# Research Papers — 2026-01 · bundle page 148 of 189 > Full-text markdown of papers #7351–7400 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/148 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-01/page/147.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-01/page/149.md) ### GenAI-DrawIO-Creator: A Framework for Automated Diagram Generation Authors: Jinze Yu, Dayuan Jiang Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.GR, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05162v2 Diagrams are crucial for communicating complex information, yet creating and modifying them remains a labor-intensive task. We present GenAI-DrawIO-Creator, a novel framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate diagram generation and manipulation in the structured XML format used by draw.io. Our system integrates Claude 3.7 to reason about structured visual data and produce valid diagram representations. Key contributions include a high-level system design enabling real-time diagram updates, specialized prompt engineering and error-checking to ensure well-formed XML outputs. We demonstrate a working prototype capable of generating accurate diagrams (such as network architectures and flowcharts) from natural language or code, and even replicating diagrams from images. Simulated evaluations show that our approach significantly reduces diagram creation time and produces outputs with high structural fidelity. Our results highlight the promise of Claude 3.7 in handling structured visual reasoning tasks and lay the groundwork for future research in AI-assisted diagramming applications. --- ### GenAI-DrawIO-Creator: A Framework for Automated Diagram Generation Authors: Jinze Yu, Dayuan Jiang Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.GR, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05162v1 Diagrams are crucial for communicating complex information, yet creating and modifying them remains a labor-intensive task. We present GenAI-DrawIO-Creator, a novel framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate diagram generation and manipulation in the structured XML format used by draw.io. Our system integrates Claude 3.7 to reason about structured visual data and produce valid diagram representations. Key contributions include a high-level system design enabling real-time diagram updates, specialized prompt engineering and error-checking to ensure well-formed XML outputs. We demonstrate a working prototype capable of generating accurate diagrams (such as network architectures and flowcharts) from natural language or code, and even replicating diagrams from images. Simulated evaluations show that our approach significantly reduces diagram creation time and produces outputs with high structural fidelity. Our results highlight the promise of Claude 3.7 in handling structured visual reasoning tasks and lay the groundwork for future research in AI-assisted diagramming applications. --- ### Vision-Language Introspection: Mitigating Overconfident Hallucinations in MLLMs via Interpretable Bi-Causal Steering Authors: Shuliang Liu, Songbo Yang, Dong Fang, Sihang Jia, Yuqi Tang, Lingfeng Su, Ruoshui Peng, Yibo Yan, Xin Zou, Xuming Hu Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05159v1 Object hallucination critically undermines the reliability of Multimodal Large Language Models, often stemming from a fundamental failure in cognitive introspection, where models blindly trust linguistic priors over specific visual evidence. Existing mitigations remain limited: contrastive decoding approaches operate superficially without rectifying internal semantic misalignments, while current latent steering methods rely on static vectors that lack instance-specific precision. We introduce Vision-Language Introspection (VLI), a training-free inference framework that simulates a metacognitive self-correction process. VLI first performs Attributive Introspection to diagnose hallucination risks via probabilistic conflict detection and localize the causal visual anchors. It then employs Interpretable Bi-Causal Steering to actively modulate the inference process, dynamically isolating visual evidence from background noise while neutralizing blind confidence through adaptive calibration. VLI achieves state-of-the-art performance on advanced models, reducing object hallucination rates by 12.67% on MMHal-Bench and improving accuracy by 5.8% on POPE. --- ### Learning Mixture Models via Efficient High-dimensional Sparse Fourier Transforms Authors: Alkis Kalavasis, Pravesh K. Kothari, Shuchen Li, Manolis Zampetakis Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.DS, cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05157v2 In this work, we give a ${\rm poly}(d,k)$ time and sample algorithm for efficiently learning the parameters of a mixture of $k$ spherical distributions in $d$ dimensions. Unlike all previous methods, our techniques apply to heavy-tailed distributions and include examples that do not even have finite covariances. Our method succeeds whenever the cluster distributions have a characteristic function with sufficiently heavy tails. Such distributions include the Laplace distribution but crucially exclude Gaussians. All previous methods for learning mixture models relied implicitly or explicitly on the low-degree moments. Even for the case of Laplace distributions, we prove that any such algorithm must use super-polynomially many samples. Our method thus adds to the short list of techniques that bypass the limitations of the method of moments. Somewhat surprisingly, our algorithm does not require any minimum separation between the cluster means. This is in stark contrast to spherical Gaussian mixtures where a minimum $\ell_2$-separation is provably necessary even information-theoretically (Regev and Vijayaraghavan '17). Our methods compose well with existing techniques and allow obtaining ''best of both worlds" guarantees for mixtures where every component either has a heavy-tailed characteristic function or has a sub-Gaussian tail with a light-tailed characteristic function. Our algorithm is based on a new approach to learning mixture models via efficient high-dimensional sparse Fourier transforms. We believe that this method will find more applications to statistical estimation. As an example, we give an algorithm for consistent robust mean estimation against noise-oblivious adversaries, a model practically motivated by the literature on multiple hypothesis testing. It was formally proposed in a recent Master's thesis by one of the authors, and has already inspired follow-up works. --- ### Learning Mixture Models via Efficient High-dimensional Sparse Fourier Transforms Authors: Alkis Kalavasis, Pravesh K. Kothari, Shuchen Li, Manolis Zampetakis Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.DS, cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05157v1 In this work, we give a ${\rm poly}(d,k)$ time and sample algorithm for efficiently learning the parameters of a mixture of $k$ spherical distributions in $d$ dimensions. Unlike all previous methods, our techniques apply to heavy-tailed distributions and include examples that do not even have finite covariances. Our method succeeds whenever the cluster distributions have a characteristic function with sufficiently heavy tails. Such distributions include the Laplace distribution but crucially exclude Gaussians. All previous methods for learning mixture models relied implicitly or explicitly on the low-degree moments. Even for the case of Laplace distributions, we prove that any such algorithm must use super-polynomially many samples. Our method thus adds to the short list of techniques that bypass the limitations of the method of moments. Somewhat surprisingly, our algorithm does not require any minimum separation between the cluster means. This is in stark contrast to spherical Gaussian mixtures where a minimum $\ell_2$-separation is provably necessary even information-theoretically (Regev and Vijayaraghavan '17). Our methods compose well with existing techniques and allow obtaining ''best of both worlds" guarantees for mixtures where every component either has a heavy-tailed characteristic function or has a sub-Gaussian tail with a light-tailed characteristic function. Our algorithm is based on a new approach to learning mixture models via efficient high-dimensional sparse Fourier transforms. We believe that this method will find more applications to statistical estimation. As an example, we give an algorithm for consistent robust mean estimation against noise-oblivious adversaries, a model practically motivated by the literature on multiple hypothesis testing. It was formally proposed in a recent Master's thesis by one of the authors, and has already inspired follow-up works. --- ### Safe Continual Reinforcement Learning Methods for Nonstationary Environments. Towards a Survey of the State of the Art Authors: Timofey Tomashevskiy Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05152v1 This work provides a state-of-the-art survey of continual safe online reinforcement learning (COSRL) methods. We discuss theoretical aspects, challenges, and open questions in building continual online safe reinforcement learning algorithms. We provide the taxonomy and the details of continual online safe reinforcement learning methods based on the type of safe learning mechanism that takes adaptation to nonstationarity into account. We categorize safety constraints formulation for online reinforcement learning algorithms, and finally, we discuss prospects for creating reliable, safe online learning algorithms. Keywords: safe RL in nonstationary environments, safe continual reinforcement learning under nonstationarity, HM-MDP, NSMDP, POMDP, safe POMDP, constraints for continual learning, safe continual reinforcement learning review, safe continual reinforcement learning survey, safe continual reinforcement learning, safe online learning under distribution shift, safe continual online adaptation, safe reinforcement learning, safe