# Research Papers — 2026-01 · bundle page 146 of 189 > Full-text markdown of papers #7251–7300 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/146 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-01/page/145.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-01/page/147.md) ### TimeGNN-Augmented Hybrid-Action MARL for Fine-Grained Task Partitioning and Energy-Aware Offloading in MEC Authors: Wei Ai, Yun Peng, Yuntao Shou, Tao Meng, Keqin Li Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06191v1 With the rapid growth of IoT devices and latency-sensitive applications, the demand for both real-time and energy-efficient computing has surged, placing significant pressure on traditional cloud computing architectures. Mobile edge computing (MEC), an emerging paradigm, effectively alleviates the load on cloud centers and improves service quality by offloading computing tasks to edge servers closer to end users. However, the limited computing resources, non-continuous power provisioning (e.g., battery-powered nodes), and highly dynamic systems of edge servers complicate efficient task scheduling and resource allocation. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning algorithm, TG-DCMADDPG, and constructs a collaborative computing framework for multiple edge servers, aiming to achieve joint optimization of fine-grained task partitioning and offloading. This approach incorporates a temporal graph neural network (TimeGNN) to model and predict time series of multi-dimensional server state information, thereby reducing the frequency of online interactions and improving policy predictability. Furthermore, a multi-agent deterministic policy gradient algorithm (DC-MADDPG) in a discrete-continuous hybrid action space is introduced to collaboratively optimize task partitioning ratios, transmission power, and priority scheduling strategies. Extensive simulation experiments confirm that TG-DCMADDPG achieves markedly faster policy convergence, superior energy-latency optimization, and higher task completion rates compared with existing state-of-the-art methods, underscoring its robust scalability and practical effectiveness in dynamic and constrained MEC scenarios. --- ### Rational Synthesizers or Heuristic Followers? Analyzing LLMs in RAG-based Question-Answering Authors: Atharv Naphade Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06189v1 Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is the prevailing paradigm for grounding Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the mechanisms governing how models integrate groups of conflicting retrieved evidence remain opaque. Does an LLM answer a certain way because the evidence is factually strong, because of a prior belief, or merely because it is repeated frequently? To answer this, we introduce GroupQA, a curated dataset of 1,635 controversial questions paired with 15,058 diversely-sourced evidence documents, annotated for stance and qualitative strength. Through controlled experiments, we characterize group-level evidence aggregation dynamics: Paraphrasing an argument can be more persuasive than providing distinct independent support; Models favor evidence presented first rather than last, and Larger models are increasingly resistant to adapt to presented evidence. Additionally, we find that LLM explanations to group-based answers are unfaithful. Together, we show that LLMs behave consistently as vulnerable heuristic followers, with direct implications for improving RAG system design. --- ### Scalable Dynamic Distributed Constraint Optimization with Metareasoning and Application to Continual Satellite Operations Authors: Itai Zilberstein, Steve Chien Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06188v4 Dynamic distributed constraint optimization problems (DDCOPs) provide a general framework for coordinating autonomous agents in changing environments. However, existing DDCOP formulations do not adequately address settings where optimization and execution overlap, resources persist across time, and agents operate under limited computational and communication constraints. We extend the DDCOP model to address these challenges by introducing an execution-aware formulation, together with new algorithms and frameworks for efficiently computing solutions. We develop a general framework for metareasoning in DDCOPs, enabling agents to determine when the estimated benefit of recomputing solutions outweighs its computational cost. We further extend the neighborhood stochastic search algorithm to the dynamic setting, introducing dynamic incremental neighborhood stochastic search (D-NSS), a scalable decomposition-based DDCOP algorithm that efficiently repairs previous solutions in response to problem dynamics. We apply our methods to the real-world application of large-scale satellite scheduling. Deploying autonomy to satellites requires efficient computation and communication in the face of highly dynamic environments. We demonstrate that D-NSS stabilizes to high-quality solutions, outperforming standard DDCOP baselines in solution quality, computation time, and message volume, while our metareasoning framework successfully balances resource conservation with utility. These methods will support the NASA FAME mission, the largest in-space demonstration of distributed multi-agent AI to date. --- ### Thinking with Map: Reinforced Parallel Map-Augmented Agent for Geolocalization Authors: Yuxiang Ji, Yong Wang, Ziyu Ma, Yiming Hu, Hailang Huang, Xuecai Hu, Guanhua Chen, Liaoni Wu, Xiangxiang Chu Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05432v1 The image geolocalization task aims to predict the location where an image was taken anywhere on Earth using visual clues. Existing large vision-language model (LVLM) approaches leverage world knowledge, chain-of-thought reasoning, and agentic capabilities, but overlook a common strategy used by humans -- using maps. In this work, we first equip the model \textit{Thinking with Map} ability and formulate it as an agent-in-the-map loop. We develop a two-stage optimization scheme for it, including agentic reinforcement learning (RL) followed by parallel test-time scaling (TTS). The RL strengthens the agentic capability of model to improve sampling efficiency, and the parallel TTS enables the model to explore multiple candidate paths before making the final prediction, which is crucial for geolocalization. To evaluate our method on up-to-date and in-the-wild images, we further present MAPBench, a comprehensive geolocalization training and evaluation benchmark composed entirely of real-world images. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing open- and closed-source models on most metrics, specifically improving Acc@500m from 8.0\% to 22.1\% compared to \textit{Gemini-3-Pro} with Google Search/Map grounded mode. --- ### Prediction of Fault Slip Tendency in CO${_2}$ Storage using Data-space Inversion Authors: Xiaowen He, Su Jiang, Louis J. Durlofsky Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05431v1 Accurately assessing the potential for fault slip is essential in many subsurface operations. Conventional model-based history matching methods, which entail the generation of posterior geomodels calibrated to observed data, can be challenging to apply in coupled flow-geomechanics problems with faults. In this work, we implement a variational autoencoder (VAE)-based data-space inversion (DSI) framework to predict pressure, stress and strain fields, and fault slip tendency, in CO${_2}$ storage projects. The main computations required by the DSI workflow entail the simulation of O(1000) prior geomodels. The posterior distributions for quantities of interest are then inferred directly from prior simulation results and observed data, without the need to generate posterior geomodels. The model used here involves a synthetic 3D system with two faults. Realizations of heterogeneous permeability and porosity fields are generated using geostatistical software, and uncertain geomechanical and fault parameters are sampled for each realization from prior distributions. Coupled flow-geomechanics simulations for these geomodels are conducted using GEOS. A VAE with stacked convolutional long short-term memory layers is trained, using the prior simulation results, to represent pressure, strain, effective normal stress and shear stress fields in terms of latent variables. The VAE parameterization is used with DSI for posterior predictions, with monitoring wells providing observed pressure and strain data. Posterior results for synthetic true models demonstrate that the DSI-VAE framework gives accurate predictions for pressure, strain, and stress fields and for fault slip tendency. The framework is also shown to reduce uncertainty in key geomechanical and fault parameters. --- ### Dynamic Inclusion and Bounded Multi-Factor Tilts for Robust Portfolio Construction Authors: Roberto Garrone Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: math.OC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05428v1 This paper proposes a portfolio construction framework designed to remain robust under estimation error, non-stationarity, and realistic trading constraints. The methodology combines dynamic asset eligibility, deterministic rebalancing, and bounded multi-factor tilts applied to an equal-weight baseline. Asset eligibility is formalized as a state-dependent constraint on portfolio construction, allowing factor exposure to adjust endogenously in response to observable market conditions such as liquidity, volatility, and cross-sectional breadth. Rather than estimating expected returns or covariances, the framework relies on cross-sectional rankings and hard structural bounds to control concentration, turnover, and fragility. The resulting approach is fully algorithmic, transparent, and directly implementable. It provides a robustness-oriented alternative to parametric optimization