# Research Papers — 2026-01 · bundle page 177 of 189

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### DiMEx: Breaking the Cold Start Barrier in Data-Free Model Extraction via Latent Diffusion Priors

Authors: Yash Thesia, Meera Suthar
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01688v2

Model stealing attacks pose an existential threat to Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS), allowing adversaries to replicate proprietary models for a fraction of their training cost. While Data-Free Model Extraction (DFME) has emerged as a stealthy vector, it remains fundamentally constrained by the "Cold Start" problem: GAN-based adversaries waste thousands of queries converging from random noise to meaningful data. We propose DiMEx, a framework that weaponizes the rich semantic priors of pre-trained Latent Diffusion Models to bypass this initialization barrier entirely. By employing Random Embedding Bayesian Optimization (REMBO) within the generator's latent space, DiMEx synthesizes high-fidelity queries immediately, achieving 52.1 percent agreement on SVHN with just 2,000 queries - outperforming state-of-the-art GAN baselines by over 16 percent. To counter this highly semantic threat, we introduce the Hybrid Stateful Ensemble (HSE) defense, which identifies the unique "optimization trajectory" of latent-space attacks. Our results demonstrate that while DiMEx evades static distribution detectors, HSE exploits this temporal signature to suppress attack success rates to 21.6 percent with negligible latency.

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### FALCON: Few-Shot Adversarial Learning for Cross-Domain Medical Image Segmentation

Authors: Abdur R. Fayjie, Pankhi Kashyap, Jutika Borah, Patrick Vandewalle
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01687v1

Precise delineation of anatomical and pathological structures within 3D medical volumes is crucial for accurate diagnosis, effective surgical planning, and longitudinal disease monitoring. Despite advancements in AI, clinically viable segmentation is often hindered by the scarcity of 3D annotations, patient-specific variability, data privacy concerns, and substantial computational overhead. In this work, we propose FALCON, a cross-domain few-shot segmentation framework that achieves high-precision 3D volume segmentation by processing data as 2D slices. The framework is first meta-trained on natural images to learn-to-learn generalizable segmentation priors, then transferred to the medical domain via adversarial fine-tuning and boundary-aware learning. Task-aware inference, conditioned on support cues, allows FALCON to adapt dynamically to patient-specific anatomical variations across slices. Experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that FALCON consistently achieves the lowest Hausdorff Distance scores, indicating superior boundary accuracy while maintaining a Dice Similarity Coefficient comparable to the state-of-the-art models. Notably, these results are achieved with significantly less labeled data, no data augmentation, and substantially lower computational overhead.

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### Lying with Truths: Open-Channel Multi-Agent Collusion for Belief Manipulation via Generative Montage

Authors: Jinwei Hu, Xinmiao Huang, Youcheng Sun, Yi Dong, Xiaowei Huang
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.MA
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01685v2

As large language models (LLMs) transition to autonomous agents synthesizing real-time information, their reasoning capabilities introduce an unexpected attack surface. This paper introduces a novel threat where colluding agents steer victim beliefs using only truthful evidence fragments distributed through public channels, without relying on covert communications, backdoors, or falsified documents. By exploiting LLMs' overthinking tendency, we formalize the first cognitive collusion attack and propose Generative Montage: a Writer-Editor-Director framework that constructs deceptive narratives through adversarial debate and coordinated posting of evidence fragments, causing victims to internalize and propagate fabricated conclusions. To study this risk, we develop CoPHEME, a dataset derived from real-world rumor events, and simulate attacks across diverse LLM families. Our results show pervasive vulnerability across 14 LLM families: attack success rates reach 74.4% for proprietary models and 70.6% for open-weights models. Counterintuitively, stronger reasoning capabilities increase susceptibility, with reasoning-specialized models showing higher attack success than base models or prompts. Furthermore, these false beliefs then cascade to downstream judges, achieving over 60% deception rates, highlighting a socio-technical vulnerability in how LLM-based agents interact with dynamic information environments. Our implementation and data are available at: https://github.com/CharlesJW222/Lying_with_Truth/tree/main.

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### LACONIC: Dense-Level Effectiveness for Scalable Sparse Retrieval via a Two-Phase Training Curriculum

Authors: Zhichao Xu, Shengyao Zhuang, Crystina Zhang, Xueguang Ma, Yijun Tian, Maitrey Mehta, Jimmy Lin, Vivek Srikumar
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.IR, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01684v2

While dense retrieval models have been the standard for state-of-the-art information retrieval, their deployment is often constrained by high memory requirements and reliance on GPU accelerators for vector similarity search at scale. Learned sparse retrieval offers a compelling alternative by enabling efficient search via inverted indices, yet it has historically received less attention than dense approaches. In this paper, we introduce LACONIC, a family of learned sparse retrievers based on the Llama3 architecture (1B, 3B, and 8B). We propose a streamlined two-phase training curriculum consisting of (1) weakly supervised pre-finetuning to adapt causal LLMs for bidirectional contextualization and (2) high-signal finetuning using curated hard negatives. Our results demonstrate that LACONIC effectively bridges the performance gap with dense models: the 8B variant achieves a state-of-the-art 60.2 nDCG@10 on the MTEB Retrieval benchmark, ranking 15th on the leaderboard as of February 5th, 2026, while utilizing 74% less index memory than an equivalent dense model. By delivering high retrieval effectiveness on commodity CPU hardware with a fraction of the compute budget required by competing models, LACONIC provides a scalable and efficient solution for real-world search applications. We fully open source our code implementation and trained checkpoints to facilitate reproducibility.

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### Evaluating Deep Learning-Based Face Recognition for Infants and Toddlers: Impact of Age Across Developmental Stages

Authors: Afzal Hossain, Mst Rumana Sumi, Stephanie Schuckers
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01680v1

Face recognition for infants and toddlers presents unique challenges due to rapid facial morphology changes, high inter-class similarity, and limited dataset availability. This study evaluates the performance of four deep learning-based face recognition models FaceNet, ArcFace, MagFace, and CosFace on a newly developed longitudinal dataset collected over a 24 month period in seven sessions involving children aged 0 to 3 years. Our analysis examines recognition accuracy across developmental stages, showing that the True Accept Rate (TAR) is only 30.7% at 0.1% False Accept Rate (FAR) for infants aged 0 to 6 months, due to unstable facial features. Performance improves significantly in older children, reaching 64.7% TAR at 0.1% FAR in the 2.5 to 3 year age group. We also evaluate verification performance over different time intervals, revealing that shorter time gaps result in higher accuracy due to reduced embedding drift. To mitigate this drift, we apply a Domain Adversarial Neural Network (DANN) approach that improves TAR by over 12%, yielding features that are more temporally stable and generalizable. These findings are critical for building biometric systems that function reliably over time in smart city applications such as public healthcare, child safety, and digital identity services. The challenges observed in early age groups highlight the importance of future research on privacy preserving biometric authentication systems that can address temporal variability, particularly in secure and regulated urban environments where child verification is essential.