exploration, safe adaptation, constrained Markov decision processes, safe reinforcement learning, partially observable Markov decision process, safe reinforcement learning and hidden Markov decision processes, Safe Online Reinforcement Learning, safe online reinforcement learning, safe online reinforcement learning, safe meta-learning, safe meta-reinforcement learning, safe context-based reinforcement learning, formulating safety constraints for continual learning --- ### ROOFS: RObust biOmarker Feature Selection Authors: Anastasiia Bakhmach, Paul Dufossé, Simon Charpigny, Florence Monville, Laurent Greillier, Fabrice Barlési, Sébastien Benzekry Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05151v3 Feature selection (FS) is essential for biomarker discovery and clinical predictive modeling. Over the past decades, methodological literature on FS has become rich and mature, offering a wide spectrum of algorithmic approaches. However, much of this methodological progress has not fully translated into applied biomedical research. Moreover, challenges inherent in biomedical data, such as high-dimensional feature space, low sample size, multicollinearity, and missing values, make FS non-trivial. To help bridge this gap between methodological development and practical application, we propose ROOFS (RObust biOmarker Feature Selection), a Python package available at https://gitlab.inria.fr/compo/roofs, designed to help researchers in the choice of FS method adapted to their problem. ROOFS benchmarks multiple FS methods on the user's data and generates reports summarizing a comprehensive set of evaluation metrics, including downstream predictive performance estimated using optimism correction, stability, robustness of individual features, and true positive and false positive rates assessed on semi-synthetic data with a simulated outcome. We demonstrate the utility of ROOFS on data from the PIONeeR clinical trial, aimed at identifying predictors of resistance to anti-PD-(L)1 immunotherapy in lung cancer. Of the 34 FS methods gathered in ROOFS, we evaluated 23 in combination with 11 classifiers (253 models) and identified a filter based on the union of Benjamini-Hochberg false discovery rate-adjusted p-values from t-test and logistic regression as the optimal approach, outperforming other methods including widely used LASSO. We conclude that comprehensive benchmarking with ROOFS has the potential to improve the reproducibility of FS discoveries and increase the translational value of clinical models. --- ### ROOFS: RObust biOmarker Feature Selection Authors: Anastasiia Bakhmach, Paul Dufossé, Andrea Vaglio, Florence Monville, Laurent Greillier, Fabrice Barlési, Sébastien Benzekry Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05151v1 Feature selection (FS) is essential for biomarker discovery and in the analysis of biomedical datasets. However, challenges such as high-dimensional feature space, low sample size, multicollinearity, and missing values make FS non-trivial. Moreover, FS performances vary across datasets and predictive tasks. We propose roofs, a Python package available at https://gitlab.inria.fr/compo/roofs, designed to help researchers in the choice of FS method adapted to their problem. Roofs benchmarks multiple FS methods on the user's data and generates reports that summarize a comprehensive set of evaluation metrics, including downstream predictive performance estimated using optimism correction, stability, reliability of individual features, and true positive and false positive rates assessed on semi-synthetic data with a simulated outcome. We demonstrate the utility of roofs on data from the PIONeeR clinical trial, aimed at identifying predictors of resistance to anti-PD-(L)1 immunotherapy in lung cancer. The PIONeeR dataset contained 374 multi-source blood and tumor biomarkers from 435 patients. A reduced subset of 214 features was obtained through iterative variance inflation factor pre-filtering. Of the 34 FS methods gathered in roofs, we evaluated 23 in combination with 11 classifiers (253 models in total) and identified a filter based on the union of Benjamini-Hochberg false discovery rate-adjusted p-values from t-test and logistic regression as the optimal approach, outperforming other methods including the widely used LASSO. We conclude that comprehensive benchmarking with roofs has the potential to improve the robustness and reproducibility of FS discoveries and increase the translational value of clinical models. --- ### Multi-Scale Local Speculative Decoding for Image Generation Authors: Elia Peruzzo, Guillaume Sautière, Amirhossein Habibian Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05149v2 Autoregressive (AR) models have achieved remarkable success in image synthesis, yet their sequential nature imposes significant latency constraints. Speculative Decoding offers a promising avenue for acceleration, but existing approaches are limited by token-level ambiguity and lack of spatial awareness. In this work, we introduce Multi-Scale Local Speculative Decoding (MuLo-SD), a novel framework that combines multi-resolution drafting with spatially informed verification to accelerate AR image generation. Our method leverages a low-resolution drafter paired with an up-sampling step to propose candidate image tokens, which are then verified in parallel by a high-resolution target model. Crucially, we incorporate a local rejection and resampling mechanism, enabling efficient correction of draft errors by focusing on spatial neighborhoods rather than raster-scan resampling after the first rejection. When integrated with parallel decoding resampling, MuLo-SD achieves substantial speedups -- up to $\mathbf{5\times}$ -- outperforming both speculative decoding and parallel decoding baselines in terms of acceleration, while maintaining comparable semantic alignment and perceptual quality. These results are validated using GenEval, DPG-Bench, and FID/HPSv2 on the MS-COCO 5k validation split. Extensive ablations highlight the impact of up-sampling design, probability pooling, and local rejection and resampling with neighborhood expansion. Our approach sets a new state-of-the-art in speculative decoding for image synthesis, bridging the gap between efficiency and fidelity. Project page is available at https://qualcomm-ai-research.github.io/mulo-sd-webpage/ . --- ### Multi-Scale Local Speculative Decoding for Image Generation Authors: Elia Peruzzo, Guillaume Sautière, Amirhossein Habibian Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05149v1 Autoregressive (AR) models have achieved remarkable success in image synthesis, yet their sequential nature imposes significant latency constraints. Speculative Decoding offers a promising avenue for acceleration, but existing approaches are limited by token-level ambiguity and lack of spatial awareness. In this work, we introduce Multi-Scale Local Speculative Decoding (MuLo-SD), a novel framework that combines multi-resolution drafting with spatially informed verification to accelerate AR image generation. Our method leverages a low-resolution drafter paired with learned up-samplers to propose candidate image tokens, which are then verified in parallel by a high-resolution target model. Crucially, we incorporate a local rejection and resampling mechanism, enabling efficient correction of draft errors by focusing on spatial neighborhoods rather than raster-scan resampling after the first rejection. We demonstrate that MuLo-SD achieves substantial speedups - up to $\mathbf{1.7\times}$ - outperforming strong speculative decoding baselines such as EAGLE-2 and LANTERN in terms of acceleration, while maintaining comparable semantic alignment and perceptual quality. These results are validated using GenEval, DPG-Bench, and FID/HPSv2 on the MS-COCO 5k validation split. Extensive ablations highlight the impact of up-sampling design, probability pooling, and local rejection and resampling with neighborhood expansion. Our approach sets a new state-of-the-art in speculative decoding for image synthesis, bridging the gap between efficiency and fidelity. --- ### Atlas 2 -- Foundation models for clinical deployment Authors: Maximilian Alber, Timo Milbich, Alexandra Carpen-Amarie, Stephan Tietz, Jonas Dippel, Lukas Muttenthaler, Beatriz Perez Cancer, Alessandro Benetti, Panos Korfiatis, Elias Eulig, Jérôme Lüscher, Jiasen Wu et al. Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05148v2 Pathology foundation models substantially advanced the possibilities in computational pathology --- yet tradeoffs in terms of performance, robustness, and computational requirements remained, which limited their clinical deployment. In this report, we present Atlas 2, Atlas 2-B, and Atlas 2-S, three pathology vision foundation models which bridge these shortcomings by showing state-of-the-art prediction performance, robustness, and resource efficiency in a comprehensive evaluation across eighty public benchmarks. Our models were trained on the largest pathology foundation model dataset to date comprising 5.5 million histopathology whole slide images, collected from three medical institutions Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, LMU Munich, and Mayo Clinic. --- ### Atlas 2 - Foundation models for clinical deployment Authors: Maximilian Alber, Timo Milbich, Alexandra Carpen-Amarie, Stephan Tietz, Jonas Dippel, Lukas Muttenthaler, Beatriz Perez Cancer, Alessandro Benetti, Panos Korfiatis, Elias Eulig, Jérôme Lüscher, Jiasen Wu et al. Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05148v1 Pathology foundation models substantially advanced the possibilities in computational pathology -- yet tradeoffs in terms of performance, robustness, and computational requirements remained, which limited their clinical deployment. In this report, we present Atlas 2, Atlas 2-B, and Atlas 2-S, three pathology vision foundation models which bridge these shortcomings by showing state-of-the-art performance in prediction performance, robustness, and resource efficiency in a comprehensive evaluation across eighty public benchmarks. Our models were trained on the largest pathology foundation model dataset to date comprising 5.5 million histopathology whole slide images, collected from three medical institutions Charité - Universtätsmedizin Berlin, LMU Munich, and Mayo Clinic. --- ### Distilling the Thought, Watermarking the Answer: A Principle Semantic Guided Watermark for Large Reasoning Models Authors: Shuliang Liu, Xingyu Li, Hongyi Liu, Dong Fang, Yibo Yan, Bingchen Duan, Qi Zheng, Lingfeng Su, Xuming Hu Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05144v2 Reasoning Large Language Models (RLLMs) excelling in complex tasks present unique challenges for digital watermarking, as existing methods often disrupt logical coherence or incur high computational costs. Token-based watermarking techniques can corrupt the reasoning flow by applying pseudo-random biases, while semantic-aware approaches improve quality but introduce significant latency or require auxiliary models. This paper introduces ReasonMark, a novel watermarking framework specifically designed for reasoning-intensive LLMs. Our approach decouples generation into an undisturbed Thinking Phase and a watermarked Answering Phase. We propose a Criticality Score to identify semantically pivotal tokens from the reasoning trace, which are distilled into a Principal Semantic Vector (PSV). The PSV then guides a semantically-adaptive mechanism that modulates watermark strength based on token-PSV alignment, ensuring robustness without compromising logical integrity. Extensive experiments show ReasonMark surpasses state-of-the-art methods by reducing text Perplexity by 0.35, increasing translation BLEU score by 0.164, and raising mathematical accuracy by 0.67 points. These advancements are achieved alongside a 0.34% higher watermark detection AUC and stronger robustness to attacks, all with a negligible increase in latency. This work enables the traceable and trustworthy deployment of reasoning LLMs in real-world applications. --- ### Distilling the Thought, Watermarking the Answer: A Principle Semantic Guided Watermark for Large Reasoning Models Authors: Shuliang Liu, Xingyu Li, Hongyi Liu, Yibo Yan, Bingchen Duan, Qi Zheng, Dong Fang, Lingfeng Su, Xuming Hu Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05144v1 Reasoning Large Language Models (RLLMs) excelling in complex tasks present unique challenges for digital watermarking, as existing methods often disrupt logical coherence or incur high computational costs. Token-based watermarking techniques can corrupt the reasoning flow by applying pseudo-random biases, while semantic-aware approaches improve quality but introduce significant latency or require auxiliary models. This paper introduces ReasonMark, a novel watermarking framework specifically designed for reasoning-intensive LLMs. Our approach decouples generation into an undisturbed Thinking Phase and a watermarked Answering Phase. We propose a Criticality Score to identify semantically pivotal tokens from the reasoning trace, which are distilled into a Principal Semantic Vector (PSV). The PSV then guides a semantically-adaptive mechanism that modulates watermark strength based on token-PSV alignment, ensuring robustness without compromising logical integrity. Extensive experiments show ReasonMark surpasses state-of-the-art methods by reducing text Perplexity by 0.35, increasing translation BLEU score by 0.164, and raising mathematical accuracy by 0.67 points. These advancements are achieved alongside a 0.34% higher watermark detection AUC and stronger robustness to attacks, all with a negligible increase in latency. This work enables the traceable and trustworthy deployment of reasoning LLMs in real-world applications. --- ### A Two-Stage Multitask Vision-Language Framework for Explainable Crop Disease Visual Question Answering Authors: Md. Zahid Hossain, Most. Sharmin Sultana Samu, Md. Rakibul Islam, Md. Siam Ansary Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05143v2 Visual question answering (VQA) for crop disease analysis requires accurate visual understanding and reliable language generation. In this work, we present a lightweight and explainable vision-language framework for crop and disease identification from leaf images. The proposed approach integrates a Swin Transformer vision encoder with sequence-to-sequence language decoders. The vision encoder is first trained in a multitask setup for both plant and disease classification, and then frozen while the text decoders are trained, forming a two-stage training strategy that enhances visual representation learning and cross-modal alignment. We evaluate the model on the large-scale Crop Disease Domain Multimodal (CDDM) dataset using both classification and natural language generation metrics. Experimental results demonstrate near-perfect recognition performance, achieving 99.94% plant classification accuracy and 99.06% disease classification accuracy, along with strong BLEU, ROUGE and BERTScore results. Without fine-tuning, the model further generalizes well to the external PlantVillageVQA benchmark, achieving 83.18% micro accuracy in the VQA task. Our lightweight design outperforms larger vision-language baselines while using significantly fewer parameters. Explainability is assessed through Grad-CAM and token-level attribution, providing interpretable visual and textual evidence for predictions. Qualitative results demonstrate robust performance under diverse user-driven queries, highlighting the effectiveness of task-specific visual pretraining and the two-stage training methodology for crop disease visual question answering. An interactive demo of the proposed Swin-T5 model is publicly available as a Gradio-based application at https://huggingface.co/spaces/Zahid16/PlantDiseaseVQAwithSwinT5 for community use. --- ### A Lightweight and Explainable Vision-Language Framework for Crop Disease Visual Question Answering Authors: Md. Zahid Hossain, Most. Sharmin Sultana Samu, Md. Rakibul Islam, Md. Siam Ansary Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05143v1 Visual question answering for crop disease analysis requires accurate visual understanding and reliable language generation. This work presents a lightweight vision-language framework for crop and disease identification from leaf images. The proposed approach combines a Swin Transformer vision encoder with sequence-to-sequence language decoders. A two-stage training strategy is adopted to improve visual representation learning and cross-modal alignment. The model is evaluated on a large-scale crop disease dataset using classification and natural language generation metrics. Experimental results show high accuracy for both crop and disease identification. The framework also achieves strong performance on BLEU, ROUGE and BERTScore. Our proposed models outperform large-scale vision-language baselines while using significantly fewer parameters. Explainability is assessed using Grad-CAM and token-level attribution. Qualitative results demonstrate robust performance under diverse user-driven queries. These findings highlight the effectiveness of task-specific visual pretraining for crop disease visual question answering. --- ### VerseCrafter: Dynamic Realistic Video World Model with 4D Geometric Control Authors: Sixiao Zheng, Minghao Yin, Wenbo Hu, Xiaoyu Li, Ying Shan, Yanwei Fu Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05138v2 Video world models aim to simulate dynamic, real-world environments, yet existing methods struggle to provide unified and precise control over camera and multi-object motion, as videos inherently capture dynamics in the projected 2D image plane. To bridge this gap, we introduce VerseCrafter, a geometry-driven video world model that generates dynamic, realistic videos from a unified 4D geometric world state. Our approach is centered on a novel 4D Geometric Control representation, which encodes the world state as a static background point cloud and per-object 3D Gaussian trajectories. This representation captures each object's motion path and probabilistic 3D occupancy over time, providing a flexible, category-agnostic alternative to rigid bounding boxes and parametric models. We render 4D Geometric Control into 4D control maps for a pretrained video diffusion model, enabling high-fidelity, view-consistent video generation that faithfully follows the specified dynamics. To enable training at scale, we develop an automatic data engine and construct VerseControl4D, a real-world dataset of 35K training samples with automatically derived prompts and rendered 4D control maps. Extensive experiments show that VerseCrafter achieves superior visual quality and more accurate control over camera and multi-object motion than prior methods. --- ### VerseCrafter: Dynamic Realistic Video World Model with 4D Geometric Control Authors: Sixiao Zheng, Minghao Yin, Wenbo Hu, Xiaoyu Li, Ying Shan, Yanwei Fu Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05138v1 Video world models aim to simulate dynamic, real-world environments, yet existing methods struggle to provide unified and precise control over camera and multi-object motion, as videos inherently operate dynamics in the projected 2D image plane. To bridge this gap, we introduce VerseCrafter, a 4D-aware video world model that enables explicit and coherent control over both camera and object dynamics within a unified 4D geometric world state. Our approach is centered on a novel 4D Geometric Control representation, which encodes the world state through a static background point cloud and per-object 3D Gaussian trajectories. This representation captures not only an object's path but also its probabilistic 3D occupancy over time, offering a flexible, category-agnostic alternative to rigid bounding boxes or parametric models. These 4D controls are rendered into conditioning signals for a pretrained video diffusion model, enabling the generation of high-fidelity, view-consistent videos that precisely