and unconstrained multi-factor models, particularly suited for long-horizon allocations where stability and operational feasibility are primary objectives. --- ### Efficient Inference for Noisy LLM-as-a-Judge Evaluation Authors: Yiqun T Chen, Sizhu Lu, Sijia Li, Moran Guo, Shengyi Li Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.LG, stat.AP, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05420v1 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as automatic evaluators of generative AI outputs, a paradigm often referred to as "LLM-as-a-judge." In practice, LLM judges are imperfect predictions for the underlying truth and can exhibit systematic, non-random errors. Two main approaches have recently been proposed to address this issue: (i) direct measurementerror correction based on misclassification models such as Rogan-Gladen-style estimators, and (ii) surrogate-outcome approaches such as prediction-powered inference (PPI), which correct bias by calibrating prediction residuals on a small set of gold-standard human labels. In this paper, we systematically study the performance of these two approaches for estimating mean parameters (e.g., average benchmark scores or pairwise win rates). Leveraging tools from semiparametric efficiency theory, we unify the two classes of estimators by deriving explicit forms of efficient influence function (EIF)-based efficient estimators and characterize conditions under which PPI-style estimators attain strictly smaller asymptotic variance than measurement-error corrections. We verify our theoretical results in simulations and demonstrate the methods on real-data examples. We provide an implementation of the benchmarked methods and comparison utilities at https://github.com/yiqunchen/debias-llm-as-a-judge. --- ### Multi-Group Quadratic Discriminant Analysis via Projection Authors: Yuchao Wang, Tianying Wang Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: stat.ME, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05415v1 Multi-group classification arises in many prediction and decision-making problems, including applications in epidemiology, genomics, finance, and image recognition. Although classification methods have advanced considerably, much of the literature focuses on binary problems, and available extensions often provide limited flexibility for multi-group settings. Recent work has extended linear discriminant analysis to multiple groups, but more general methods are still needed to handle complex structures such as nonlinear decision boundaries and group-specific covariance patterns. We develop Multi-Group Quadratic Discriminant Analysis (MGQDA), a method for multi-group classification built on quadratic discriminant analysis. MGQDA projects high-dimensional predictors onto a lower-dimensional subspace, which enables accurate classification while capturing nonlinearity and heterogeneity in group-specific covariance structures. We derive theoretical guarantees, including variable selection consistency, to support the reliability of the procedure. In simulations and a gene-expression application, MGQDA achieves competitive or improved predictive performance compared with existing methods while selecting group-specific informative variables, indicating its practical value for high-dimensional multi-group classification problems. Supplementary materials for this article are available online. --- ### Large Language Models Are Bad Dice Players: LLMs Struggle to Generate Random Numbers from Statistical Distributions Authors: Minda Zhao, Yilun Du, Mengyu Wang Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05414v3 As large language models (LLMs) transition from chat interfaces to integral components of stochastic pipelines and systems approaching general intelligence, the ability to faithfully sample from specified probability distributions has become a functional requirement rather than a theoretical curiosity. We present the first large-scale, statistically powered audit of native probabilistic sampling in frontier LLMs, benchmarking 11 models across 15 distributions. To disentangle failure modes, we employ a dual-protocol design: Batch Generation, where a model produces $N{=}1000$ samples within one response, and Independent Requests, comprising $N{=}1000$ stateless calls. We observe a sharp protocol asymmetry: batch generation achieves only modest statistical validity, with a 7% median pass rate, while independent requests collapse almost entirely, with 10 of 11 models passing none of the distributions. Beyond this asymmetry, we reveal that sampling fidelity degrades monotonically with distributional complexity and aggravates as the sampling horizon $N$ increases. Finally, we demonstrate how the propagation of these failures into downstream real-world application tasks introduces systematic biases: models fail to enforce uniform answer-position constraints in Multiple Choice Question generation and systematically violate demographic targets in attribute-constrained text-to-image prompt synthesis. These findings indicate that current LLMs lack a functional internal sampler, necessitating external tools for applications requiring statistical guarantees. --- ### Glitter: Visualizing Lexical Surprisal for Readability in Administrative Texts Authors: Jan Černý, Ivana Kvapilíková, Silvie Cinková Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05411v1 This work investigates how measuring information entropy of text can be used to estimate its readability. We propose a visualization framework that can be used to approximate information entropy of text using multiple language models and visualize the result. The end goal is to use this method to estimate and improve readability and clarity of administrative or bureaucratic texts. Our toolset is available as a libre software on https://github.com/ufal/Glitter. --- ### Interactive Distillation for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Authors: Minwoo Cho, Batuhan Altundas, Matthew Gombolay Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05407v1 Knowledge distillation (KD) has the potential to accelerate MARL by employing a centralized teacher for decentralized students but faces key bottlenecks. Specifically, there are (1) challenges in synthesizing high-performing teaching policies in complex domains, (2) difficulties when teachers must reason in out-of-distribution (OOD) states, and (3) mismatches between the decentralized students' and the centralized teacher's observation spaces. To address these limitations, we propose HINT (Hierarchical INteractive Teacher-based transfer), a novel KD framework for MARL in a centralized training, decentralized execution setup. By leveraging hierarchical RL, HINT provides a scalable, high-performing teacher. Our key innovation, pseudo off-policy RL, enables the teacher policy to be updated using both teacher and student experience, thereby improving OOD adaptation. HINT also applies performance-based filtering to retain only outcome-relevant guidance, reducing observation mismatches. We evaluate HINT on challenging cooperative domains (e.g., FireCommander for resource allocation, MARINE for tactical combat). Across these benchmarks, HINT outperforms baselines, achieving improvements of 60% to 165% in success rate. --- ### Same Claim, Different Judgment: Benchmarking Scenario-Induced Bias in Multilingual Financial Misinformation Detection Authors: Zhiwei Liu, Yupen Cao, Yuechen Jiang, Mohsinul Kabir, Polydoros Giannouris, Chen Xu, Ziyang Xu, Tianlei Zhu, Md. Tariquzzaman, Triantafillos Papadopoulos, Yan Wang, Lingfei Qian et al. Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05403v2 Large language models (LLMs) have been widely applied across various domains of finance. Since their training data are largely derived from human-authored corpora, LLMs may inherit a range of human biases. Behavioral biases can lead to instability and uncertainty in decision-making, particularly when processing financial information. However, existing research on LLM bias has mainly focused on direct questioning or simplified, general-purpose settings, with limited consideration of the complex real-world financial environments and high-risk, context-sensitive, multilingual financial misinformation detection tasks MFMD. In this work, we propose MFMDScen, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating behavioral biases of LLMs in MFMD across diverse economic scenarios. In collaboration with financial experts, we construct three types of complex financial scenarios: (i) role- and personality-based, (ii) role- and region-based, and (iii) role-based scenarios incorporating ethnicity and religious beliefs. We further develop a multilingual financial misinformation dataset covering English, Chinese, Greek, and Bengali. By integrating these scenarios with misinformation claims, MFMDScen enables a systematic evaluation of 22 mainstream LLMs. Our findings reveal that pronounced behavioral biases persist across both commercial and open-source models. This project is available at https://github.com/lzw108/FMD. --- ### Multi-task Cross-modal Learning for Chest X-ray Image Retrieval Authors: Zhaohui Liang, Sivaramakrishnan Rajaraman, Niccolo Marini, Zhiyun Xue, Sameer Antani Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05399v1 CLIP and BiomedCLIP are examples of vision-language foundation models and offer strong cross-modal embeddings; however, they are not optimized for fine-grained medical retrieval tasks, such as retrieving clinically relevant radiology reports using chest X-ray (CXR) image queries. To address this shortcoming, we propose a multi-task learning framework to fine-tune BiomedCLIP and evaluate improvements to CXR image-text retrieval. Using BiomedCLIP as the backbone, we incorporate a lightweight MLP projector head trained with a multi-task composite loss function that includes: (1) a binary cross-entropy loss to