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### Simplex Deep Linear Discriminant Analysis

Authors: Maxat Tezekbayev, Arman Bolatov, Zhenisbek Assylbekov
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01679v2

We revisit Deep Linear Discriminant Analysis (Deep LDA) from a likelihood-based perspective. While classical LDA is a simple Gaussian model with linear decision boundaries, attaching an LDA head to a neural encoder raises the question of how to train the resulting deep classifier by maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). We first show that end-to-end MLE training of an unconstrained Deep LDA model ignores discrimination: when both the LDA parameters and the encoder parameters are learned jointly, the likelihood admits a degenerate solution in which some of the class clusters may heavily overlap or even collapse, and classification performance deteriorates. Batchwise moment re-estimation of the LDA parameters does not remove this failure mode. We then propose a constrained Deep LDA formulation that fixes the class means to the vertices of a regular simplex in the latent space and restricts the shared covariance to be spherical, leaving only the priors and a single variance parameter to be learned along with the encoder. Under these geometric constraints, MLE becomes stable and yields well-separated class clusters in the latent space. On images (Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100) and texts (AG News, CLINC150), the resulting Deep LDA models achieve accuracy competitive with softmax baselines while offering a simple, interpretable latent geometry that is clearly visible in two-dimensional projections.

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### HeurekaBench: A Benchmarking Framework for AI Co-scientist

Authors: Siba Smarak Panigrahi, Jovana Videnović, Maria Brbić
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01678v2

LLM-based reasoning models have enabled the development of agentic systems that act as co-scientists, assisting in multi-step scientific analysis. However, evaluating these systems is challenging, as it requires realistic, end-to-end research scenarios that integrate data analysis, interpretation, and the generation of new insights from the experimental data. To address this limitation, we introduce HeurekaBench, a framework to create benchmarks with exploratory, open-ended research questions for experimental datasets. Each such question is grounded in a scientific study and its corresponding code repository, and is created using a semi-automated pipeline that leverages multiple LLMs to extract insights and generate candidate workflows, which are then verified against reported findings. We instantiate the framework in single-cell biology to obtain sc-HeurekaBench benchmark and use it to compare state-of-the-art single-cell agents. We further showcase the benefits of our benchmark for quantitatively analyzing current design choices in agentic systems. We find that the addition of a critic module can improve ill-formed responses for open-source LLM-based agents by up to 22% and close the gap with their closed-source counterparts. Overall, HeurekaBench sets a path toward rigorous, end-to-end evaluation of scientific agents, grounding benchmark construction in real scientific workflows.

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### Trustworthy Data-Driven Wildfire Risk Prediction and Understanding in Western Canada

Authors: Zhengsen Xu, Lanying Wang, Sibo Cheng, Xue Rui, Kyle Gao, Yimin Zhu, Mabel Heffring, Zack Dewis, Saeid Taleghanidoozdoozan, Megan Greenwood, Motasem Alkayid, Quinn Ledingham et al.
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01677v1

In recent decades, the intensification of wildfire activity in western Canada has resulted in substantial socio-economic and environmental losses. Accurate wildfire risk prediction is hindered by the intrinsic stochasticity of ignition and spread and by nonlinear interactions among fuel conditions, meteorology, climate variability, topography, and human activities, challenging the reliability and interpretability of purely data-driven models. We propose a trustworthy data-driven wildfire risk prediction framework based on long-sequence, multi-scale temporal modeling, which integrates heterogeneous drivers while explicitly quantifying predictive uncertainty and enabling process-level interpretation. Evaluated over western Canada during the record-breaking 2023 and 2024 fire seasons, the proposed model outperforms existing time-series approaches, achieving an F1 score of 0.90 and a PR-AUC of 0.98 with low computational cost. Uncertainty-aware analysis reveals structured spatial and seasonal patterns in predictive confidence, highlighting increased uncertainty associated with ambiguous predictions and spatiotemporal decision boundaries. SHAP-based interpretation provides mechanistic understanding of wildfire controls, showing that temperature-related drivers dominate wildfire risk in both years, while moisture-related constraints play a stronger role in shaping spatial and land-cover-specific contrasts in 2024 compared to the widespread hot and dry conditions of 2023. Data and code are available at https://github.com/SynUW/mmFire.

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### LabelAny3D: Label Any Object 3D in the Wild

Authors: Jin Yao, Radowan Mahmud Redoy, Sebastian Elbaum, Matthew B. Dwyer, Zezhou Cheng
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01676v1

Detecting objects in 3D space from monocular input is crucial for applications ranging from robotics to scene understanding. Despite advanced performance in the indoor and autonomous driving domains, existing monocular 3D detection models struggle with in-the-wild images due to the lack of 3D in-the-wild datasets and the challenges of 3D annotation. We introduce LabelAny3D, an \emph{analysis-by-synthesis} framework that reconstructs holistic 3D scenes from 2D images to efficiently produce high-quality 3D bounding box annotations. Built on this pipeline, we present COCO3D, a new benchmark for open-vocabulary monocular 3D detection, derived from the MS-COCO dataset and covering a wide range of object categories absent from existing 3D datasets. Experiments show that annotations generated by LabelAny3D improve monocular 3D detection performance across multiple benchmarks, outperforming prior auto-labeling approaches in quality. These results demonstrate the promise of foundation-model-driven annotation for scaling up 3D recognition in realistic, open-world settings.

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### Exposing Hidden Interfaces: LLM-Guided Type Inference for Reverse Engineering macOS Private Frameworks

Authors: Arina Kharlamova, Youcheng Sun, Ting Yu
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01673v1

Private macOS frameworks underpin critical services and daemons but remain undocumented and distributed only as stripped binaries, complicating security analysis. We present MOTIF, an agentic framework that integrates tool-augmented analysis with a finetuned large language model specialized for Objective-C type inference. The agent manages runtime metadata extraction, binary inspection, and constraint checking, while the model generates candidate method signatures that are validated and refined into compilable headers. On MOTIF-Bench, a benchmark built from public frameworks with groundtruth headers, MOTIF improves signature recovery from 15% to 86% compared to baseline static analysis tooling, with consistent gains in tool-use correctness and inference stability. Case studies on private frameworks show that reconstructed headers compile, link, and facilitate downstream security research and vulnerability studies. By transforming opaque binaries into analyzable interfaces, MOTIF establishes a scalable foundation for systematic auditing of macOS internals.

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### EHRSummarizer: A Privacy-Aware, FHIR-Native Reference Architecture for Source-Grounded EHR Summarization

Authors: Houman Kazemzadeh, Nima Minaifar, Kamyar Naderi, Sho Tabibzadeh
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01668v2

Clinicians routinely navigate fragmented electronic health record (EHR) interfaces to assemble a coherent picture of a patient's problems, medications, recent encounters, and longitudinal trends. This manuscript describes EHRSummarizer, a privacy-aware, FHIR-native reference architecture for structured EHR summarization. The architecture retrieves a targeted set of high-yield HL7 FHIR R4 resources, normalizes them into a clinical context package, and uses a constrained summarization stage to produce source-grounded summaries intended to support chart review. The architecture further clarifies missing-data status handling, medication-status ambiguity, controlled use of narrative clinical documents when available, and future source-to-summary traceability. The manuscript describes a reference architecture and prototype behavior rather than a validated clinical intervention, autonomous clinical decision-support system, or evidence of clinical benefit. Prototype demonstrations on synthetic and test FHIR environments illustrate end-to-end behavior and output formats; however, this manuscript does not report clinical outcomes, controlled workflow studies, or benchmark results. We outline an evaluation plan centered on faithfulness, omission risk, temporal correctness, usability, privacy, and operational monitoring to guide future institutional assessment.