adhere to the specified dynamics. Unfortunately, another major challenge lies in the scarcity of large-scale training data with explicit 4D annotations. We address this by developing an automatic data engine that extracts the required 4D controls from in-the-wild videos, allowing us to train our model on a massive and diverse dataset. --- ### Neural Algorithmic Reasoning for Approximate $k$-Coloring with Recursive Warm Starts Authors: Knut Vanderbush, Melanie Weber Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: math.CO, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05137v1 Node coloring is the task of assigning colors to the nodes of a graph such that no two adjacent nodes have the same color, while using as few colors as possible. It is the most widely studied instance of graph coloring and of central importance in graph theory; major results include the Four Color Theorem and work on the Hadwiger-Nelson Problem. As an abstraction of classical combinatorial optimization tasks, such as scheduling and resource allocation, it is also rich in practical applications. Here, we focus on a relaxed version, approximate $k$-coloring, which is the task of assigning at most $k$ colors to the nodes of a graph such that the number of edges whose vertices have the same color is approximately minimized. While classical approaches leverage mathematical programming or SAT solvers, recent studies have explored the use of machine learning. We follow this route and explore the use of graph neural networks (GNNs) for node coloring. We first present an optimized differentiable algorithm that improves a prior approach by Schuetz et al. with orthogonal node feature initialization and a loss function that penalizes conflicting edges more heavily when their endpoints have higher degree; the latter inspired by the classical result that a graph is $k$-colorable if and only if its $k$-core is $k$-colorable. Next, we introduce a lightweight greedy local search algorithm and show that it may be improved by recursively computing a $(k-1)$-coloring to use as a warm start. We then show that applying such recursive warm starts to the GNN approach leads to further improvements. Numerical experiments on a range of different graph structures show that while the local search algorithms perform best on small inputs, the GNN exhibits superior performance at scale. The recursive warm start may be of independent interest beyond graph coloring for local search methods for combinatorial optimization. --- ### Sequential Subspace Noise Injection Prevents Accuracy Collapse in Certified Unlearning Authors: Polina Dolgova, Sebastian U. Stich Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05134v2 Certified unlearning based on differential privacy offers strong guarantees but remains largely impractical: the noisy fine-tuning approaches proposed so far achieve these guarantees but severely reduce model accuracy. We propose sequential noise scheduling, which distributes the noise budget across orthogonal subspaces of the parameter space, rather than injecting it all at once. This simple modification mitigates the destructive effect of noise while preserving the original certification guarantees. We extend the analysis of noisy fine-tuning to the subspace setting, proving that the same $(\varepsilon,δ)$ privacy budget is retained. Empirical results on image classification benchmarks show that our approach substantially improves accuracy after unlearning while remaining robust to membership inference attacks. These results show that certified unlearning can achieve both rigorous guarantees and practical utility. --- ### Sequential Subspace Noise Injection Prevents Accuracy Collapse in Certified Unlearning Authors: Polina Dolgova, Sebastian U. Stich Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05134v1 Certified unlearning based on differential privacy offers strong guarantees but remains largely impractical: the noisy fine-tuning approaches proposed so far achieve these guarantees but severely reduce model accuracy. We propose sequential noise scheduling, which distributes the noise budget across orthogonal subspaces of the parameter space, rather than injecting it all at once. This simple modification mitigates the destructive effect of noise while preserving the original certification guarantees. We extend the analysis of noisy fine-tuning to the subspace setting, proving that the same $(\varepsilon,δ)$ privacy budget is retained. Empirical results on image classification benchmarks show that our approach substantially improves accuracy after unlearning while remaining robust to membership inference attacks. These results show that certified unlearning can achieve both rigorous guarantees and practical utility. --- ### VERSE: Visual Embedding Reduction and Space Exploration. Clustering-Guided Insights for Training Data Enhancement in Visually-Rich Document Understanding Authors: Ignacio de Rodrigo, Alvaro J. Lopez-Lopez, Jaime Boal Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05125v1 This work introduces VERSE, a methodology for analyzing and improving Vision-Language Models applied to Visually-rich Document Understanding by exploring their visual embedding space. VERSE enables the visualization of latent representations, supporting the assessment of model feasibility. It also facilitates the identification of problematic regions and guides the generation of synthetic data to enhance performance in those clusters. We validate the methodology by training on the synthetic MERIT Dataset and evaluating on its real-world counterpart, MERIT Secret. Results show that VERSE helps uncover the visual features associated with error-prone clusters, and that retraining with samples containing these features substantially boosts F1 performance without degrading generalization. Furthermore, we demonstrate that on-premise models such as Donut and Idefics2, when optimized with VERSE, match or even surpass the performance of SaaS solutions like GPT-4 and Pixtral. --- ### Re-Align: Structured Reasoning-guided Alignment for In-Context Image Generation and Editing Authors: Runze He, Yiji Cheng, Tiankai Hang, Zhimin Li, Yu Xu, Zijin Yin, Shiyi Zhang, Wenxun Dai, Penghui Du, Ao Ma, Chunyu Wang, Qinglin Lu et al. Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05124v1 In-context image generation and editing (ICGE) enables users to specify visual concepts through interleaved image-text prompts, demanding precise understanding and faithful execution of user intent. Although recent unified multimodal models exhibit promising understanding capabilities, these strengths often fail to transfer effectively to image generation. We introduce Re-Align, a unified framework that bridges the gap between understanding and generation through structured reasoning-guided alignment. At its core lies the In-Context Chain-of-Thought (IC-CoT), a structured reasoning paradigm that decouples semantic guidance and reference association, providing clear textual target and mitigating confusion among reference images. Furthermore, Re-Align introduces an effective RL training scheme that leverages a surrogate reward to measure the alignment between structured reasoning text and the generated image, thereby improving the model's overall performance on ICGE tasks. Extensive experiments verify that Re-Align outperforms competitive methods of comparable model scale and resources on both in-context image generation and editing tasks. --- ### From Rays to Projections: Better Inputs for Feed-Forward View Synthesis Authors: Zirui Wu, Zeren Jiang, Martin R. Oswald, Jie Song Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05116v1 Feed-forward view synthesis models predict a novel view in a single pass with minimal 3D inductive bias. Existing works encode cameras as Plücker ray maps, which tie predictions to the arbitrary world coordinate gauge and make them sensitive to small camera transformations, thereby undermining geometric consistency. In this paper, we ask what inputs best condition a model for robust and consistent view synthesis. We propose projective conditioning, which replaces raw camera parameters with a target-view projective cue that provides a stable 2D input. This reframes the task from a brittle geometric regression problem in ray space to a well-conditioned target-view image-to-image translation problem. Additionally, we introduce a masked autoencoding pretraining strategy tailored to this cue, enabling the use of large-scale uncalibrated data for pretraining. Our method shows improved fidelity and stronger cross-view consistency compared to ray-conditioned baselines on our view-consistency benchmark. It also achieves state-of-the-art quality on standard novel view synthesis benchmarks. --- ### Evaluative Fingerprints: Stable and Systematic Differences in LLM Evaluator Behavior Authors: Wajid Nasser Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05114v1 LLM-as-judge systems promise scalable, consistent evaluation. We find the opposite: judges are consistent, but not with each other; they are consistent with themselves. Across 3,240 evaluations (9 judges x 120 unique video x pack items x 3 independent runs), inter-judge agreement is near-zero (Krippendorff's α = 0.042). On two dimensions, judges disagree more than random noise would predict (α < 0). Yet this disagreement isn't chaos; it's structured. A classifier identifies which judge produced an evaluation with 77.1% accuracy from rubric scores alone, rising to 89.9% with disposition features. Within model families, the signal is even stronger: GPT-4.1 and GPT-5.2 are distinguishable with 99.6% accuracy. We call this the reliability paradox: judges cannot agree on what constitutes quality, yet their disagreement patterns are so stable they function as fingerprints. Each judge implements a distinct, stable theory of quality: an "evaluative disposition" that shapes how it interprets any rubric. We characterize these dispositions along multiple axes: harshness/leniency, dimension emphasis, within-judge