Long Zhang, Anxiang Zeng, Haibo Zhang, Jinsong Su Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05607v1 Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) offers a promising framework for optimizing large language models in reasoning tasks. However, existing RLVR algorithms focus on different granularities, and each has complementary strengths and limitations. Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) updates the policy with token-level importance ratios, which preserves fine-grained credit assignment but often suffers from high variance and instability. In contrast, Group Sequence Policy Optimization (GSPO) applies single sequence-level importance ratios across all tokens in a response that better matches sequence-level rewards, but sacrifices token-wise credit assignment. In this paper, we propose Dynamic Hybrid Policy Optimization (DHPO) to bridge GRPO and GSPO within a single clipped surrogate objective. DHPO combines token-level and sequence-level importance ratios using weighting mechanisms. We explore two variants of the mixing mechanism, including an averaged mixing and an entropy-guided mixing. To further stabilize training, we employ a branch-specific clipping strategy that constrains token-level and sequence-level ratios within separate trust regions before mixing, preventing outliers in either branch from dominating the update. Across seven challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks, experiments on both dense and MoE models from the Qwen3 series show that DHPO consistently outperforms GRPO and GSPO. We will release our code upon acceptance of this paper. --- ### Learning Geometric Invariance for Gait Recognition Authors: Zengbin Wang, Junjie Li, Saihui Hou, Xu Liu, Chunshui Cao, Yongzhen Huang, Muyi Sun, Siye Wang, Man Zhang Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05604v1 The goal of gait recognition is to extract identity-invariant features of an individual under various gait conditions, e.g., cross-view and cross-clothing. Most gait models strive to implicitly learn the common traits across different gait conditions in a data-driven manner to pull different gait conditions closer for recognition. However, relatively few studies have explicitly explored the inherent relations between different gait conditions. For this purpose, we attempt to establish connections among different gait conditions and propose a new perspective to achieve gait recognition: variations in different gait conditions can be approximately viewed as a combination of geometric transformations. In this case, all we need is to determine the types of geometric transformations and achieve geometric invariance, then identity invariance naturally follows. As an initial attempt, we explore three common geometric transformations (i.e., Reflect, Rotate, and Scale) and design a $\mathcal{R}$eflect-$\mathcal{R}$otate-$\mathcal{S}$cale invariance learning framework, named ${\mathcal{RRS}}$-Gait. Specifically, it first flexibly adjusts the convolution kernel based on the specific geometric transformations to achieve approximate feature equivariance. Then these three equivariant-aware features are respectively fed into a global pooling operation for final invariance-aware learning. Extensive experiments on four popular gait datasets (Gait3D, GREW, CCPG, SUSTech1K) show superior performance across various gait conditions. --- ### SceneAlign: Aligning Multimodal Reasoning to Scene Graphs in Complex Visual Scenes Authors: Chuhan Wang, Xintong Li, Jennifer Yuntong Zhang, Junda Wu, Chengkai Huang, Lina Yao, Julian McAuley, Jingbo Shang Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05600v1 Multimodal large language models often struggle with faithful reasoning in complex visual scenes, where intricate entities and relations require precise visual grounding at each step. This reasoning unfaithfulness frequently manifests as hallucinated entities, mis-grounded relations, skipped steps, and over-specified reasoning. Existing preference-based approaches, typically relying on textual perturbations or answer-conditioned rationales, fail to address this challenge as they allow models to exploit language priors to bypass visual grounding. To address this, we propose SceneAlign, a framework that leverages scene graphs as structured visual information to perform controllable structural interventions. By identifying reasoning-critical nodes and perturbing them through four targeted strategies that mimic typical grounding failures, SceneAlign constructs hard negative rationales that remain linguistically plausible but are grounded in inaccurate visual facts. These contrastive pairs are used in Direct Preference Optimization to steer models toward fine-grained, structure-faithful reasoning. Across seven visual reasoning benchmarks, SceneAlign consistently improves answer accuracy and reasoning faithfulness, highlighting the effectiveness of grounding-aware alignment for multimodal reasoning. --- ### Quantifying and Inducing Shape Bias in CNNs via Max-Pool Dilation Authors: Takito Sawada, Akinori Iwata, Masahiro Okuda Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05599v2 Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) exhibit a well-known texture bias, prioritizing local patterns over global shapes - a tendency inherent to their convolutional architecture. While this bias is beneficial for texture-rich natural images, it often degrades performance on shape-dominant data such as illustrations and sketches. Although prior work has proposed shape-biased models to mitigate this issue, these approaches lack a quantitative metric for identifying which datasets would actually benefit from such modifications. To address this limitation, we propose a data-driven metric that quantifies the shape-texture balance within a dataset by computing the Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) between an image's luminance (Y) channel and its L0-smoothed counterpart. Building on this metric, we introduce a computationally efficient adaptation method that promotes shape bias by modifying the dilation of max-pooling operations while keeping convolutional weights frozen. Experimental results demonstrate consistent accuracy improvements on shape-dominant datasets, particularly in low-data regimes where full fine-tuning is impractical, requiring training only the final classification layer. --- ### Good Allocations from Bad Estimates Authors: Sílvia Casacuberta, Moritz Hardt Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05597v1 Conditional average treatment effect (CATE) estimation is the de facto gold standard for targeting a treatment to a heterogeneous population. The method estimates treatment effects up to an error $ε> 0$ in each of $M$ different strata of the population, targeting individuals in decreasing order of estimated treatment effect until the budget runs out. In general, this method requires $O(M/ε^2)$ samples. This is best possible if the goal is to estimate all treatment effects up to an $ε$ error. In this work, we show how to achieve the same total treatment effect as CATE with only $O(M/ε)$ samples for natural distributions of treatment effects. The key insight is that coarse estimates suffice for near-optimal treatment allocations. In addition, we show that budget flexibility can further reduce the sample complexity of allocation. Finally, we evaluate our algorithm on various real-world RCT datasets. In all cases, it finds nearly optimal treatment allocations with surprisingly few samples. Our work highlights the fundamental distinction between treatment effect estimation and treatment allocation: the latter requires far fewer samples. --- ### PaCoRe: Learning to Scale Test-Time Compute with Parallel Coordinated Reasoning Authors: Jingcheng Hu, Yinmin Zhang, Shijie Shang, Xiaobo Yang, Yue Peng, Zhewei Huang, Hebin Zhou, Xin Wu, Jie Cheng, Fanqi Wan, Xiangwen Kong, Chengyuan Yao et al. Published: 2026-01-09 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05593v1 We introduce Parallel Coordinated Reasoning (PaCoRe), a training-and-inference framework designed to overcome a central limitation of contemporary language models: their inability to scale test-time compute (TTC) far beyond sequential reasoning under a fixed context window. PaCoRe departs from the traditional sequential paradigm by driving TTC through massive parallel exploration coordinated via a message-passing architecture in multiple rounds. Each round launches many parallel reasoning trajectories, compacts their findings into context-bounded messages, and synthesizes these messages to guide the next round and ultimately produce the final answer. Trained end-to-end with large-scale, outcome-based reinforcement learning, the model masters the synthesis abilities required by PaCoRe and scales to multi-million-token effective TTC without exceeding context limits. The approach yields strong improvements across diverse domains, and notably pushes reasoning beyond frontier systems in mathematics: an 8B model reaches 94.5% on HMMT 2025, surpassing GPT-5's 93.2% by scaling effective TTC to roughly two million tokens. We open-source model checkpoints, training data, and the full inference pipeline to accelerate follow-up work. ---