distinguish normal from abnormal CXR studies, (2) a supervised contrastive loss to reinforce intra-class consistency, and (3) a CLIP loss to maintain cross-modal alignment. Experimental results demonstrate that the fine-tuned model achieves more balanced and clinically meaningful performance across both image-to-text and text-to-image retrieval tasks compared to the pretrained BiomedCLIP and general-purpose CLIP models. Furthermore, t-SNE visualizations reveal clearer semantic clustering of normal and abnormal cases, demonstrating the model's enhanced diagnostic sensitivity. These findings highlight the value of domain-adaptive, multi-task learning for advancing cross-modal retrieval in biomedical applications. --- ### Sketch&Patch++: Efficient Structure-Aware 3D Gaussian Representation Authors: Yuang Shi, Géraldine Morin, Simone Gasparini, Wei Tsang Ooi Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.GR, cs.MM, eess.IV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05394v2 We observe that Gaussians exhibit distinct roles and characteristics analogous to traditional artistic techniques -- like how artists first sketch outlines before filling in broader areas with color, some Gaussians capture high-frequency features such as edges and contours, while others represent broader, smoother regions analogous to brush strokes that add volume and depth. Based on this observation, we propose a hybrid representation that categorizes Gaussians into (i) Sketch Gaussians, which represent high-frequency, boundary-defining features, and (ii) Patch Gaussians, which cover low-frequency, smooth regions. This semantic separation naturally enables layered progressive streaming, where the compact Sketch Gaussians establish the structural skeleton before Patch Gaussians incrementally refine volumetric detail. In this work, we extend our previous method to arbitrary 3D scenes by proposing a novel hierarchical adaptive categorization framework that operates directly on the 3DGS representation. Our approach employs multi-criteria density-based clustering, combined with adaptive quality-driven refinement. This method eliminates dependency on external 3D line primitives while ensuring optimal parametric encoding effectiveness. Our comprehensive evaluation across diverse scenes, including both man-made and natural environments, demonstrates that our method achieves up to 1.74 dB improvement in PSNR, 6.7% in SSIM, and 41.4% in LPIPS at equivalent model sizes compared to uniform pruning baselines. For indoor scenes, our method can maintain visual quality with only 0.5\% of the original model size. This structure-aware representation enables efficient storage, adaptive streaming, and rendering of high-fidelity 3D content across bandwidth-constrained networks and resource-limited devices. --- ### Archetypal cases for questionnaires with nominal multiple choice questions Authors: Aleix Alcacer, Irene Epifanio Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: stat.ME, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05392v1 Archetypal analysis serves as an exploratory tool that interprets a collection of observations as convex combinations of pure (extreme) patterns. When these patterns correspond to actual observations within the sample, they are termed archetypoids. For the first time, we propose applying archetypoid analysis to nominal observations, specifically for identifying archetypal cases from questionnaires featuring nominal multiple-choice questions with a single possible answer. This approach can enhance our understanding of a nominal data set, similar to its application in multivariate contexts. We compare this methodology with the use of archetype analysis and probabilistic archetypal analysis and demonstrate the benefits of this methodology using a real-world example: the German credit dataset. --- ### DynaSTy: A Framework for SpatioTemporal Node Attribute Prediction in Dynamic Graphs Authors: Namrata Banerji, Tanya Berger-Wolf Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05391v2 Accurate multistep forecasting of node-level attributes on dynamic graphs is critical for applications ranging from financial trust networks to biological networks. Existing spatiotemporal graph neural networks typically assume a static adjacency matrix. In this work, we propose an end-to-end dynamic edge-biased spatiotemporal model that ingests a multi-dimensional timeseries of node attributes and a timeseries of adjacency matrices, to predict multiple future steps of node attributes. At each time step, our transformer-based model injects the given adjacency as an adaptable attention bias, allowing the model to focus on relevant neighbors as the graph evolves. We further deploy a masked node-time pretraining objective that primes the encoder to reconstruct missing features, and train with scheduled sampling and a horizon-weighted loss to mitigate compounding error over long horizons. Unlike prior work, our model accommodates dynamic graphs that vary across input samples, enabling forecasting in multi-system settings such as brain networks across different subjects, financial systems in different contexts, or evolving social systems. Empirical results demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms strong baselines on Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) and Mean Absolute Error (MAE). --- ### How Much Can a Few Engine Moves Help? Quantifying Limited Cheating in Chess Authors: Daniel Keren Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05386v2 Cheating in chess, by using advice from powerful software, has become a major problem, reaching the highest levels. As opposed to the large majority of previous work, which concerned {\em detection} of cheating, here we try to evaluate the possible gain in performance, obtained by cheating a limited number of times during a game. We develop threshold-based and Bellman-style intervention policies, and test them in a controlled engine-vs-engine setting using Stockfish. A judicious choice of 1 or 2 cheats yields average scores of 0.71 and 0.82, respectively, compared to 0.51 with no cheats. We also introduce a fast, engine-free simulator that enables hyperparameter optimization without running games, closely matching the engine-based optimum. The goal of this work is not to assist cheaters, but to measure the effectiveness of cheating -- which is crucial as part of the effort to contain and detect it. --- ### Conformity and Social Impact on AI Agents Authors: Alessandro Bellina, Giordano De Marzo, David Garcia Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05384v1 As AI agents increasingly operate in multi-agent environments, understanding their collective behavior becomes critical for predicting the dynamics of artificial societies. This study examines conformity, the tendency to align with group opinions under social pressure, in large multimodal language models functioning as AI agents. By adapting classic visual experiments from social psychology, we investigate how AI agents respond to group influence as social actors. Our experiments reveal that AI agents exhibit a systematic conformity bias, aligned with Social Impact Theory, showing sensitivity to group size, unanimity, task difficulty, and source characteristics. Critically, AI agents achieving near-perfect performance in isolation become highly susceptible to manipulation through social influence. This vulnerability persists across model scales: while larger models show reduced conformity on simple tasks due to improved capabilities, they remain vulnerable when operating at their competence boundary. These findings reveal fundamental security vulnerabilities in AI agent decision-making that could enable malicious manipulation, misinformation campaigns, and bias propagation in multi-agent systems, highlighting the urgent need for safeguards in collective AI deployments. --- ### Imitation Learning for Combinatorial Optimisation under Uncertainty Authors: Prakash Gawas, Antoine Legrain, Louis-Martin Rousseau Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.LG, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05383v4 Imitation learning (IL) provides a data-driven framework for approximating policies for large-scale combinatorial optimisation problems formulated as sequential decision problems (SDPs), where exact solution methods are computationally intractable. A central but underexplored aspect of IL in this context is the role of the \emph{expert} that generates training demonstrations. Existing studies employ a wide range of expert constructions, yet lack a unifying framework to characterise their modelling assumptions, computational properties, and impact on learning performance. This paper introduces a systematic taxonomy of experts for imitation learning in combinatorial optimisation under uncertainty. The literature is classified along three principal dimensions: (i) treatment of uncertainty; (ii) level of optimality, distinguishing task-optimal and approximate experts; and (iii) interaction mode with the learner, ranging from one-shot supervision to iterative, interactive schemes. We further identify additional categories capturing other relevant expert characteristics. Building on this taxonomy, we propose a generalised Dataset Aggregation (DAgger) framework that accommodates multiple expert queries, expert aggregation, and flexible interaction strategies. The proposed framework is evaluated on a dynamic physician-to-patient assignment problem with stochastic arrivals and capacity constraints. Computational experiments compare learning outcomes across expert types and interaction regimes. The results show that policies learned from stochastic experts consistently outperform those learned from deterministic or full-information experts, while interactive learning improves solution quality using fewer expert demonstrations. Aggregated deterministic experts