stability (ICC), and evidence behavior (receipt validity, semantic linkage via NLI, and shotgun index). The implication is stark: LLM judges are not interchangeable instruments measuring a shared construct. They are distinct measurement devices, each encoding its own implicit theory of quality. Averaging their scores produces a synthetic verdict that corresponds to no judge's actual values. --- ### Agent-as-a-Judge Authors: Runyang You, Hongru Cai, Caiqi Zhang, Qiancheng Xu, Meng Liu, Tiezheng Yu, Yongqi Li, Wenjie Li Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05111v1 LLM-as-a-Judge has revolutionized AI evaluation by leveraging large language models for scalable assessments. However, as evaluands become increasingly complex, specialized, and multi-step, the reliability of LLM-as-a-Judge has become constrained by inherent biases, shallow single-pass reasoning, and the inability to verify assessments against real-world observations. This has catalyzed the transition to Agent-as-a-Judge, where agentic judges employ planning, tool-augmented verification, multi-agent collaboration, and persistent memory to enable more robust, verifiable, and nuanced evaluations. Despite the rapid proliferation of agentic evaluation systems, the field lacks a unified framework to navigate this shifting landscape. To bridge this gap, we present the first comprehensive survey tracing this evolution. Specifically, we identify key dimensions that characterize this paradigm shift and establish a developmental taxonomy. We organize core methodologies and survey applications across general and professional domains. Furthermore, we analyze frontier challenges and identify promising research directions, ultimately providing a clear roadmap for the next generation of agentic evaluation. --- ### GlimpRouter: Efficient Collaborative Inference by Glimpsing One Token of Thoughts Authors: Wenhao Zeng, Xuteng Zhang, Yuling Shi, Chao Hu, Yuting Chen, Beijun Shen, Xiaodong Gu Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05110v3 Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve remarkable performance by explicitly generating multi-step chains of thought, but this capability incurs substantial inference latency and computational cost. Collaborative inference offers a promising solution by selectively allocating work between lightweight and large models, yet a fundamental challenge remains: determining when a reasoning step requires the capacity of a large model or the efficiency of a small model. Existing routing strategies either rely on local token probabilities or post-hoc verification, introducing significant inference overhead. In this work, we propose a novel perspective on step-wise collaboration: the difficulty of a reasoning step can be inferred from its very first token. Inspired by the "Aha Moment" phenomenon in LRMs, we show that the entropy of the initial token serves as a strong predictor of step difficulty. Building on this insight, we introduce GlimpRouter, a training-free step-wise collaboration framework. GlimpRouter employs a lightweight model to generate only the first token of each reasoning step and routes the step to a larger model only when the initial token entropy exceeds a threshold. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces inference latency while preserving accuracy. For instance, GlimpRouter attains a substantial 10.7% improvement in accuracy while reducing inference latency by 25.9% compared to a standalone large model on AIME25. These results suggest a simple yet effective mechanism for reasoning: allocating computation based on a glimpse of thought rather than full-step evaluation. --- ### GlimpRouter: Efficient Collaborative Inference by Glimpsing One Token of Thoughts Authors: Wenhao Zeng, Xuteng Zhang, Yuling Shi, Chao Hu, Yuting Chen, Beijun Shen, Xiaodong Gu Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05110v1 Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve remarkable performance by explicitly generating multi-step chains of thought, but this capability incurs substantial inference latency and computational cost. Collaborative inference offers a promising solution by selectively allocating work between lightweight and large models, yet a fundamental challenge remains: determining when a reasoning step requires the capacity of a large model or the efficiency of a small model. Existing routing strategies either rely on local token probabilities or post-hoc verification, introducing significant inference overhead. In this work, we propose a novel perspective on step-wise collaboration: the difficulty of a reasoning step can be inferred from its very first token. Inspired by the "Aha Moment" phenomenon in LRMs, we show that the entropy of the initial token serves as a strong predictor of step difficulty. Building on this insight, we introduce GlimpRouter, a training-free step-wise collaboration framework. GlimpRouter employs a lightweight model to generate only the first token of each reasoning step and routes the step to a larger model only when the initial token entropy exceeds a threshold. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces inference latency while preserving accuracy. For instance, GlimpRouter attains a substantial 10.7% improvement in accuracy while reducing inference latency by 25.9% compared to a standalone large model on AIME25. These results suggest a simple yet effective mechanism for reasoning: allocating computation based on a glimpse of thought rather than full-step evaluation. --- ### Controllable Memory Usage: Balancing Anchoring and Innovation in Long-Term Human-Agent Interaction Authors: Muzhao Tian, Zisu Huang, Xiaohua Wang, Jingwen Xu, Zhengkang Guo, Qi Qian, Yuanzhe Shen, Kaitao Song, Jiakang Yuan, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05107v2 As LLM-based agents are increasingly used in long-term interactions, cumulative memory is critical for enabling personalization and maintaining stylistic consistency. However, most existing systems adopt an ``all-or-nothing'' approach to memory usage: incorporating all relevant past information can lead to \textit{Memory Anchoring}, where the agent is trapped by past interactions, while excluding memory entirely results in under-utilization and the loss of important interaction history. We show that an agent's reliance on memory can be modeled as an explicit and user-controllable dimension. We first introduce a behavioral metric of memory dependence to quantify the influence of past interactions on current outputs. We then propose \textbf{Stee}rable \textbf{M}emory Agent, \texttt{SteeM}, a framework that allows users to dynamically regulate memory reliance, ranging from a fresh-start mode that promotes innovation to a high-fidelity mode that closely follows interaction history. Experiments across different scenarios demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms conventional prompting and rigid memory masking strategies, yielding a more nuanced and effective control for personalized human-agent collaboration. --- ### Controllable Memory Usage: Balancing Anchoring and Innovation in Long-Term Human-Agent Interaction Authors: Muzhao Tian, Zisu Huang, Xiaohua Wang, Jingwen Xu, Zhengkang Guo, Qi Qian, Yuanzhe Shen, Kaitao Song, Jiakang Yuan, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05107v1 As LLM-based agents are increasingly used in long-term interactions, cumulative memory is critical for enabling personalization and maintaining stylistic consistency. However, most existing systems adopt an ``all-or-nothing'' approach to memory usage: incorporating all relevant past information can lead to \textit{Memory Anchoring}, where the agent is trapped by past interactions, while excluding memory entirely results in under-utilization and the loss of important interaction history. We show that an agent's reliance on memory can be modeled as an explicit and user-controllable dimension. We first introduce a behavioral metric of memory dependence to quantify the influence of past interactions on current outputs. We then propose \textbf{Stee}rable \textbf{M}emory Agent, \texttt{SteeM}, a framework that allows users to dynamically regulate memory reliance, ranging from a fresh-start mode that promotes innovation to a high-fidelity mode that closely follows interaction history. Experiments across different scenarios demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms conventional prompting and rigid memory masking strategies, yielding a more nuanced and effective control for personalized human-agent collaboration. --- ### Token-Level LLM Collaboration via FusionRoute Authors: Nuoya Xiong, Yuhang Zhou, Hanqing Zeng, Zhaorun Chen, Furong Huang, Shuchao Bi, Lizhu Zhang, Zhuokai Zhao Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05106v5 Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strengths across diverse domains. However, achieving strong performance across these domains with a single general-purpose model typically requires scaling to sizes that are prohibitively expensive to train and deploy. On the other hand, while smaller domain-specialized models are much more efficient, they struggle to generalize beyond their training distributions. To address this dilemma, we propose FusionRoute, a robust and effective token-level multi-LLM collaboration framework in which a lightweight router simultaneously (i) selects the most suitable expert at each decoding step and (ii) contributes a complementary logit that refines or corrects the selected expert's next-token distribution via logit addition. Unlike existing token-level collaboration methods that rely solely on fixed expert outputs, we provide a theoretical analysis showing that pure expert-only routing is fundamentally limited: unless strong global coverage assumptions hold, it cannot in general realize the optimal decoding policy. By augmenting expert selection with a trainable complementary generator, FusionRoute expands the effective policy class and enables recovery of optimal