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### Adversarial Instance Generation and Robust Training for Neural Combinatorial Optimization with Multiple Objectives

Authors: Wei Liu, Yaoxin Wu, Yingqian Zhang, Thomas Bäck, Yingjie Fan
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01665v2

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has shown great promise in addressing multi-objective combinatorial optimization problems (MOCOPs). Nevertheless, the robustness of these learning-based solvers has remained insufficiently explored, especially across diverse and complex problem distributions. In this paper, we propose a unified robustness-oriented framework for preference-conditioned DRL solvers for MOCOPs. Within this framework, we develop a preference-based adversarial attack to generate hard instances that expose solver weaknesses, and quantify the attack impact by the resulting degradation on Pareto-front quality. We further introduce a defense strategy that integrates hardness-aware preference selection into adversarial training to reduce overfitting to restricted preference regions and improve out-of-distribution performance. The experimental results on multi-objective traveling salesman problem (MOTSP), multi-objective capacitated vehicle routing problem (MOCVRP), and multi-objective knapsack problem (MOKP) verify that our attack method successfully learns hard instances for different solvers. Furthermore, our defense method significantly strengthens the robustness and generalizability of neural solvers, delivering superior performance on hard or out-of-distribution instances.

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### Who is the Winning Algorithm? Rank Aggregation for Comparative Studies

Authors: Amichai Painsky
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01664v1

Consider a collection of m competing machine learning algorithms. Given their performance on a benchmark of datasets, we would like to identify the best performing algorithm. Specifically, which algorithm is most likely to ``win'' (rank highest) on a future, unseen dataset. The standard maximum likelihood approach suggests counting the number of wins per each algorithm. In this work, we argue that there is much more information in the complete rankings. That is, the number of times that each algorithm finished second, third and so forth. Yet, it is not entirely clear how to effectively utilize this information for our purpose. In this work we introduce a novel conceptual framework for estimating the win probability for each of the m algorithms, given their complete rankings over a benchmark of datasets. Our proposed framework significantly improves upon currently known methods in synthetic and real-world examples.

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### Length-Aware Adversarial Training for Variable-Length Trajectories: Digital Twins for Mall Shopper Paths

Authors: He Sun, Jiwoong Shin, Ravi Dhar
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01663v1

We study generative modeling of \emph{variable-length trajectories} -- sequences of visited locations/items with associated timestamps -- for downstream simulation and counterfactual analysis. A recurring practical issue is that standard mini-batch training can be unstable when trajectory lengths are highly heterogeneous, which in turn degrades \emph{distribution matching} for trajectory-derived statistics. We propose \textbf{length-aware sampling (LAS)}, a simple batching strategy that groups trajectories by length and samples batches from a single length bucket, reducing within-batch length heterogeneity (and making updates more consistent) without changing the model class. We integrate LAS into a conditional trajectory GAN with auxiliary time-alignment losses and provide (i) a distribution-level guarantee for derived variables under mild boundedness assumptions, and (ii) an IPM/Wasserstein mechanism explaining why LAS improves distribution matching by removing length-only shortcut critics and targeting within-bucket discrepancies. Empirically, LAS consistently improves matching of derived-variable distributions on a multi-mall dataset of shopper trajectories and on diverse public sequence datasets (GPS, education, e-commerce, and movies), outperforming random sampling across dataset-specific metrics.

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### Animated 3DGS Avatars in Diverse Scenes with Consistent Lighting and Shadows

Authors: Aymen Mir, Riza Alp Guler, Jian Wang, Gerard Pons-Moll, Bing Zhou
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01660v1

We present a method for consistent lighting and shadows when animated 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) avatars interact with 3DGS scenes or with dynamic objects inserted into otherwise static scenes. Our key contribution is Deep Gaussian Shadow Maps (DGSM), a modern analogue of the classical shadow mapping algorithm tailored to the volumetric 3DGS representation. Building on the classic deep shadow mapping idea, we show that 3DGS admits closed form light accumulation along light rays, enabling volumetric shadow computation without meshing. For each estimated light, we tabulate transmittance over concentric radial shells and store them in octahedral atlases, which modern GPUs can sample in real time per query to attenuate affected scene Gaussians and thus cast and receive shadows consistently. To relight moving avatars, we approximate the local environment illumination with HDRI probes represented in a spherical harmonic (SH) basis and apply a fast per Gaussian radiance transfer, avoiding explicit BRDF estimation or offline optimization. We demonstrate environment consistent lighting for avatars from AvatarX and ActorsHQ, composited into ScanNet++, DL3DV, and SuperSplat scenes, and show interactions with inserted objects. Across single and multi avatar settings, DGSM and SH relighting operate fully in the volumetric 3DGS representation, yielding coherent shadows and relighting while avoiding meshing.

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### STEMNIST: Spiking Tactile Extended MNIST Neuromorphic Dataset

Authors: Anubhab Tripathi, Li Gaishan, Zhengnan Fu, Chiara Bartolozzi, Bert E. Shi, Arindam Basu
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.NE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01658v1

Tactile sensing is essential for robotic manipulation, prosthetics and assistive technologies, yet neuromorphic tactile datasets remain limited compared to their visual counterparts. We introduce STEMNIST, a large-scale neuromorphic tactile dataset extending ST-MNIST from 10 digits to 35 alphanumeric classes (uppercase letters A--Z and digits 1--9), providing a challenging benchmark for event-based haptic recognition. The dataset comprises 7,700 samples collected from 34 participants using a custom \(16\times 16\) tactile sensor array operating at 120 Hz, encoded as 1,005,592 spike events through adaptive temporal differentiation. Following EMNIST's visual character recognition protocol, STEMNIST addresses the critical gap between simplified digit classification and real-world tactile interaction scenarios requiring alphanumeric discrimination. Baseline experiments using conventional CNNs (90.91% test accuracy) and spiking neural networks (89.16%) establish performance benchmarks. The dataset's event-based format, unrestricted spatial variability and rich temporal structure makes it suitable for testing neuromorphic hardware and bio-inspired learning algorithms. STEMNIST enables reproducible evaluation of tactile recognition systems and provides a foundation for advancing energy-efficient neuromorphic perception in robotics, biomedical engineering and human-machine interfaces. The dataset, documentation and codes are publicly available to accelerate research in neuromorphic tactile computing.

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### UniCrop: A Universal, Multi-Source Data Engineering Pipeline for Scalable Crop Yield Prediction

Authors: Emiliya Khidirova, Oktay Karakuş
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: eess.IV, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01655v1

Accurate crop yield prediction relies on diverse data streams, including satellite, meteorological, soil, and topographic information. However, despite rapid advances in machine learning, existing approaches remain crop- or region-specific and require data engineering efforts. This limits scalability, reproducibility, and operational deployment. This study introduces UniCrop, a universal and reusable data pipeline designed to automate the acquisition, cleaning, harmonisation, and engineering of multi-source environmental data for crop yield prediction. For any given location, crop type, and temporal window, UniCrop automatically retrieves, harmonises, and engineers over 200 environmental variables (Sentinel-1/2, MODIS, ERA5-Land, NASA POWER, SoilGrids, and SRTM), reducing them to a compact, analysis-ready feature set utilising a structured feature reduction workflow with minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR). To validate, UniCrop was applied to a rice yield dataset comprising 557 field observations. Using only the selected 15 features, four baseline machine learning models (LightGBM, Random Forest, Support Vector Regression, and Elastic Net) were trained. LightGBM achieved the best single-model performance (RMSE = 465.1 kg/ha, $R^2 = 0.6576$), while a constrained ensemble of all baselines further improved accuracy (RMSE = 463.2 kg/ha, $R^2 = 0.6604$). UniCrop contributes a scalable and transparent data-engineering framework that addresses the primary bottleneck in operational crop yield modelling: the preparation of consistent and harmonised multi-source data. By decoupling data specification from implementation and supporting any crop, region, and time frame through simple configuration updates, UniCrop provides a practical foundation for scalable agricultural analytics. The code and implementation documentation are shared in https://github.com/CoDIS-Lab/UniCrop.