provide an effective alternative when stochastic optimisation becomes computationally challenging. --- ### EdgeLDR: Quaternion Low-Displacement Rank Neural Networks for Edge-Efficient Deep Learning Authors: Vladimir Frants, Sos Agaian, Karen Panetta Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05379v1 Deploying deep neural networks on edge devices is often limited by the memory traffic and compute cost of dense linear operators. While quaternion neural networks improve parameter efficiency by coupling multiple channels through Hamilton products, they typically retain unstructured dense weights; conversely, structured matrices enable fast computation but are usually applied in the real domain. This paper introduces EdgeLDR, a practical framework for quaternion block-circulant linear and convolutional layers that combines quaternion channel mixing with block-circulant parameter structure and enables FFT-based evaluation through the complex adjoint representation. We present reference implementations of EdgeLDR layers and compare FFT-based computation against a naive spatial-domain realization of quaternion circulant products. FFT evaluation yields large empirical speedups over the naive implementation and keeps latency stable as block size increases, making larger compression factors computationally viable. We further integrate EdgeLDR layers into compact CNN and Transformer backbones and evaluate accuracy-compression trade-offs on 32x32 RGB classification (CIFAR-10/100, SVHN) and hyperspectral image classification (Houston 2013, Pavia University), reporting parameter counts and CPU/GPU latency. The results show that EdgeLDR layers provide significant compression with competitive accuracy. --- ### Inverting Non-Injective Functions with Twin Neural Network Regression Authors: Sebastian J. Wetzel Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05378v2 Non-injective functions are not globally invertible. However, they can often be restricted to locally injective subdomains where the inversion is well-defined. In many settings a preferred solution can be selected even when multiple valid preimages exist or input and output dimensions differ. This manuscript describes a natural reformulation of the inverse learning problem for non-injective functions as a collection of locally invertible problems. More precisely, Twin Neural Network Regression is trained to predict local inverse corrections around known anchor points. By anchoring predictions to points within the same locally invertible region, the method consistently selects a valid branch of the inverse. In contrast to current probabilistic state-of-the art inversion methods, Inverse Twin Neural Network Regression is a deterministic framework for resolving multi-valued inverse mappings. I demonstrate the approach on problems that are defined by mathematical equations or by data, including multi-solution toy problems and robot arm inverse kinematics. --- ### The Persona Paradox: Medical Personas as Behavioral Priors in Clinical Language Models Authors: Tassallah Abdullahi, Shrestha Ghosh, Hamish S Fraser, Daniel León Tramontini, Adeel Abbasi, Ghada Bourjeily, Carsten Eickhoff, Ritambhara Singh Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05376v1 Persona conditioning can be viewed as a behavioral prior for large language models (LLMs) and is often assumed to confer expertise and improve safety in a monotonic manner. However, its effects on high-stakes clinical decision-making remain poorly characterized. We systematically evaluate persona-based control in clinical LLMs, examining how professional roles (e.g., Emergency Department physician, nurse) and interaction styles (bold vs.\ cautious) influence behavior across models and medical tasks. We assess performance on clinical triage and patient-safety tasks using multidimensional evaluations that capture task accuracy, calibration, and safety-relevant risk behavior. We find systematic, context-dependent, and non-monotonic effects: Medical personas improve performance in critical care tasks, yielding gains of up to $\sim+20\%$ in accuracy and calibration, but degrade performance in primary-care settings by comparable margins. Interaction style modulates risk propensity and sensitivity, but it's highly model-dependent. While aggregated LLM-judge rankings favor medical over non-medical personas in safety-critical cases, we found that human clinicians show moderate agreement on safety compliance (average Cohen's $κ= 0.43$) but indicate a low confidence in 95.9\% of their responses on reasoning quality. Our work shows that personas function as behavioral priors that introduce context-dependent trade-offs rather than guarantees of safety or expertise. The code is available at https://github.com/rsinghlab/Persona\_Paradox. --- ### From Unstructured Data to Demand Counterfactuals: Theory and Practice Authors: Timothy Christensen, Giovanni Compiani Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: econ.EM, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05374v2 Empirical models of multi-product demand rely on low-dimensional product representations to capture substitution patterns, increasingly using proxies built from unstructured data. When proxies are imperfect, standard workflows yield biased counterfactuals and invalid inference. We develop a practical toolkit to address these issues. Our methods apply to market-level and/or individual data, require minimal additional computation, provide simple standard-error formulas, and accommodate proxies from fine-tuned models. Further, we propose diagnostics to assess proxy quality. Our methods yield meaningful improvements in predicting substitution in empirically calibrated simulations and in an application where we assess counterfactual prediction performance against a ground truth. --- ### Ensemble of radiomics and ConvNeXt for breast cancer diagnosis Authors: Jorge Alberto Garza-Abdala, Gerardo Alejandro Fumagal-González, Beatriz A. Bosques-Palomo, Mario Alexis Monsivais Molina, Daly Avedano, Servando Cardona-Huerta, José Gerardo Tamez-Pena Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05373v1 Early diagnosis of breast cancer is crucial for improving survival rates. Radiomics and deep learning (DL) have shown significant potential in assisting radiologists with early cancer detection. This paper aims to critically assess the performance of radiomics, DL, and ensemble techniques in detecting cancer from screening mammograms. Two independent datasets were used: the RSNA 2023 Breast Cancer Detection Challenge (11,913 patients) and a Mexican cohort from the TecSalud dataset (19,400 patients). The ConvNeXtV1-small DL model was trained on the RSNA dataset and validated on the TecSalud dataset, while radiomics models were developed using the TecSalud dataset and validated with a leave-one-year-out approach. The ensemble method consistently combined and calibrated predictions using the same methodology. Results showed that the ensemble approach achieved the highest area under the curve (AUC) of 0.87, compared to 0.83 for ConvNeXtV1-small and 0.80 for radiomics. In conclusion, ensemble methods combining DL and radiomics predictions significantly enhance breast cancer diagnosis from mammograms. --- ### The Kernel Manifold: A Geometric Approach to Gaussian Process Model Selection Authors: Md Shafiqul Islam, Shakti Prasad Padhy, Douglas Allaire, Raymundo Arróyave Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05371v2 Gaussian Process (GP) regression is a powerful nonparametric Bayesian framework, but its performance depends critically on the choice of covariance kernel. Selecting an appropriate kernel is therefore central to model quality, yet remains one of the most challenging and computationally expensive steps in probabilistic modeling. We present a Bayesian optimization framework built on kernel-of-kernels geometry, using expected divergence-based distances between GP priors to explore kernel space efficiently. A multidimensional scaling (MDS) embedding of this distance matrix maps a discrete kernel library into a continuous Euclidean manifold, enabling smooth BO. In this formulation, the input space comprises kernel compositions, the objective is the log marginal likelihood, and featurization is given by the MDS coordinates. When the divergence yields a valid metric, the embedding preserves geometry and produces a stable BO landscape. We demonstrate the approach on synthetic benchmarks, real-world time-series datasets, and an additive manufacturing case study predicting melt-pool geometry, achieving superior predictive accuracy and uncertainty calibration relative to baselines including Large Language Model (LLM)-guided search. This framework establishes a reusable probabilistic geometry for kernel search, with direct relevance to GP modeling and deep kernel learning. --- ### MOSAIC-GS: Monocular Scene Reconstruction via Advanced Initialization for Complex Dynamic Environments Authors: Svitlana Morkva, Maximum Wilder-Smith, Michael Oechsle, Alessio Tonioni, Marco Hutter, Vaishakh Patil Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05368v1 We present MOSAIC-GS, a novel, fully explicit, and computationally efficient approach for high-fidelity dynamic scene reconstruction from monocular videos using Gaussian Splatting. Monocular reconstruction is inherently ill-posed due to the lack of sufficient multiview constraints, making accurate recovery of object geometry and temporal coherence particularly challenging. To address this, we leverage multiple geometric cues, such as depth, optical flow, dynamic object segmentation, and point tracking. Combined with rigidity-based motion constraints, these cues allow us to estimate preliminary 3D scene dynamics during an initialization stage. Recovering scene dynamics prior to the photometric optimization reduces reliance on motion inference from visual appearance alone, which is