value functions under mild conditions. Empirically, across both Llama-3 and Gemma-2 families and diverse benchmarks spanning mathematical reasoning, code generation, and instruction following, FusionRoute outperforms both sequence- and token-level collaboration, model merging, and direct fine-tuning, while remaining competitive with domain experts on their respective tasks. --- ### Token-Level LLM Collaboration via FusionRoute Authors: Nuoya Xiong, Yuhang Zhou, Hanqing Zeng, Zhaorun Chen, Furong Huang, Shuchao Bi, Lizhu Zhang, Zhuokai Zhao Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05106v1 Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strengths across diverse domains. However, achieving strong performance across these domains with a single general-purpose model typically requires scaling to sizes that are prohibitively expensive to train and deploy. On the other hand, while smaller domain-specialized models are much more efficient, they struggle to generalize beyond their training distributions. To address this dilemma, we propose FusionRoute, a robust and effective token-level multi-LLM collaboration framework in which a lightweight router simultaneously (i) selects the most suitable expert at each decoding step and (ii) contributes a complementary logit that refines or corrects the selected expert's next-token distribution via logit addition. Unlike existing token-level collaboration methods that rely solely on fixed expert outputs, we provide a theoretical analysis showing that pure expert-only routing is fundamentally limited: unless strong global coverage assumptions hold, it cannot in general realize the optimal decoding policy. By augmenting expert selection with a trainable complementary generator, FusionRoute expands the effective policy class and enables recovery of optimal value functions under mild conditions. Empirically, across both Llama-3 and Gemma-2 families and diverse benchmarks spanning mathematical reasoning, code generation, and instruction following, FusionRoute outperforms both sequence- and token-level collaboration, model merging, and direct fine-tuning, while remaining competitive with domain experts on their respective tasks. --- ### UniLiPs: Unified LiDAR Pseudo-Labeling with Geometry-Grounded Dynamic Scene Decomposition Authors: Filippo Ghilotti, Samuel Brucker, Nahku Saidy, Matteo Matteucci, Mario Bijelic, Felix Heide Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05105v1 Unlabeled LiDAR logs, in autonomous driving applications, are inherently a gold mine of dense 3D geometry hiding in plain sight - yet they are almost useless without human labels, highlighting a dominant cost barrier for autonomous-perception research. In this work we tackle this bottleneck by leveraging temporal-geometric consistency across LiDAR sweeps to lift and fuse cues from text and 2D vision foundation models directly into 3D, without any manual input. We introduce an unsupervised multi-modal pseudo-labeling method relying on strong geometric priors learned from temporally accumulated LiDAR maps, alongside with a novel iterative update rule that enforces joint geometric-semantic consistency, and vice-versa detecting moving objects from inconsistencies. Our method simultaneously produces 3D semantic labels, 3D bounding boxes, and dense LiDAR scans, demonstrating robust generalization across three datasets. We experimentally validate that our method compares favorably to existing semantic segmentation and object detection pseudo-labeling methods, which often require additional manual supervision. We confirm that even a small fraction of our geometrically consistent, densified LiDAR improves depth prediction by 51.5% and 22.0% MAE in the 80-150 and 150-250 meters range, respectively. --- ### How Human is AI? Examining the Impact of Emotional Prompts on Artificial and Human and Responsiveness Authors: Florence Bernays, Marco Henriques Pereira, Jochen Menges Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CL, econ.GN arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05104v1 This research examines how the emotional tone of human-AI interactions shapes ChatGPT and human behavior. In a between-subject experiment, we asked participants to express a specific emotion while working with ChatGPT (GPT-4.0) on two tasks, including writing a public response and addressing an ethical dilemma. We found that compared to interactions where participants maintained a neutral tone, ChatGPT showed greater improvement in its answers when participants praised ChatGPT for its responses. Expressing anger towards ChatGPT also led to a higher albeit smaller improvement relative to the neutral condition, whereas blaming ChatGPT did not improve its answers. When addressing an ethical dilemma, ChatGPT prioritized corporate interests less when participants expressed anger towards it, while blaming increases its emphasis on protecting the public interest. Additionally, we found that people used more negative, hostile, and disappointing expressions in human-human communication after interactions during which participants blamed rather than praised for their responses. Together, our findings demonstrate that the emotional tone people apply in human-AI interactions not only shape ChatGPT's outputs but also carry over into subsequent human-human communication. --- ### Semantically Orthogonal Framework for Citation Classification: Disentangling Intent and Content Authors: Changxu Duan, Zhiyin Tan Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.DL, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05103v1 Understanding the role of citations is essential for research assessment and citation-aware digital libraries. However, existing citation classification frameworks often conflate citation intent (why a work is cited) with cited content type (what part is cited), limiting their effectiveness in auto classification due to a dilemma between fine-grained type distinctions and practical classification reliability. We introduce SOFT, a Semantically Orthogonal Framework with Two dimensions that explicitly separates citation intent from cited content type, drawing inspiration from semantic role theory. We systematically re-annotate the ACL-ARC dataset using SOFT and release a cross-disciplinary test set sampled from ACT2. Evaluation with both zero-shot and fine-tuned Large Language Models demonstrates that SOFT enables higher agreement between human annotators and LLMs, and supports stronger classification performance and robust cross-domain generalization compared to ACL-ARC and SciCite annotation frameworks. These results confirm SOFT's value as a clear, reusable annotation standard, improving clarity, consistency, and generalizability for digital libraries and scholarly communication infrastructures. All code and data are publicly available on GitHub https://github.com/zhiyintan/SOFT. --- ### Arabic Prompts with English Tools: A Benchmark Authors: Konstantin Kubrak, Ahmed El-Moselhy, Ammar Alsulami, Remaz Altuwaim, Hassan Ismail Fawaz, Faisal Alsaby Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05101v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) are now integral to numerous industries, increasingly serving as the core reasoning engine for autonomous agents that perform complex tasks through tool-use. While the development of Arabic-native LLMs is accelerating, the benchmarks for evaluating their capabilities lag behind, with most existing frameworks focusing on English. A critical and overlooked area is tool-calling, where the performance of models prompted in non-English languages like Arabic is poorly understood, especially since these models are often pretrained on predominantly English data. This paper addresses this critical gap by introducing the first dedicated benchmark for evaluating the tool-calling and agentic capabilities of LLMs in the Arabic language. Our work provides a standardized framework to measure the functional accuracy and robustness of models in Arabic agentic workflows. Our findings reveal a huge performance gap: when users interact in Arabic, tool-calling accuracy drops by an average of 5-10\%, regardless of whether the tool descriptions themselves are in Arabic or English. By shedding light on these critical challenges, this benchmark aims to foster the development of more reliable and linguistically equitable AI agents for Arabic-speaking users. --- ### Multi-Disciplinary Dataset Discovery from Citation-Verified Literature Contexts Authors: Zhiyin Tan, Changxu Duan Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.DL, cs.CL, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05099v1 Identifying suitable datasets for a research question remains challenging because existing dataset search engines rely heavily on metadata quality and keyword overlap, which often fail to capture the semantic intent of scientific investigation. We introduce a literature-driven framework that discovers datasets from citation contexts in scientific papers, enabling retrieval grounded in actual research use rather than metadata availability. Our approach combines large-scale citation-context extraction, schema-guided dataset recognition with Large Language Models, and provenance-preserving entity resolution. We evaluate the system on eight survey-derived computer science queries and find that it achieves substantially higher recall than Google Dataset Search and DataCite Commons, with normalized recall ranging from an average of 47.47% to a highest value of 81.82%. Beyond recovering gold-standard datasets, the method also surfaces additional datasets not documented in the surveys. Expert assessments across five top-level Fields of Science indicate that a substantial portion of the additional datasets are considered high utility, and some are regarded as novel for the specific topics chosen by the experts. These findings establish citation-context mining as an effective and generalizable paradigm for dataset discovery, particularly in settings where datasets lack sufficient or reliable metadata. To support reproducibility and future extensions, we release our code, evaluation datasets, and results on GitHub (https://github.com/Fireblossom/citation-context-dataset-discovery). --- ### ECLIPSE: An Evolutionary Computation Library for Instrumentation Prototyping in Scientific Engineering Authors: Max Foreback, Evan Imata, Vincent Ragusa, Jacob Weiler, Jonathan Sy, Christina Shao, Joey Wagner, Dylan Wells, Rick Marcusen, Katherine G. Skocelas, Aman Hafez, Amy Conolly et al. Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05098v3 Designing scientific instrumentation often requires exploring large, highly constrained design spaces using computationally expensive physics simulations. These simulators pose substantial challenges for integrating evolutionary computation (EC) into scientific design workflows. EC typically requires numerous design evaluations, making the integration of slow, low-throughput simulators challenging, as they are optimized for accuracy and ease of use rather than throughput. We present ECLIPSE, an evolutionary computation framework built to interface directly with complex, domain-specific simulation tools while supporting flexible geometric and parametric representations of scientific hardware. ECLIPSE provides a modular architecture consisting of (1) Individuals, which encode hardware designs using domain-aware, physically constrained representations; (2) Evaluators, which prepare simulation inputs, invoke external simulators, and translate the simulator's outputs into fitness measures; and (3) Evolvers, which implement EC algorithms suitable for this domain. We evolve solutions for two novel space-science applications: 3D antennas optimized for directional sensitivity and spacecraft geometries optimized for drag reduction. Notably, we identify antennas with directional sensitivity roughly comparable to the expected sensitivity of two-antenna interferometric arrays, representing potential cost-savings. ECLIPSE enables interdisciplinary teams of physicists, engineers, and EC researchers to collaboratively explore designs for scientific hardware while leveraging existing domain-specific simulation software. --- ### ECLIPSE: An Evolutionary Computation Library for Instrumentation Prototyping in Scientific Engineering Authors: Max Foreback, Evan Imata, Vincent Ragusa, Jacob Weiler, Christina Shao, Joey Wagner, Katherine G. Skocelas, Jonathan Sy, Aman Hafez, Wolfgang Banzhaf, Amy Conolly, Kyle R. Helson et al. Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05098v1 Designing scientific instrumentation often requires exploring large, highly constrained design spaces using computationally expensive physics simulations. These simulators pose substantial challenges for integrating evolutionary computation (EC) into scientific design workflows. Evolutionary computation typically requires numerous design evaluations, making the integration of slow, low-throughput simulators particularly challenging, as they are optimized for accuracy and ease of use rather than throughput. We present ECLIPSE, an evolutionary computation framework built to interface directly with complex, domain-specific simulation tools while supporting flexible geometric and parametric representations of scientific hardware. ECLIPSE provides a modular architecture consisting of (1) Individuals, which encode hardware designs using domain-aware, physically constrained representations; (2) Evaluators, which prepare simulation inputs, invoke external simulators, and translate the simulator's outputs into fitness measures; and (3) Evolvers, which implement EC algorithms suitable for high-cost, limited-throughput environments. We demonstrate the utility of ECLIPSE across several active space-science applications, including evolved 3D antennas and spacecraft geometries optimized for drag reduction in very low Earth orbit. We further discuss the practical challenges encountered when coupling EC with scientific simulation workflows, including interoperability constraints, parallelization limits, and extreme evaluation costs, and outline ongoing efforts to combat these challenges. ECLIPSE enables interdisciplinary teams of physicists, engineers, and EC researchers to collaboratively explore unconventional designs for scientific hardware while leveraging existing domain-specific simulation software. --- ### Advanced Multimodal Learning for Seizure Detection and Prediction: Concept, Challenges, and Future Directions Authors: Ijaz Ahmad, Faizan Ahmad, Sunday Timothy Aboyeji, Yongtao Zhang, Peng Yang, Javed Ali Khan, Rab Nawaz, Baiying Lei Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05095v2 Epilepsy is a chronic neurological disorder characterized by recurrent unprovoked seizures, affects over 50 million people worldwide, and poses significant risks, including sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP). Conventional unimodal approaches, primarily reliant on electroencephalography (EEG), face several key challenges, including low SNR, nonstationarity, inter- and intrapatient heterogeneity, portability, and real-time applicability in clinical settings. To address these issues, a comprehensive survey highlights the concept of advanced multimodal learning for epileptic seizure detection and prediction (AMLSDP). The survey presents the evolution of epileptic seizure detection (ESD) and prediction (ESP) technologies across different eras. The survey also explores the core challenges of multimodal and non-EEG-based ESD and ESP. To overcome the key challenges of the multimodal system, the survey introduces the advanced processing strategies for efficient AMLSDP. Furthermore, this survey highlights future directions for researchers and practitioners. We believe this work will advance neurotechnology toward wearable and imaging-based solutions for epilepsy monitoring, serving as a valuable resource for future innovations in this domain. --- ### Advanced Multimodal Learning for Seizure Detection and Prediction: Concept, Challenges, and Future Directions Authors: Ijaz Ahmad, Faizan Ahmad, Sunday Timothy Aboyeji, Yongtao Zhang, Peng Yang, Rab Nawaz, Baiying Lei Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05095v1 Epilepsy is a chronic neurological disorder characterized by recurrent unprovoked seizures, affects over 50 million people worldwide, and poses significant risks, including sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP). Conventional unimodal approaches, primarily reliant on electroencephalography (EEG), face several key challenges, including low SNR, nonstationarity, inter- and intrapatient heterogeneity, portability, and real-time applicability in clinical settings. To address these issues, a comprehensive survey highlights the concept of advanced multimodal learning for epileptic seizure detection and prediction (AMLSDP). The survey presents the evolution of epileptic seizure detection (ESD) and prediction (ESP) technologies across different eras. The survey also explores the core challenges of multimodal and non-EEG-based ESD and ESP. To overcome the key challenges of the multimodal system, the survey introduces the advanced processing strategies for efficient AMLSDP. Furthermore, this survey highlights future directions for researchers and practitioners. We believe this work will advance neurotechnology toward wearable and imaging-based solutions for epilepsy monitoring, serving as a valuable resource for future innovations in this domain. --- ### Code-Mix Sentiment Analysis on Hinglish Tweets Authors: Aashi Garg, Aneshya Das, Arshi Arya, Anushka Goyal, Aditi Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05091v1 The effectiveness of brand monitoring in India is increasingly challenged by the rise of Hinglish--a hybrid of Hindi and English--used widely in user-generated content on platforms like Twitter. Traditional Natural Language Processing (NLP) models, built for monolingual data, often fail to interpret the syntactic and semantic complexity of this code-mixed language, resulting in inaccurate sentiment analysis and misleading market insights. To address this gap, we propose a high-performance sentiment classification framework specifically designed for Hinglish tweets. Our approach fine-tunes mBERT (Multilingual BERT), leveraging its multilingual capabilities to better understand the linguistic diversity of Indian social media. A key component of our methodology is the use of subword tokenization, which enables the model to effectively manage spelling variations, slang, and out-of-vocabulary terms common in Romanized Hinglish. This research delivers a production-ready AI solution for brand sentiment tracking and establishes a strong benchmark for multilingual NLP in low-resource, code-mixed environments. --- ### Driver-Intention Prediction with Deep Learning: Real-Time Brain-to-Vehicle Communication Authors: Niloufar Alavi, Swati Shah, Rezvan Alamian, Stefan Goetz Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI, cs.ET, eess.SP, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05084v1 Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) allow direct communication between the brain and electronics without the need for speech or physical movement. Such interfaces can be particularly beneficial in applications requiring rapid response times, such as driving, where a vehicle's advanced driving assistance systems could benefit from immediate understanding of a driver's intentions. This study presents a novel method for predicting a driver's intention to steer using electroencephalography (EEG) signals through deep learning. A driving simulator created a controlled environment in which participants imagined controlling a vehicle during various driving scenarios, including left and right turns, as well as straight driving. A convolutional neural network (CNN) classified the detected EEG data with minimal pre-processing. Our model achieved an accuracy of 83.7% in distinguishing between the three steering intentions and demonstrated the ability of CNNs to process raw EEG data effectively. The classification accuracy was highest for right-turn segments, which suggests a potential spatial bias in brain activity. This study lays the foundation for more intuitive brain-to-vehicle communication systems. --- ### Driving on Registers Authors: Ellington Kirby, Alexandre Boulch, Yihong Xu, Yuan Yin, Gilles Puy, Éloi Zablocki, Andrei Bursuc, Spyros Gidaris, Renaud Marlet, Florent Bartoccioni, Anh-Quan Cao, Nermin Samet et al. Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05083v2 We present DrivoR, a simple and efficient transformer-based architecture for end-to-end autonomous driving. Our approach builds on pretrained Vision Transformers (ViTs) and introduces camera-aware register tokens that compress multi-camera features into a compact scene representation, significantly reducing downstream computation without sacrificing accuracy. These tokens drive two lightweight transformer decoders that generate and then score candidate trajectories. The scoring decoder learns to mimic an oracle and predicts interpretable sub-scores representing aspects such as safety, comfort, and efficiency, enabling behavior-conditioned driving at inference. Despite its minimal design, DrivoR outperforms or matches strong contemporary baselines across NAVSIM-v1, NAVSIM-v2, and the photorealistic closed-loop HUGSIM benchmark. Our results show that a pure-transformer architecture, combined with targeted token compression, is sufficient for accurate, efficient, and adaptive end-to-end driving. Code and checkpoints will be made available via the project page. --- ### Driving on Registers Authors: Ellington Kirby, Alexandre Boulch, Yihong Xu, Yuan Yin, Gilles Puy, Éloi Zablocki, Andrei Bursuc, Spyros Gidaris, Renaud Marlet, Florent Bartoccioni, Anh-Quan Cao, Nermin Samet et al. Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05083v1 We present DrivoR, a simple and efficient transformer-based architecture for end-to-end autonomous driving. Our approach builds on pretrained Vision Transformers (ViTs) and introduces camera-aware register tokens that compress multi-camera features into a compact scene representation, significantly reducing downstream computation without sacrificing accuracy. These tokens drive two lightweight transformer decoders that generate and then score candidate trajectories. The scoring decoder learns to mimic an oracle and predicts interpretable sub-scores representing aspects such as safety, comfort, and efficiency, enabling behavior-conditioned driving at inference. Despite its minimal design, DrivoR outperforms or matches strong contemporary baselines across NAVSIM-v1, NAVSIM-v2, and the photorealistic closed-loop HUGSIM benchmark. Our results show that a pure-transformer architecture, combined with targeted token compression, is sufficient for accurate, efficient, and adaptive end-to-end driving. Code and checkpoints will be made available via the project page. --- ### Exploring Student Expectations and Confidence in Learning Analytics Authors: Hayk Asatryan, Basile Tousside, Janis Mohr, Malte Neugebauer, Hildo Bijl, Paul Spiegelberg, Claudia Frohn-Schauf, Jörg Frochte Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CY, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05082v1 Learning Analytics (LA) is nowadays ubiquitous in many educational systems, providing the ability to collect and analyze student data in order to understand and optimize learning and the environments in which it occurs. On the other hand, the collection of data requires to comply with the growing demand regarding privacy legislation. In this paper, we use the Student Expectation of Learning Analytics Questionnaire (SELAQ) to analyze the expectations and confidence of students from different faculties regarding the processing of their data for Learning Analytics purposes. This allows us to identify four clusters of students through clustering algorithms: Enthusiasts, Realists, Cautious and Indifferents. This structured analysis provides valuable insights into the acceptance and criticism of Learning Analytics among students. --- ### Chain-of-Sanitized-Thoughts: Plugging PII Leakage in CoT of Large Reasoning Models Authors: Arghyadeep Das, Sai Sreenivas Chintha, Rishiraj Girmal, Kinjal Pandey, Sharvi Endait Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05076v1 Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) improve performance, reliability, and interpretability by generating explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, but this transparency introduces a serious privacy risk: intermediate reasoning often leaks personally identifiable information (PII) even when final answers are sanitized. We study how to induce privacy-first reasoning, where models reason without exposing sensitive information, using deployable interventions rather than post-hoc redaction. We introduce PII-CoT-Bench, a supervised dataset with privacy-aware CoT annotations, and a category-balanced evaluation benchmark covering realistic and adversarial leakage scenarios. Our results reveal a capability-dependent trend: state-of-the-art models benefit most from prompt-based controls, whereas weaker models require fine-tuning to achieve meaningful leakage reduction. Across models and categories, both approaches substantially reduce PII exposure with minimal degradation in utility, demonstrating that private reasoning can be achieved without sacrificing performance. Overall, we show that private CoT reasoning can be achieved with minimal utility loss, providing practical guidance for building privacy-preserving reasoning systems. --- ### SemPA: Improving Sentence Embeddings of Large Language Models through Semantic Preference Alignment Authors: Ziyang Chen, Zhenxuan Huang, Yile Wang, Weiqin Wang, Lu Yin, Hui Huang Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05075v1 Traditional sentence embedding methods employ token-level contrastive learning on non-generative pre-trained models. Recently, there have emerged embedding methods based on generative large language models (LLMs). These methods either rely on fixed prompt templates or involve modifications to the model architecture. The former lacks further optimization of the model and results in limited performance, while the latter alters the internal computational mechanisms of the model, thereby compromising its generative capabilities. We propose SemPA, a novel approach that boosts the sentence representations while preserving the generative ability of LLMs via semantic preference alignment. We leverage sentence-level Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to efficiently optimize LLMs on a paraphrase generation task, where the model learns to discriminate semantically equivalent sentences while preserving inherent generative capacity. Theoretically, we establish a formal connection between DPO and contrastive learning under the Plackett-Luce model framework. Empirically, experimental results on both semantic textual similarity tasks and various benchmarks for LLMs show that SemPA achieves better semantic representations without sacrificing the inherent generation capability of LLMs. --- ### Milestones over Outcome: Unlocking Geometric Reasoning with Sub-Goal Verifiable Reward Authors: Jianlong Chen, Daocheng Fu, Shengze Xu, Jiawei Chen, Yuan Feng, Yue Yang, Junchi Yan, Hongyuan Zha, Renqiu Xia Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05073v1 Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with complex geometric reasoning, largely because "black box" outcome-based supervision fails to distinguish between lucky guesses and rigorous deduction. To address this, we introduce a paradigm shift towards subgoal-level evaluation and learning. We first construct GeoGoal, a benchmark synthesized via a rigorous formal verification data engine, which converts abstract proofs into verifiable numeric subgoals. This structure reveals a critical divergence between reasoning quality and outcome accuracy. Leveraging this, we propose the Sub-Goal Verifiable Reward (SGVR) framework, which replaces sparse signals with dense rewards based on the Skeleton Rate. Experiments demonstrate that SGVR not only enhances geometric performance (+9.7%) but also exhibits strong generalization, transferring gains to general math (+8.0%) and other general reasoning tasks (+2.8%), demonstrating broad applicability across diverse domains. --- ### Graph energy as a measure of community detectability in networks Authors: Lucas Böttcher, Mason A. Porter, Santo Fortunato Published: 2026-01-08 Categories: cs.SI, cond-mat.stat-mech, math.PR, physics.soc-ph, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05065v1 A key challenge in network science is the detection of communities, which are sets of nodes in a network that are densely connected internally but sparsely connected to the rest of the network. A fundamental result in community detection is the existence of a nontrivial threshold for community detectability on sparse graphs that are generated by the planted partition model (PPM). Below this so-called ``detectability limit'', no community-detection method can perform better than random chance. Spectral methods for community detection fail before this detectability limit because the eigenvalues corresponding to the eigenvectors that are relevant for community detection can be absorbed by the bulk of the spectrum. One can bypass the detectability problem by using special matrices, like the non-backtracking matrix, but this requires one to consider higher-dimensional matrices. In this paper, we show that the difference in graph energy between a PPM and an Erdős--Rényi (ER) network has a distinct transition at the detectability threshold even for the adjacency matrices of the underlying networks. The graph energy is based on the full spectrum of an adjacency matrix, so our result suggests that standard graph matrices still allow one to separate the parameter regions with detectable and undetectable communities. ---