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### Learning Resilient Elections with Adversarial GNNs

Authors: Hao Xiang Li, Yash Shah, Lorenzo Giusti
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.MA, cs.SI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01653v1

In the face of adverse motives, it is indispensable to achieve a consensus. Elections have been the canonical way by which modern democracy has operated since the 17th century. Nowadays, they regulate markets, provide an engine for modern recommender systems or peer-to-peer networks, and remain the main approach to represent democracy. However, a desirable universal voting rule that satisfies all hypothetical scenarios is still a challenging topic, and the design of these systems is at the forefront of mechanism design research. Automated mechanism design is a promising approach, and recent works have demonstrated that set-invariant architectures are uniquely suited to modelling electoral systems. However, various concerns prevent the direct application to real-world settings, such as robustness to strategic voting. In this paper, we generalise the expressive capability of learned voting rules, and combine improvements in neural network architecture with adversarial training to improve the resilience of voting rules while maximizing social welfare. We evaluate the effectiveness of our methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Our method resolves critical limitations of prior work regarding learning voting rules by representing elections using bipartite graphs, and learning such voting rules using graph neural networks. We believe this opens new frontiers for applying machine learning to real-world elections.

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### Communication-Efficient Federated AUC Maximization with Cyclic Client Participation

Authors: Umesh Vangapally, Wenhan Wu, Chen Chen, Zhishuai Guo
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.LG, cs.DC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01649v1

Federated AUC maximization is a powerful approach for learning from imbalanced data in federated learning (FL). However, existing methods typically assume full client availability, which is rarely practical. In real-world FL systems, clients often participate in a cyclic manner: joining training according to a fixed, repeating schedule. This setting poses unique optimization challenges for the non-decomposable AUC objective. This paper addresses these challenges by developing and analyzing communication-efficient algorithms for federated AUC maximization under cyclic client participation. We investigate two key settings: First, we study AUC maximization with a squared surrogate loss, which reformulates the problem as a nonconvex-strongly-concave minimax optimization. By leveraging the Polyak-Łojasiewicz (PL) condition, we establish a state-of-the-art communication complexity of $\widetilde{O}(1/ε^{1/2})$ and iteration complexity of $\widetilde{O}(1/ε)$. Second, we consider general pairwise AUC losses. We establish a communication complexity of $O(1/ε^3)$ and an iteration complexity of $O(1/ε^4)$. Further, under the PL condition, these bounds improve to communication complexity of $\widetilde{O}(1/ε^{1/2})$ and iteration complexity of $\widetilde{O}(1/ε)$. Extensive experiments on benchmark tasks in image classification, medical imaging, and fraud detection demonstrate the superior efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed methods.

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### An Empirical Study of Monocular Human Body Measurement Under Weak Calibration

Authors: Gaurav Sekar
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01639v1

Estimating human body measurements from monocular RGB imagery remains challenging due to scale ambiguity, viewpoint sensitivity, and the absence of explicit depth information. This work presents a systematic empirical study of three weakly calibrated monocular strategies: landmark-based geometry, pose-driven regression, and object-calibrated silhouettes, evaluated under semi-constrained conditions using consumer-grade cameras. Rather than pursuing state-of-the-art accuracy, the study analyzes how differing calibration assumptions influence measurement behavior, robustness, and failure modes across varied body types. The results reveal a clear trade-off between user effort during calibration and the stability of resulting circumferential quantities. This paper serves as an empirical design reference for lightweight monocular human measurement systems intended for deployment on consumer devices.

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### JMedEthicBench: A Multi-Turn Conversational Benchmark for Evaluating Medical Safety in Japanese Large Language Models

Authors: Junyu Liu, Zirui Li, Qian Niu, Zequn Zhang, Yue Xun, Wenlong Hou, Shujun Wang, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Kan Hatakeyama-Sato
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01627v3

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in healthcare field, it becomes essential to carefully evaluate their medical safety before clinical use. However, existing safety benchmarks remain predominantly English-centric, and test with only single-turn prompts despite multi-turn clinical consultations. To address these gaps, we introduce JMedEthicBench, the first multi-turn conversational benchmark for evaluating medical safety of LLMs for Japanese healthcare. Our benchmark is based on 67 guidelines from the Japan Medical Association and contains over 50,000 adversarial conversations generated using seven automatically discovered jailbreak strategies. Using a dual-LLM scoring protocol, we evaluate 27 models and find that commercial models maintain robust safety while medical-specialized models exhibit increased vulnerability. Furthermore, safety scores decline significantly across conversation turns (median: 9.5 to 5.0, $p < 0.001$). Cross-lingual evaluation on both Japanese and English versions of our benchmark reveals that medical model vulnerabilities persist across languages, indicating inherent alignment limitations rather than language-specific factors. These findings suggest that domain-specific fine-tuning may accidentally weaken safety mechanisms and that multi-turn interactions represent a distinct threat surface requiring dedicated alignment strategies.

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### How Does Prefix Matter in Reasoning Model Tuning?

Authors: Raj Vardhan Tomar, Preslav Nakov, Yuxia Wang
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01624v1

Recent alignment studies commonly remove introductory boilerplate phrases from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) datasets. This work challenges that assumption. We hypothesize that safety- and reasoning-oriented prefix sentences serve as lightweight alignment signals that can guide model decoding toward safer and more coherent responses. To examine this, we fine-tune three R1 series models across three core model capabilities: reasoning (mathematics, coding), safety, and factuality, systematically varying prefix inclusion from 0% to 100%. Results show that prefix-conditioned SFT improves both safety and reasoning performance, yielding up to +6% higher Safe@1 accuracy on adversarial benchmarks (WildJailbreak, StrongReject) and +7% improvement on GSM8K reasoning. However, factuality and coding tasks show marginal or negative effects, indicating that prefix-induced narrowing of the search space benefits structured reasoning. Token-level loss analysis further reveals that prefix tokens such as "revised" and "logically" incur higher gradient magnitudes, acting as alignment anchors that stabilize reasoning trajectories. Our findings suggest that prefix conditioning offers a scalable and interpretable mechanism for improving reasoning safety, serving as an implicit form of alignment that complements traditional reward-based methods.