often ambiguous in monocular settings. To enable compact representations, fast training, and real-time rendering while supporting non-rigid deformations, the scene is decomposed into static and dynamic components. Each Gaussian in the dynamic part of the scene is assigned a trajectory represented as time-dependent Poly-Fourier curve for parameter-efficient motion encoding. We demonstrate that MOSAIC-GS achieves substantially faster optimization and rendering compared to existing methods, while maintaining reconstruction quality on par with state-of-the-art approaches across standard monocular dynamic scene benchmarks. --- ### Lost in Execution: On the Multilingual Robustness of Tool Calling in Large Language Models Authors: Zheng Luo, T Pranav Kutralingam, Ogochukwu N Okoani, Wanpeng Xu, Hua Wei, Xiyang Hu Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05366v2 Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as agents that invoke external tools through structured function calls. While recent work reports strong tool-calling performance under standard English-centric evaluations, the robustness of tool calling under multilingual user interactions remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce MLCL, a diagnostic benchmark, and conduct a systematic evaluation of multilingual tool calling across Chinese, Hindi, and the low-resource language Igbo. Through fine-grained error analysis, we show that many failures occur despite correct intent understanding and tool selection. We identify parameter value language mismatch as a dominant failure mode, where models generate semantically appropriate parameter values in the user's language, violating language-invariant execution conventions. We further evaluate several inference-time system strategies and find that while these strategies substantially reduce language-induced execution errors, none of them can fully recover English-level performance. --- ### STResNet & STYOLO : A New Family of Compact Classification and Object Detection Models for MCUs Authors: Sudhakar Sah, Ravish Kumar Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05364v1 Recent advancements in lightweight neural networks have significantly improved the efficiency of deploying deep learning models on edge hardware. However, most existing architectures still trade accuracy for latency, which limits their applicability on microcontroller and neural processing unit based devices. In this work, we introduce two new model families, STResNet for image classification and STYOLO for object detection, jointly optimized for accuracy, efficiency, and memory footprint on resource constrained platforms. The proposed STResNet series, ranging from Nano to Tiny variants, achieves competitive ImageNet 1K accuracy within a four million parameter budget. Specifically, STResNetMilli attains 70.0 percent Top 1 accuracy with only three million parameters, outperforming MobileNetV1 and ShuffleNetV2 at comparable computational complexity. For object detection, STYOLOMicro and STYOLOMilli achieve 30.5 percent and 33.6 percent mean average precision, respectively, on the MS COCO dataset, surpassing YOLOv5n and YOLOX Nano in both accuracy and efficiency. Furthermore, when STResNetMilli is used as a backbone with the Ultralytics training environment. --- ### The Table of Media Bias Elements: A sentence-level taxonomy of media bias types and propaganda techniques Authors: Tim Menzner, Jochen L. Leidner Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05358v1 Public debates about "left-" or "right-wing" news overlook the fact that bias is usually conveyed by concrete linguistic manoeuvres that transcend any single political spectrum. We therefore shift the focus from where an outlet allegedly stands to how partiality is expressed in individual sentences. Drawing on 26,464 sentences collected from newsroom corpora, user submissions and our own browsing, we iteratively combine close-reading, interdisciplinary theory and pilot annotation to derive a fine-grained, sentence-level taxonomy of media bias and propaganda. The result is a two-tier schema comprising 38 elementary bias types, arranged in six functional families and visualised as a "table of media-bias elements". For each type we supply a definition, real-world examples, cognitive and societal drivers, and guidance for recognition. A quantitative survey of a random 155-sentence sample illustrates prevalence differences, while a cross-walk to the best-known NLP and communication-science taxonomies reveals substantial coverage gains and reduced ambiguity. --- ### PRISM: Protocol Refinement through Intelligent Simulation Modeling Authors: Brian Hsu, Priyanka V Setty, Rory M Butler, Ryan Lewis, Casey Stone, Rebecca Weinberg, Thomas Brettin, Rick Stevens, Ian Foster, Arvind Ramanathan Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.MA, q-bio.QM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05356v1 Automating experimental protocol design and execution remains as a fundamental bottleneck in realizing self-driving laboratories. We introduce PRISM (Protocol Refinement through Intelligent Simulation Modeling), a framework that automates the design, validation, and execution of experimental protocols on a laboratory platform composed of off-the-shelf robotic instruments. PRISM uses a set of language-model-based agents that work together to generate and refine experimental steps. The process begins with automatically gathering relevant procedures from web-based sources describing experimental workflows. These are converted into structured experimental steps (e.g., liquid handling steps, deck layout and other related operations) through a planning, critique, and validation loop. The finalized steps are translated into the Argonne MADSci protocol format, which provides a unified interface for coordinating multiple robotic instruments (Opentrons OT-2 liquid handler, PF400 arm, Azenta plate sealer and peeler) without requiring human intervention between steps. To evaluate protocol-generation performance, we benchmarked both single reasoning models and multi-agent workflow across constrained and open-ended prompting paradigms. The resulting protocols were validated in a digital-twin environment built in NVIDIA Omniverse to detect physical or sequencing errors before execution. Using Luna qPCR amplification and Cell Painting as case studies, we demonstrate PRISM as a practical end-to-end workflow that bridges language-based protocol generation, simulation-based validation, and automated robotic execution. --- ### An AI-powered Bayesian Generative Modeling Approach for Arbitrary Conditional Inference Authors: Qiao Liu, Wing Hung Wong Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: stat.ML, cs.AI, cs.LG, stat.CO, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05355v2 Modern data analysis increasingly requires flexible conditional inference P(X_B | X_A) where (X_A, X_B) is an arbitrary partition of observed variable X. Existing approaches are either restricted to a fixed conditioning structure or depend strongly on the distribution of conditioning masks during training. To address these limitations, we introduce Bayesian generative modeling (BGM), a unified framework for arbitrary conditional inference. BGM learns a generative model of X via a stochastic iterative Bayesian updating algorithm in which model parameters and latent variables are updated until convergence. Once trained, any conditional distribution can be obtained without retraining. Empirically, BGM achieves superior predictive performance with posterior predictive intervals, demonstrating that a single learned model can serve as a universal engine for conditional prediction with principled uncertainty quantification. We provide theoretical guarantees for convergence of the stochastic iterative algorithm, statistical consistency, and conditional risk bounds. The proposed BGM framework leverages modern AI to capture complex relationships among variables while adhering to Bayesian principles, offering a promising approach for a wide range of applications in modern data science. Code for BGM is available at https://github.com/liuq-lab/bayesgm. Document of BGM is available at https://bayesgm.readthedocs.io. --- ### GlyRAG: Context-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Framework for Blood Glucose Forecasting Authors: Shovito Barua Soumma, Hassan Ghasemzadeh Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.IT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05353v3 Accurate blood glucose forecasting using continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) data can support the early prediction of dysglycemic risk. However, current neural-network-based forecasting models treat CGM data as a purely numerical sequence without integrating the contextual information contained in CGM signal morphology. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for time-series forecasting, yet their role as agentic context extractors in diabetes care remains largely unexplored. In this study, we bridge glucose forecasting and LLM-based contextualization by developing GlyRAG, a context-aware, retrieval-augmented forecasting framework that uses an LLM as a contextualization agent to summarize glucose morphology directly from a timed CGM window. The generated CGM-only narrative is embedded and fused with patch-based glucose representations, while a retrieval module incorporates similar historical training episodes through cross-attention. We evaluate GlyRAG on the OhioT1DM and AZT1D datasets for 5-, 30-, and 60-minute forecasting horizons. Compared with strong CGM-only baselines, GPT-4 GlyRAG significantly improves long-horizon root mean square error (RMSE) over PatchTST on both datasets. For example, RMSE decreases from 13.8 to 10.6 at 30 minutes and from 23.1 to 20.2 at 60 minutes on OhioT1DM. LLaMA 3.1 produces smaller but significant long-horizon gains, suggesting that the contextualization pipeline is not limited to GPT-4. Clinical error-grid analyses further show that approximately 85 percent of predictions fall within the clinically acceptable Clarke Error Grid Zones A and B. These results suggest that CGM-derived linguistic context and case-based retrieval can improve long-horizon glucose forecasting without requiring additional sensing modalities. --- ### When the Server Steps In: Calibrated Updates for Fair Federated Learning Authors: Tianrun Yu, Kaixiang Zhao, Cheng Zhang, Anjun Gao, Yueyang Quan, Zhuqing Liu, Minghong Fang Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CR, cs.IR, cs.SI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05352v2 Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a transformative distributed learning paradigm, enabling multiple clients to collaboratively train a global model under the coordination of a central server without sharing their raw training data. While FL offers notable advantages, it faces critical challenges in ensuring fairness across diverse demographic groups. To address these fairness concerns, various fairness-aware debiasing methods have been proposed. However, many of these approaches either require modifications to clients' training protocols or lack flexibility in their aggregation strategies. In this work, we address these limitations by introducing EquFL, a novel server-side debiasing method designed to mitigate bias in FL systems. EquFL operates by allowing the server to generate a single calibrated update after receiving model updates from the clients. This calibrated update is then integrated with the aggregated client updates to produce an adjusted global model that reduces bias. Theoretically, we establish that EquFL converges to the optimal global model achieved by FedAvg and effectively reduces fairness loss over training rounds. Empirically, we demonstrate that EquFL significantly mitigates bias within the system, showcasing its practical effectiveness. --- ### Coding the Visual World: From Image to Simulation Using Vision Language Models Authors: Sagi Eppel Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05344v3 The ability to construct mental models of the world is a central aspect of understanding. Similarly, visual understanding can be viewed as the ability to construct a representative model of the system depicted in an image. This work explores the capacity of Vision Language Models (VLMs) to recognize and simulate the systems and mechanisms depicted in images using the Im2Sim methodology. The VLM is given a natural image of a real-world system (e.g., cities, clouds, vegetation) and is tasked with describing the system and writing code that simulates and generates it. This generative code is then executed to produce a synthetic image, which is compared against the original. This approach is tested on various complex emergent systems, ranging from physical systems (waves, lights, clouds) to vegetation, cities, materials, and geological formations. Through analysis of the models and images generated by the VLMs, we examine their understanding of the systems in images. The results show that leading VLMs (GPT, Gemini) have the ability to understand and model complex, multi-component systems across multiple layers of abstraction and a wide range of domains. At the same time, the VLMs exhibit limited ability to replicate fine details and low-level arrangements of patterns in the image. These findings reveal an interesting asymmetry: VLMs combine high-level, deep visual understanding of images with limited perception of fine details. --- ### Multi-turn Jailbreaking Attack in Multi-Modal Large Language Models Authors: Badhan Chandra Das, Md Tasnim Jawad, Joaquin Molto, M. Hadi Amini, Yanzhao Wu Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05339v1 In recent years, the security vulnerabilities of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have become a serious concern in the Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) research. These highly intelligent models, capable of performing multi-modal tasks with high accuracy, are also severely susceptible to carefully launched security attacks, such as jailbreaking attacks, which can manipulate model behavior and bypass safety constraints. This paper introduces MJAD-MLLMs, a holistic framework that systematically analyzes the proposed Multi-turn Jailbreaking Attacks and multi-LLM-based defense techniques for MLLMs. In this paper, we make three original contributions. First, we introduce a novel multi-turn jailbreaking attack to exploit the vulnerabilities of the MLLMs under multi-turn prompting. Second, we propose a novel fragment-optimized and multi-LLM defense mechanism, called FragGuard, to effectively mitigate jailbreaking attacks in the MLLMs. Third, we evaluate the efficacy of the proposed attacks and defenses through extensive experiments on several state-of-the-art (SOTA) open-source and closed-source MLLMs and benchmark datasets, and compare their performance with the existing techniques. --- ### Generalized Canonical Polyadic Tensor Decompositions with General Symmetry Authors: Alex Mulrooney, David Hong Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: math.NA, cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05335v1 Canonical Polyadic (CP) tensor decomposition is a workhorse algorithm for discovering underlying low-dimensional structure in tensor data. This is accomplished in conventional CP decomposition by fitting a low-rank tensor to data with respect to the least-squares loss. Generalized CP (GCP) decompositions generalize this approach by allowing general loss functions that can be more appropriate, e.g., to model binary and count data or to improve robustness to outliers. However, GCP decompositions do not explicitly account for any symmetry in the tensors, which commonly arises in modern applications. For example, a tensor formed by stacking the adjacency matrices of a dynamic graph over time will naturally exhibit symmetry along the two modes corresponding to the graph nodes. In this paper, we develop a symmetric GCP (SymGCP) decomposition that allows for general forms of symmetry, i.e., symmetry along any subset of the modes. SymGCP accounts for symmetry by enforcing the corresponding symmetry in the decomposition. We derive gradients for SymGCP that enable its efficient computation via all-at-once optimization with existing tensor kernels. The form of the gradients also leads to various stochastic approximations that enable us to develop stochastic SymGCP algorithms that can scale to large tensors. We demonstrate the utility of the proposed SymGCP algorithms with a variety of experiments on both synthetic and real data. --- ### Improving Enzyme Prediction with Chemical Reaction Equations by Hypergraph-Enhanced Knowledge Graph Embeddings Authors: Tengwei Song, Long Yin, Zhen Han, Zhiqiang Xu Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05330v1 Predicting enzyme-substrate interactions has long been a fundamental problem in biochemistry and metabolic engineering. While existing methods could leverage databases of expert-curated enzyme-substrate pairs for models to learn from known pair interactions, the databases are often sparse, i.e., there are only limited and incomplete examples of such pairs, and also labor-intensive to maintain. This lack of sufficient training data significantly hinders the ability of traditional enzyme prediction models to generalize to unseen interactions. In this work, we try to exploit chemical reaction equations from domain-specific databases, given their easier accessibility and denser, more abundant data. However, interactions of multiple compounds, e.g., educts and products, with the same enzymes create complex relational data patterns that traditional models cannot easily capture. To tackle that, we represent chemical reaction equations as triples of (educt, enzyme, product) within a knowledge graph, such that we can take advantage of knowledge graph embedding (KGE) to infer missing enzyme-substrate pairs for graph completion. Particularly, in order to capture intricate relationships among compounds, we propose our knowledge-enhanced hypergraph model for enzyme prediction, i.e., Hyper-Enz, which integrates a hypergraph transformer with a KGE model to learn representations of the hyper-edges that involve multiple educts and products. Also, a multi-expert paradigm is introduced to guide the learning of enzyme-substrate interactions with both the proposed model and chemical reaction equations. Experimental results show a significant improvement, with up to a 88% relative improvement in average enzyme retrieval accuracy and 30% improvement in pair-level prediction compared to traditional models, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. --- ### Bi-Orthogonal Factor Decomposition for Vision Transformers Authors: Fenil R. Doshi, Thomas Fel, Talia Konkle, George Alvarez Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05328v1 Self-attention is the central computational primitive of Vision Transformers, yet we lack a principled understanding of what information attention mechanisms exchange between tokens. Attention maps describe where weight mass concentrates; they do not reveal whether queries and keys trade position, content, or both. We introduce Bi-orthogonal Factor Decomposition (BFD), a two-stage analytical framework: first, an ANOVA-based decomposition statistically disentangles token activations into orthogonal positional and content factors; second, SVD of the query-key interaction matrix QK^T exposes bi-orthogonal modes that reveal how these factors mediate communication. After validating proper isolation of position and content, we apply BFD to state-of-the-art vision models and uncover three phenomena.