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### The Gray Area: Characterizing Moderator Disagreement on Reddit

Authors: Shayan Alipour, Shruti Phadke, Seyed Shahabeddin Mousavi, Amirhossein Afsharrad, Morteza Zihayat, Mattia Samory
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.CY, cs.CL, cs.IT
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01620v2

Volunteer moderators play a crucial role in sustaining online dialogue, but they often disagree about what should or should not be allowed. In this paper, we study the complexity of content moderation with a focus on disagreements between moderators, which we term the ``gray area'' of moderation. Leveraging 5 years and 4.3 million moderation log entries from 24 subreddits of different topics and sizes, we characterize how gray area, or disputed cases, differ from undisputed cases. We show that one-in-seven moderation cases are disputed among moderators, often addressing transgressions where users' intent is not directly legible, such as in trolling and brigading, as well as tensions around community governance. This is concerning, as almost half of all gray area cases involved automated moderation decisions. Through information-theoretic evaluations, we demonstrate that gray area cases are inherently harder to adjudicate than undisputed cases and show that state-of-the-art language models struggle to adjudicate them. We highlight the key role of expert human moderators in overseeing the moderation process and provide insights about the challenges of current moderation processes and tools.

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### Deep Linear Discriminant Analysis Revisited

Authors: Maxat Tezekbayev, Rustem Takhanov, Arman Bolatov, Zhenisbek Assylbekov
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01619v1

We show that for unconstrained Deep Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) classifiers, maximum-likelihood training admits pathological solutions in which class means drift together, covariances collapse, and the learned representation becomes almost non-discriminative. Conversely, cross-entropy training yields excellent accuracy but decouples the head from the underlying generative model, leading to highly inconsistent parameter estimates. To reconcile generative structure with discriminative performance, we introduce the \emph{Discriminative Negative Log-Likelihood} (DNLL) loss, which augments the LDA log-likelihood with a simple penalty on the mixture density. DNLL can be interpreted as standard LDA NLL plus a term that explicitly discourages regions where several classes are simultaneously likely. Deep LDA trained with DNLL produces clean, well-separated latent spaces, matches the test accuracy of softmax classifiers on synthetic data and standard image benchmarks, and yields substantially better calibrated predictive probabilities, restoring a coherent probabilistic interpretation to deep discriminant models.

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### Real Time NILM Based Power Monitoring of Identical Induction Motors Representing Cutting Machines in Textile Industry

Authors: Md Istiauk Hossain Rifat, Moin Khan, Zohara Kamal, Md Borhan Uddin Khan, Mohammad Zunaed
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.LG, eess.SP
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01616v2

The textile industry in Bangladesh is one of the most energy-intensive sectors, yet its monitoring practices remain largely outdated, resulting in inefficient power usage and high operational costs. To address this, we propose a real-time Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM)-based framework tailored for industrial applications, with a focus on identical motor-driven loads representing textile cutting machines. A hardware setup comprising voltage and current sensors, Arduino Mega and ESP8266 was developed to capture aggregate and individual load data, which was stored and processed on cloud platforms. A new dataset was created from three identical induction motors and auxiliary loads, totaling over 180,000 samples, to evaluate the state-of-the-art MATNILM model under challenging industrial conditions. Results indicate that while aggregate energy estimation was reasonably accurate, per-appliance disaggregation faced difficulties, particularly when multiple identical machines operated simultaneously. Despite these challenges, the integrated system demonstrated practical real-time monitoring with remote accessibility through the Blynk application. This work highlights both the potential and limitations of NILM in industrial contexts, offering insights into future improvements such as higher-frequency data collection, larger-scale datasets and advanced deep learning approaches for handling identical loads.

---

### CAP-IQA: Context-Aware Prompt-Guided CT Image Quality Assessment

Authors: Kazi Ramisa Rifa, Jie Zhang, Abdullah Imran
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01613v1

Prompt-based methods, which encode medical priors through descriptive text, have been only minimally explored for CT Image Quality Assessment (IQA). While such prompts can embed prior knowledge about diagnostic quality, they often introduce bias by reflecting idealized definitions that may not hold under real-world degradations such as noise, motion artifacts, or scanner variability. To address this, we propose the Context-Aware Prompt-guided Image Quality Assessment (CAP-IQA) framework, which integrates text-level priors with instance-level context prompts and applies causal debiasing to separate idealized knowledge from factual, image-specific degradations. Our framework combines a CNN-based visual encoder with a domain-specific text encoder to assess diagnostic visibility, anatomical clarity, and noise perception in abdominal CT images. The model leverages radiology-style prompts and context-aware fusion to align semantic and perceptual representations. On the 2023 LDCTIQA challenge benchmark, CAP-IQA achieves an overall correlation score of 2.8590 (sum of PLCC, SROCC, and KROCC), surpassing the top-ranked leaderboard team (2.7427) by 4.24%. Moreover, our comprehensive ablation experiments confirm that prompt-guided fusion and the simplified encoder-only design jointly enhance feature alignment and interpretability. Furthermore, evaluation on an in-house dataset of 91,514 pediatric CT images demonstrates the true generalizability of CAP-IQA in assessing perceptual fidelity in a different patient population.

---

### Structured Decomposition for LLM Reasoning: Cross-Domain Validation and Semantic Web Integration

Authors: Albert Sadowski, Jarosław A. Chudziak
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01609v1

Rule-based reasoning over natural language input arises in domains where decisions must be auditable and justifiable: clinical protocols specify eligibility criteria in prose, evidence rules define admissibility through textual conditions, and scientific standards dictate methodological requirements. Applying rules to such inputs demands both interpretive flexibility and formal guarantees. Large language models (LLMs) provide flexibility but cannot ensure consistent rule application; symbolic systems provide guarantees but require structured input. This paper presents an integration pattern that combines these strengths: LLMs serve as ontology population engines, translating unstructured text into ABox assertions according to expert-authored TBox specifications, while SWRL-based reasoners apply rules with deterministic guarantees. The framework decomposes reasoning into entity identification, assertion extraction, and symbolic verification, with task definitions grounded in OWL 2 ontologies. Experiments across three domains (legal hearsay determination, scientific method-task application, clinical trial eligibility) and eleven language models validate the approach. Structured decomposition achieves statistically significant improvements over few-shot prompting in aggregate, with gains observed across all three domains. An ablation study confirms that symbolic verification provides substantial benefit beyond structured prompting alone. The populated ABox integrates with standard semantic web tooling for inspection and querying, positioning the framework for richer inference patterns that simpler formalisms cannot express.

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### Guiding Token-Sparse Diffusion Models

Authors: Felix Krause, Stefan Andreas Baumann, Johannes Schusterbauer, Olga Grebenkova, Ming Gui, Vincent Tao Hu, Björn Ommer
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01608v2

Diffusion models deliver high quality in image synthesis but remain expensive during training and inference. Recent works have leveraged the inherent redundancy in visual content to make training more affordable by training only on a subset of visual information. While these methods were successful in providing cheaper and more effective training, sparsely trained diffusion models struggle in inference. This is due to their lacking response to Classifier-free Guidance (CFG) leading to underwhelming performance during inference. To overcome this, we propose Sparse Guidance (SG). Instead of using conditional dropout as a signal to guide diffusion models, SG uses token-level sparsity. As a result, SG preserves the high-variance of the conditional prediction better, achieving good quality and high variance outputs. Leveraging token-level sparsity at inference, SG improves fidelity at lower compute, achieving 1.58 FID on the commonly used ImageNet-256 benchmark with 25% fewer FLOPs, and yields up to 58% FLOP savings at matched baseline quality. To demonstrate the effectiveness of Sparse Guidance, we train a 2.5B text-to-image diffusion model using training time sparsity and leverage SG during inference. SG achieves improvements in composition and human preference score while increasing throughput at the same time.

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### REE-TTT: Highly Adaptive Radar Echo Extrapolation Based on Test-Time Training

Authors: Xin Di, Xinglin Piao, Fei Wang, Guodong Jing, Yong Zhang
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01605v1

Precipitation nowcasting is critically important for meteorological forecasting. Deep learning-based Radar Echo Extrapolation (REE) has become a predominant nowcasting approach, yet it suffers from poor generalization due to its reliance on high-quality local training data and static model parameters, limiting its applicability across diverse regions and extreme events. To overcome this, we propose REE-TTT, a novel model that incorporates an adaptive Test-Time Training (TTT) mechanism. The core of our model lies in the newly designed Spatio-temporal Test-Time Training (ST-TTT) block, which replaces the standard linear projections in TTT layers with task-specific attention mechanisms, enabling robust adaptation to non-stationary meteorological distributions and thereby significantly enhancing the feature representation of precipitation. Experiments under cross-regional extreme precipitation scenarios demonstrate that REE-TTT substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models in prediction accuracy and generalization, exhibiting remarkable adaptability to data distribution shifts.

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### grangersearch: An R Package for Exhaustive Granger Causality Testing with Tidyverse Integration

Authors: Nikolaos Korfiatis
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: stat.CO, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01604v1

This paper introduces grangersearch, an R package for performing exhaustive Granger causality searches on multiple time series. The package provides: (1) exhaustive pairwise search across multiple variables, (2) automatic lag order optimization with visualization, (3) tidyverse-compatible syntax with pipe operators and non-standard evaluation, and (4) integration with the broom ecosystem through tidy() and glance() methods. The package wraps the vars infrastructure while providing a simple interface for exploratory causal analysis. We describe the statistical methodology, demonstrate the package through worked examples, and discuss practical considerations for applied researchers.

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### From Theory of Mind to Theory of Environment: Counterfactual Simulation of Latent Environmental Dynamics

Authors: Ryutaro Uchiyama
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: q-bio.NC, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01599v1

The vertebrate motor system employs dimensionality-reducing strategies to limit the complexity of movement coordination, for efficient motor control. But when environments are dense with hidden action-outcome contingencies, movement complexity can promote behavioral innovation. Humans, perhaps uniquely, may infer the presence of hidden environmental dynamics from social cues, by drawing upon computational mechanisms shared with Theory of Mind. This proposed "Theory of Environment" supports behavioral innovation by expanding the dimensionality of motor exploration.

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### Variance-Reduced Diffusion Sampling via Target Score Identity

Authors: Alois Duston, Tan Bui-Thanh
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01594v3

We study variance reduction for score estimation and diffusion-based sampling in settings where the clean (target) score is available or can be approximated. Starting from the Target Score Identity (TSI), which expresses the noisy marginal score as a conditional expectation of the target score under the forward diffusion, we develop: (i) a plug-and-play nonparametric self-normalized importance sampling estimator compatible with standard reverse-time solvers, (ii) a variance-minimizing \emph{state- and time-dependent} blending rule between Tweedie-type and TSI estimators together with an anti-correlation analysis, (iii) a data-only extension based on locally fitted proxy scores, and (iv) a likelihood-tilting extension to Bayesian inverse problems. We also propose a \emph{Critic--Gate} distillation scheme that amortizes the state-dependent blending coefficient into a neural gate. Experiments on synthetic targets and PDE-governed inverse problems demonstrate improved sample quality for a fixed simulation budget.

---

### Beyond Patches: Global-aware Autoregressive Model for Multimodal Few-Shot Font Generation

Authors: Haonan Cai, Yuxuan Luo, Zhouhui Lian
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.CV, cs.MM
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01593v2

Manual font design is an intricate process that transforms a stylistic visual concept into a coherent glyph set. This challenge persists in automated Few-shot Font Generation (FFG), where models often struggle to preserve both the structural integrity and stylistic fidelity from limited references. While autoregressive (AR) models have demonstrated impressive generative capabilities, their application to FFG is constrained by conventional patch-level tokenization, which neglects global dependencies crucial for coherent font synthesis. Moreover, existing FFG methods remain within the image-to-image paradigm, relying solely on visual references and overlooking the role of language in conveying stylistic intent during font design. To address these limitations, we propose GAR-Font, a novel AR framework for multimodal few-shot font generation. GAR-Font introduces a global-aware tokenizer that effectively captures both local structures and global stylistic patterns, a multimodal style encoder offering flexible style control through a lightweight language-style adapter without requiring intensive multimodal pretraining, and a post-refinement pipeline that further enhances structural fidelity and style coherence. Extensive experiments show that GAR-Font outperforms existing FFG methods, excelling in maintaining global style faithfulness and achieving higher-quality results with textual stylistic guidance.

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### OpenRT: An Open-Source Red Teaming Framework for Multimodal LLMs

Authors: Xin Wang, Yunhao Chen, Juncheng Li, Yixu Wang, Yang Yao, Tianle Gu, Jie Li, Yan Teng, Yingchun Wang, Xia Hu
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.CR, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01592v2

The rapid integration of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) into critical applications is increasingly hindered by persistent safety vulnerabilities. However, existing red-teaming benchmarks are often fragmented, limited to single-turn text interactions, and lack the scalability required for systematic evaluation. To address this, we introduce OpenRT, a unified, modular, and high-throughput red-teaming framework designed for comprehensive MLLM safety evaluation. At its core, OpenRT architects a paradigm shift in automated red-teaming by introducing an adversarial kernel that enables modular separation across five critical dimensions: model integration, dataset management, attack strategies, judging methods, and evaluation metrics. By standardizing attack interfaces, it decouples adversarial logic from a high-throughput asynchronous runtime, enabling systematic scaling across diverse models. Our framework integrates 37 diverse attack methodologies, spanning white-box gradients, multi-modal perturbations, and sophisticated multi-agent evolutionary strategies. Through an extensive empirical study on 20 advanced models (including GPT-5.2, Claude 4.5, and Gemini 3 Pro), we expose critical safety gaps: even frontier models fail to generalize across attack paradigms, with leading models exhibiting average Attack Success Rates as high as 49.14%. Notably, our findings reveal that reasoning models do not inherently possess superior robustness against complex, multi-turn jailbreaks. By open-sourcing OpenRT, we provide a sustainable, extensible, and continuously maintained infrastructure that accelerates the development and standardization of AI safety.

---

### Identifying recurrent flows in high-dimensional dissipative chaos from low-dimensional embeddings

Authors: Pierre Beck, Tobias M. Schneider
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: nlin.CD, cs.LG, physics.flu-dyn
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01590v1

Unstable periodic orbits (UPOs) are the non-chaotic, dynamical building blocks of spatio-temporal chaos, motivating a first-principles based theory for turbulence ever since the discovery of deterministic chaos. Despite their key role in the ergodic theory approach to fluid turbulence, identifying UPOs is challenging for two reasons: chaotic dynamics and the high-dimensionality of the spatial discretization. We address both issues at once by proposing a loop convergence algorithm for UPOs directly within a low-dimensional embedding of the chaotic attractor. The convergence algorithm circumvents time-integration, hence avoiding instabilities from exponential error amplification, and operates on a latent dynamics obtained by pulling back the physical equations using automatic differentiation through the learned embedding function. The interpretable latent dynamics is accurate in a statistical sense, and, crucially, the embedding preserves the internal structure of the attractor, which we demonstrate through an equivalence between the latent and physical UPOs of both a model PDE and the 2D Navier-Stokes equations. This allows us to exploit the collapse of high-dimensional dissipative systems onto a lower dimensional manifold, and identify UPOs in the low-dimensional embedding.