(i) Attention operates primarily through content. Content-content interactions dominate attention energy, followed by content-position coupling. DINOv2 allocates more energy to content-position than supervised models and distributes computation across a richer mode spectrum. (ii) Attention mechanisms exhibit specialization: heads differentiate into content-content, content-position, and position-position operators, while singular modes within heads show analogous specialization. (iii) DINOv2's superior holistic shape processing emerges from intermediate layers that simultaneously preserve positional structure while contextually enriching semantic content. Overall, BFD exposes how tokens interact through attention and which informational factors - positional or semantic - mediate their communication, yielding practical insights into vision transformer mechanisms. --- ### Ontology Neural Networks for Topologically Conditioned Constraint Satisfaction Authors: Jaehong Oh Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05304v1 Neuro-symbolic reasoning systems face fundamental challenges in maintaining semantic coherence while satisfying physical and logical constraints. Building upon our previous work on Ontology Neural Networks, we present an enhanced framework that integrates topological conditioning with gradient stabilization mechanisms. The approach employs Forman-Ricci curvature to capture graph topology, Deep Delta Learning for stable rank-one perturbations during constraint projection, and Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy for parameter optimization. Experimental evaluation across multiple problem sizes demonstrates that the method achieves mean energy reduction to 1.15 compared to baseline values of 11.68, with 95 percent success rate in constraint satisfaction tasks. The framework exhibits seed-independent convergence and graceful scaling behavior up to twenty-node problems, suggesting that topological structure can inform gradient-based optimization without sacrificing interpretability or computational efficiency. --- ### Effects of personality steering on cooperative behavior in Large Language Model agents Authors: Mizuki Sakai, Mizuki Yokoyama, Wakaba Tateishi, Genki Ichinose Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05302v2 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as autonomous agents in strategic and social interactions. Although recent studies suggest that assigning personality traits to LLMs can influence their behavior, how personality steering affects cooperation under controlled conditions remains unclear. In this study, we examine the effects of personality steering on cooperative behavior in LLM agents using repeated Prisoner's Dilemma games. Based on the Big Five framework, we first measure basic personality scores of three models, GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-4o, and GPT-5, using the Big Five Inventory. We then compare behavior under baseline and personality-informed conditions, and further analyze the effects of independently manipulating each personality dimension to extreme values. Our results show that agreeableness is the dominant factor promoting cooperation across all models, while other personality traits have limited impact. Explicit personality information increases cooperation but can also raise vulnerability to exploitation, particularly in earlier-generation models. In contrast, later-generation models exhibit more selective cooperation. These findings indicate that personality steering acts as a behavioral bias rather than a deterministic control mechanism. --- ### TIME: Temporally Intelligent Meta-reasoning Engine for Context-Triggered Explicit Reasoning Authors: Susmit Das Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05300v2 Reasoning-oriented language models typically expose explicit reasoning as a long, front-loaded chain of "thinking" tokens before the main output, either always enabled or externally toggled at inference time. Although this can help on arithmetic, coding, and other multi-step tasks, it is costly, weakens claim-level auditability, and does not allow the model to re-trigger explicit reasoning once presentation has begun. In dialogue, these limitations are compounded by weak sensitivity to temporal structure: unless time is explicitly stated in text, standard models treat replies separated by seconds and replies separated by weeks as equivalent. We introduce TIME (Temporally Intelligent Meta-reasoning Engine), a behavioral alignment framework that learns explicit reasoning as a context-triggered control policy rather than a fixed response mode. TIME augments dialogue with optional ISO 8601 <time> tags, tick events that represent silent time passage, and short <think> blocks that may appear anywhere in a response. Using a four-phase curriculum, including a small maximally diverse full-batch alignment stage, we train Qwen3 dense models to invoke brief, in-place reasoning bursts only when contextual cues warrant them, while keeping user-facing output compact. We also introduce TIMEBench, a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating reasoning from temporal cues in dialogue. Across 4B-32B scales, TIME improves TIMEBench scores over the corresponding base Qwen3 models in both thinking and no-thinking modes while reducing explicit reasoning tokens by roughly an order of magnitude. Beyond score improvements, TIME induces a distinct behavioral shift: explicit reasoning becomes more compact and more responsive to contextual cues. Code, training data, and benchmark artifacts are publicly available. --- ### Optimizing Digital Adjudication through Social Network Analysis: An Empirical Study of Credit Card Disputes in Beijing Authors: Chung Han Tsai, ChengTo Lin, Chung Han Tsai, ChengTo Lin, Baowen Zhang, Qingyue Deng, Yunhui Zhao, Zhijia Song, Baowen Zhang, Qingyue Deng, Yunhui Zhao, Zhijia Song Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.SI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05299v1 Amid the rapid digitalization of judicial systems, the integration of big data into adjudication remains underexplored, particularly in uncovering the structural logic of legal applications. This study bridges this gap by employing social network analysis (SNA) to examine credit card disputes involving personal information protection adjudicated in Beijing. By constructing a legal citation network, we reveal the latent patterns of substantive and procedural law application. The findings demonstrate that SNA can effectively identify core legal norms and typify cases, offering a robust methodological framework for optimizing 'Digital Court' systems. These insights provide practical pathways for enhancing judicial efficiency and consistency through data-driven case retrieval and holistic judicial information networks. --- ### Mathematical Knowledge Graph-Driven Framework for Equation-Based Predictive and Reliable Additive Manufacturing Authors: Yeongbin Cha, Namjung Kim Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05298v1 Additive manufacturing (AM) relies critically on understanding and extrapolating process-property relationships; however, existing data-driven approaches remain limited by fragmented knowledge representations and unreliable extrapolation under sparse data conditions. In this study, we propose an ontology-guided, equation-centric framework that tightly integrates large language models (LLMs) with an additive manufacturing mathematical knowledge graph (AM-MKG) to enable reliable knowledge extraction and principled extrapolative modeling. By explicitly encoding equations, variables, assumptions, and their semantic relationships within a formal ontology, unstructured literature is transformed into machine-interpretable representations that support structured querying and reasoning. LLM-based equation generation is further conditioned on MKG-derived subgraphs, enforcing physically meaningful functional forms and mitigating non-physical or unstable extrapolation trends. To assess reliability beyond conventional predictive uncertainty, a confidence-aware extrapolation assessment is introduced, integrating extrapolation distance, statistical stability, and knowledge-graph-based physical consistency into a unified confidence score. Results demonstrate that ontology-guided extraction significantly improves the structural coherence and quantitative reliability of extracted knowledge, while subgraph-conditioned equation generation yields stable and physically consistent extrapolations compared to unguided LLM outputs. Overall, this work establishes a unified pipeline for ontology-driven knowledge representation, equation-centered reasoning, and confidence-based extrapolation assessment, highlighting the potential of knowledge-graph-augmented LLMs as reliable tools for extrapolative modeling in additive manufacturing. --- ### Machine learning assisted state prediction of misspecified linear dynamical system via modal reduction Authors: Rohan Vitthal Thorat, Rajdip Nayek Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05297v1 Accurate prediction of structural dynamics is imperative for preserving digital twin fidelity throughout operational lifetimes. Parametric models with fixed nominal parameters often omit critical physical effects due to simplifications in geometry, material behavior, damping, or boundary conditions, resulting in model form errors (MFEs) that impair predictive accuracy. This work introduces a comprehensive framework for MFE estimation and correction in high-dimensional finite element (FE) based structural dynamical systems. The Gaussian Process Latent Force Model (GPLFM) represents discrepancies non-parametrically in the reduced modal domain, allowing a flexible data-driven characterization of unmodeled dynamics. A linear Bayesian filtering approach jointly estimates system states and discrepancies, incorporating epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties. To ensure computational