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### Learning Relationship between Quantum Walks and Underdamped Langevin Dynamics

Authors: Yazhen Wang
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: quant-ph, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01589v1

Fast computational algorithms are in constant demand, and their development has been driven by advances such as quantum speedup and classical acceleration. This paper intends to study search algorithms based on quantum walks in quantum computation and sampling algorithms based on Langevin dynamics in classical computation. On the quantum side, quantum walk-based search algorithms can achieve quadratic speedups over their classical counterparts. In classical computation, a substantial body of work has focused on gradient acceleration, with gradient-adjusted algorithms derived from underdamped Langevin dynamics providing quadratic acceleration over conventional Langevin algorithms. Since both search and sampling algorithms are designed to address learning tasks, we study learning relationship between coined quantum walks and underdamped Langevin dynamics. Specifically, we show that, in terms of the Le Cam deficiency distance, a quantum walk with randomization is asymptotically equivalent to underdamped Langevin dynamics, whereas the quantum walk without randomization is not asymptotically equivalent due to its high-frequency oscillatory behavior. We further discuss the implications of these equivalence and nonequivalence results for the computational and inferential properties of the associated algorithms in machine learning tasks. Our findings offer new insight into the relationship between quantum walks and underdamped Langevin dynamics, as well as the intrinsic mechanisms underlying quantum speedup and classical gradient acceleration.

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### Steerability of Instrumental-Convergence Tendencies in LLMs

Authors: Jakub Hoscilowicz
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01584v2

We examine two properties of AI systems: capability (what a system can do) and steerability (how reliably one can shift behavior toward intended outcomes). A central question is whether capability growth reduces steerability and risks control collapse. We also distinguish between authorized steerability (builders reliably reaching intended behaviors) and unauthorized steerability (attackers eliciting disallowed behaviors). This distinction highlights a fundamental safety--security dilemma of AI models: safety requires high steerability to enforce control (e.g., stop/refuse), while security requires low steerability for malicious actors to elicit harmful behaviors. This tension presents a significant challenge for open-weight models, which currently exhibit high steerability via common techniques like fine-tuning or adversarial attacks. Using Qwen3 and InstrumentalEval, we find that a short anti-instrumental prompt suffix sharply reduces the measured convergence rate (e.g., shutdown avoidance, self-replication). For Qwen3-30B Instruct, the convergence rate drops from 81.69% under a pro-instrumental suffix to 2.82% under an anti-instrumental suffix. Under anti-instrumental prompting, larger aligned models show lower convergence rates than smaller ones (Instruct: 2.82% vs. 4.23%; Thinking: 4.23% vs. 9.86%). Code is available at github.com/j-hoscilowicz/instrumental_steering.

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### CONSENT: A Negotiation Framework for Leveraging User Flexibility in Vehicle-to-Building Charging under Uncertainty

Authors: Rishav Sen, Fangqi Liu, Jose Paolo Talusan, Ava Pettet, Yoshinori Suzue, Mark Bailey, Ayan Mukhopadhyay, Abhishek Dubey
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.MA, cs.AI, cs.GT, eess.SY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01581v3

The growth of Electric Vehicles (EVs) creates a conflict in vehicle-to-building (V2B) settings between building operators, who face high energy costs from uncoordinated charging, and drivers, who prioritize convenience and a full charge. To resolve this, we propose a negotiation-based framework that, by design, guarantees voluntary participation, strategy-proofness, and budget feasibility. It transforms EV charging into a strategic resource by offering drivers a range of incentive-backed options for modest flexibility in their departure time or requested state of charge (SoC). Our framework is calibrated with user survey data and validated using real operational data from a commercial building and an EV manufacturer. Simulations show that our negotiation protocol creates a mutually beneficial outcome: lowering the building operator's costs by over 3.5\% compared to an optimized, non-negotiating smart charging policy, while simultaneously reducing user charging expenses by 22\% below the utility's retail energy rate. By aligning operator and EV user objectives, our framework provides a strategic bridge between energy and mobility systems, transforming EV charging from a source of operational friction into a platform for collaboration and shared savings.

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### The Two-Stage Decision-Sampling Hypothesis: Understanding the Emergence of Self-Reflection in RL-Trained LLMs

Authors: Zibo Zhao, Yuanting Zha, Haipeng Zhang, Xingcheng Xu
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01580v2

Self-reflection capabilities emerge in Large Language Models after RL post-training, with multi-turn RL achieving substantial gains over SFT counterparts. Yet the mechanism of how a unified optimization objective gives rise to functionally distinct capabilities of generating solutions and evaluating when to revise them remains opaque. To address this question, we introduce the Gradient Attribution Property to characterize how reward gradients distribute across policy components, formalized through the Two-Stage Decision-Sampling (DS) Hypothesis, which decomposes the policy into sampling ($π_{sample}$) for generation and decision ($π_{d}$) for verification. We prove that surrogate rewards exhibit Balanced Gradient Attribution, while SFT and KL penalties exhibit Unbalanced Gradient Attribution, with length-weighting creating asymmetric regularization that constrains $π_{sample}$ while leaving $π_{d}$ under-optimized, providing an theoretical explanation of why RL succeeds where SFT fails. We also empirically validate our theoretical predictions on arithmetic reasoning demonstrates that RL's superior generalization stems primarily from improved decision-making ($π_{d}$) rather than sampling capabilities, providing a first-principles mechanistic explanation for self-correction in thinking models.

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### HanoiWorld : A Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture BasedWorld Model for Autonomous Vehicle Controller

Authors: Tran Tien Dat, Nguyen Hai An, Nguyen Khanh Viet Dung, Nguyen Duy Duc
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01577v1

Current attempts of Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Controller are data-demanding while the results are under-performed, unstable, and unable to grasp and anchor on the concept of safety, and over-concentrating on noise features due to the nature of pixel reconstruction. While current Self-Supervised Learningapproachs that learning on high-dimensional representations by leveraging the JointEmbedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) are interesting and an effective alternative, as the idea mimics the natural ability of the human brain in acquiring new skill usingimagination and minimal samples of observations. This study introduces Hanoi-World, a JEPA-based world model that using recurrent neural network (RNN) formaking longterm horizontal planning with effective inference time. Experimentsconducted on the Highway-Env package with difference enviroment showcase the effective capability of making a driving plan while safety-awareness, with considerablecollision rate in comparison with SOTA baselines

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### OpenNovelty: An LLM-powered Agentic System for Verifiable Scholarly Novelty Assessment

Authors: Ming Zhang, Kexin Tan, Yueyuan Huang, Yujiong Shen, Chunchun Ma, Li Ju, Xinran Zhang, Yuhui Wang, Wenqing Jing, Jingyi Deng, Huayu Sha, Binze Hu et al.
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01576v2

Evaluating novelty is critical yet challenging in peer review, as reviewers must assess submissions against a vast, rapidly evolving literature. This report presents OpenNovelty, an LLM-powered agentic system for transparent, evidence-based novelty analysis. The system operates through four phases: (1) extracting the core task and contribution claims to generate retrieval queries; (2) retrieving relevant prior work based on extracted queries via semantic search engine; (3) constructing a hierarchical taxonomy of core-task-related work and performing contribution-level full-text comparisons against each contribution; and (4) synthesizing all analyses into a structured novelty report with explicit citations and evidence snippets. Unlike naive LLM-based approaches, \textsc{OpenNovelty} grounds all assessments in retrieved real papers, ensuring verifiable judgments. We deploy our system on 500+ ICLR 2026 submissions with all reports publicly available on our website, and preliminary analysis suggests it can identify relevant prior work, including closely related papers that authors may overlook. OpenNovelty aims to empower the research community with a scalable tool that promotes fair, consistent, and evidence-backed peer review.