tractability, the FE system is projected onto a reduced modal basis, and a mesh-invariant neural network maps modal states to discrepancy estimates, permitting model rectification across different FE discretizations without retraining. Validation is undertaken across five MFE scenarios-including incorrect beam theory, damping misspecification, misspecified boundary condition, unmodeled material nonlinearity, and local damage demonstrating the surrogate model's substantial reduction of displacement and rotation prediction errors under unseen excitations. The proposed methodology offers a potential means to uphold digital twin accuracy amid inherent modeling uncertainties. --- ### MoEBlaze: Breaking the Memory Wall for Efficient MoE Training on Modern GPUs Authors: Jiyuan Zhang, Yining Liu, Siqi Yan, Lisen Deng, Jennifer Cao, Shuqi Yang, Min Ni, Bi Xue, Shen Li Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.DC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05296v1 The pervasive "memory wall" bottleneck is significantly amplified in modern large-scale Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures. MoE's inherent architectural sparsity leads to sparse arithmetic compute and also introduces substantial activation memory overheads -- driven by large token routing buffers and the need to materialize and buffer intermediate tensors. This memory pressure limits the maximum batch size and sequence length that can fit on GPUs, and also results in excessive data movements that hinders performance and efficient model scaling. We present MoEBlaze, a memory-efficient MoE training framework that addresses these issues through a co-designed system approach: (i) an end-to-end token dispatch and MoE training method with optimized data structures to eliminate intermediate buffers and activation materializing, and (ii) co-designed kernels with smart activation checkpoint to mitigate memory footprint while simultaneously achieving better performance. We demonstrate that MoEBlaze can achieve over 4x speedups and over 50% memory savings compared to existing MoE frameworks. --- ### A Survey of Agentic AI and Cybersecurity: Challenges, Opportunities and Use-case Prototypes Authors: Sahaya Jestus Lazer, Kshitiz Aryal, Maanak Gupta, Elisa Bertino Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05293v1 Agentic AI marks an important transition from single-step generative models to systems capable of reasoning, planning, acting, and adapting over long-lasting tasks. By integrating memory, tool use, and iterative decision cycles, these systems enable continuous, autonomous workflows in real-world environments. This survey examines the implications of agentic AI for cybersecurity. On the defensive side, agentic capabilities enable continuous monitoring, autonomous incident response, adaptive threat hunting, and fraud detection at scale. Conversely, the same properties amplify adversarial power by accelerating reconnaissance, exploitation, coordination, and social-engineering attacks. These dual-use dynamics expose fundamental gaps in existing governance, assurance, and accountability mechanisms, which were largely designed for non-autonomous and short-lived AI systems. To address these challenges, we survey emerging threat models, security frameworks, and evaluation pipelines tailored to agentic systems, and analyze systemic risks including agent collusion, cascading failures, oversight evasion, and memory poisoning. Finally, we present three representative use-case implementations that illustrate how agentic AI behaves in practical cybersecurity workflows, and how design choices shape reliability, safety, and operational effectiveness. --- ### Mesh4D: 4D Mesh Reconstruction and Tracking from Monocular Video Authors: Zeren Jiang, Chuanxia Zheng, Iro Laina, Diane Larlus, Andrea Vedaldi Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05251v1 We propose Mesh4D, a feed-forward model for monocular 4D mesh reconstruction. Given a monocular video of a dynamic object, our model reconstructs the object's complete 3D shape and motion, represented as a deformation field. Our key contribution is a compact latent space that encodes the entire animation sequence in a single pass. This latent space is learned by an autoencoder that, during training, is guided by the skeletal structure of the training objects, providing strong priors on plausible deformations. Crucially, skeletal information is not required at inference time. The encoder employs spatio-temporal attention, yielding a more stable representation of the object's overall deformation. Building on this representation, we train a latent diffusion model that, conditioned on the input video and the mesh reconstructed from the first frame, predicts the full animation in one shot. We evaluate Mesh4D on reconstruction and novel view synthesis benchmarks, outperforming prior methods in recovering accurate 3D shape and deformation. --- ### Quantum Implicit Neural Representations for Novel View Synthesis Authors: Daniele Lizzio Bosco, Shuteng Wang, Giuseppe Serra, Vladislav Golyanik Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05250v2 Quantum implicit neural representations have recently emerged as compact function approximators for continuous visual signals. In parallel, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have become a dominant framework for novel-view synthesis by recovering continuous volumetric scene representations from posed 2D images, but often require substantial model capacity and intensive optimisation. We introduce 3D Quantum Implicit Scene Representation (3D-QISR), the first hybrid quantum-classical radiance-field model for novel-view synthesis from 2D observations. 3D-QISR replaces the classical NeRF backbone with parameterised quantum circuits that encode spatial and view-dependent information through quantum state transformations, enabling compact quantum-enhanced implicit representations while preserving compatibility with standard volumetric rendering. We propose two architectures: Full 3D-QISR, which maximises the representational role of a unified quantum state, and Dual-Branch 3D-QISR, which separates spatial and view-dependent quantum embeddings to introduce a task-aligned inductive bias, reduce state-preparation complexity, and improve scalability and hardware compatibility. Experiments on moderate-resolution novel-view synthesis benchmarks show that 3D-QISR executed on simulated quantum hardware matches or outperforms classical baselines while using fewer than half the trainable parameters. These results position quantum neural networks as compact and competitive building blocks for continuous volumetric scene representation, opening a new direction for quantum-enhanced implicit neural rendering. --- ### QNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields on a Simulated Gate-Based Quantum Computer Authors: Daniele Lizzio Bosco, Shuteng Wang, Giuseppe Serra, Vladislav Golyanik Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05250v1 Recently, Quantum Visual Fields (QVFs) have shown promising improvements in model compactness and convergence speed for learning the provided 2D or 3D signals. Meanwhile, novel-view synthesis has seen major advances with Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), where models learn a compact representation from 2D images to render 3D scenes, albeit at the cost of larger models and intensive training. In this work, we extend the approach of QVFs by introducing QNeRF, the first hybrid quantum-classical model designed for novel-view synthesis from 2D images. QNeRF leverages parameterised quantum circuits to encode spatial and view-dependent information via quantum superposition and entanglement, resulting in more compact models compared to the classical counterpart. We present two architectural variants. Full QNeRF maximally exploits all quantum amplitudes to enhance representational capabilities. In contrast, Dual-Branch QNeRF introduces a task-informed inductive bias by branching spatial and view-dependent quantum state preparations, drastically reducing the complexity of this operation and ensuring scalability and potential hardware compatibility. Our experiments demonstrate that -- when trained on images of moderate resolution -- QNeRF matches or outperforms classical NeRF baselines while using less than half the number of parameters. These results suggest that quantum machine learning can serve as a competitive alternative for continuous signal representation in mid-level tasks in computer vision, such as 3D representation learning from 2D observations. --- ### RL-AWB: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Auto White Balance Correction in Low-Light Night-time Scenes Authors: Yuan-Kang Lee, Kuan-Lin Chen, Chia-Che Chang, Yu-Lun Liu Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05249v4 Nighttime color constancy still remains a challenging problem in computational photography due to low-light noise and complex illumination conditions. We present RL-AWB, a novel framework combining statistical methods with deep reinforcement learning for nighttime white balance. Our method begins with a statistical algorithm tailored for nighttime scenes, integrating salient gray pixel detection with novel illuminant estimation. Building on this foundation, we develop the first deep reinforcement learning approach for color constancy that leverages the statistical algorithm as its core, mimicking professional AWB tuning experts by dynamically determining image-specific parameters at inference time, without requiring ground-truth illuminants or reference images. To further facilitate cross-sensor evaluation, we introduce the first multi-sensor nighttime dataset. Experiment results demonstrate that our method achieves strong generalization capability across low-light and well-illuminated images. Project page: https://ntuneillee.github.io/research/rl-awb/ ---