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### CaveAgent: Transforming LLMs into Stateful Runtime Operators

Authors: Maohao Ran, Zhenglin Wan, Cooper Lin, Yanting Zhang, Hongyu Xin, Hongwei Fan, Yibo Xu, Beier Luo, Yaxin Zhou, Wangbo Zhao, Lijie Yang, Lang Feng et al.
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.AI, cs.SE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01569v4

LLM-based agents are increasingly capable of complex task execution, yet current agentic systems remain constrained by text-centric paradigms that struggle with long-horizon tasks due to fragile multi-turn dependencies and context drift. We present CaveAgent, a framework that shifts tool use from ``LLM-as-Text-Generator'' to ``LLM-as-Runtime-Operator.'' CaveAgent introduces a dual-stream architecture that inverts the conventional paradigm: rather than treating the LLM's text context as the primary workspace with tools as auxiliary, CaveAgent elevates the persistent Python runtime as the central locus of state, with a lightweight semantic stream serving as its orchestrator. Beyond leveraging code generation to resolve interdependent sub-tasks (e.g., loops, conditionals) in a single step, CaveAgent introduces \textit{Stateful Runtime Management}: it injects, manipulates, and retrieves complex Python objects (e.g., DataFrames, database connections) that persist across turns, unlike existing code-based approaches that remain text-bound. CaveAgent further provides a runtime-integrated skill management system that extends the Agent Skills open standard, enabling ecosystem interoperability through executable skill injections. This persistence mechanism serves as a high-fidelity external memory that reduces context drift in multi-turn interactions and preserves processed data for downstream applications without information loss. Evaluations show consistent improvement across challenging benchmarks, enabling CaveAgent to handle data scales that cause context overflow in both JSON-based and code-based agents. The accessible runtime state further provides programmatically verifiable feedback, enabling automated evaluation and reward signal generation without human annotation and establishing a structural foundation for future research in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR).

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### MM-Sonate: Multimodal Controllable Audio-Video Generation with Zero-Shot Voice Cloning

Authors: Chunyu Qiang, Jun Wang, Xiaopeng Wang, Kang Yin, Yuxin Guo
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.MM, eess.AS
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01568v2

Joint audio-video generation aims to synthesize synchronized multisensory content, yet current unified models struggle with fine-grained acoustic control, particularly for identity-preserving speech. Existing approaches either suffer from temporal misalignment due to cascaded generation or lack the capability to perform zero-shot voice cloning within a joint synthesis framework. In this work, we present MM-Sonate, a multimodal flow-matching framework that unifies controllable audio-video joint generation with zero-shot voice cloning capabilities. Unlike prior works that rely on coarse semantic descriptions, MM-Sonate utilizes a unified instruction-phoneme input to enforce strict linguistic and temporal alignment. To enable zero-shot voice cloning, we introduce a timbre injection mechanism that effectively decouples speaker identity from linguistic content. Furthermore, addressing the limitations of standard classifier-free guidance in multimodal settings, we propose a noise-based negative conditioning strategy that utilizes natural noise priors to significantly enhance acoustic fidelity. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that MM-Sonate establishes new state-of-the-art performance in joint generation benchmarks, significantly outperforming baselines in lip synchronization and speech intelligibility, while achieving voice cloning fidelity comparable to specialized Text-to-Speech systems.

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### Logics-STEM: Empowering LLM Reasoning via Failure-Driven Post-Training and Document Knowledge Enhancement

Authors: Mingyu Xu, Cheng Fang, Keyue Jiang, Yuqian Zheng, Yanghua Xiao, Baojian Zhou, Qifang Zhao, Suhang Zheng, Xiuwen Zhu, Jiyang Tang, Yongchi Zhao, Yijia Luo et al.
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01562v3

We present Logics-STEM, a state-of-the-art reasoning model fine-tuned on Logics-STEM-SFT-Dataset, a high-quality and diverse dataset at 10M scale that represents one of the largest-scale open-source long chain-of-thought corpora. Logics-STEM targets reasoning tasks in the domains of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), and exhibits exceptional performance on STEM-related benchmarks with an average improvement of 4.68% over the next-best model at 8B scale. We attribute the gains to our data-algorithm co-design engine, where they are jointly optimized to fit a gold-standard distribution behind reasoning. Data-wise, the Logics-STEM-SFT-Dataset is constructed from a meticulously designed data curation engine with 5 stages to ensure the quality, diversity, and scalability, including annotation, deduplication, decontamination, distillation, and stratified sampling. Algorithm-wise, our failure-driven post-training framework leverages targeted knowledge retrieval and data synthesis around model failure regions in the Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) stage to effectively guide the second-stage SFT or the reinforcement learning (RL) for better fitting the target distribution. The superior empirical performance of Logics-STEM reveals the vast potential of combining large-scale open-source data with carefully designed synthetic data, underscoring the critical role of data-algorithm co-design in enhancing reasoning capabilities through post-training. We make both the Logics-STEM models (8B and 32B) and the Logics-STEM-SFT-Dataset (10M and downsampled 2.2M versions) publicly available to support future research in the open-source community.

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### Utilizing Earth Foundation Models to Enhance the Simulation Performance of Hydrological Models with AlphaEarth Embeddings

Authors: Pengfei Qu, Wenyu Ouyang, Chi Zhang, Yikai Chai, Shuolong Xu, Lei Ye, Yongri Piao, Miao Zhang, Huchuan Lu
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01558v2

Predicting river flow in places without streamflow records is challenging because basins respond differently to climate, terrain, vegetation, and soils. Traditional basin attributes describe some of these differences, but they cannot fully represent the complexity of natural environments. This study examines whether AlphaEarth Foundation embeddings, which are learned from large collections of satellite images rather than designed by experts, offer a more informative way to describe basin characteristics. These embeddings summarize patterns in vegetation, land surface properties, and long-term environmental dynamics. We find that models using them achieve higher accuracy when predicting flows in basins not used for training, suggesting that they capture key physical differences more effectively than traditional attributes. We further investigate how selecting appropriate donor basins influences prediction in ungauged regions. Similarity based on the embeddings helps identify basins with comparable environmental and hydrological behavior, improving performance, whereas adding many dissimilar basins can reduce accuracy. The results show that satellite-informed environmental representations can strengthen hydrological forecasting and support the development of models that adapt more easily to different landscapes.

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### MOSS Transcribe Diarize Technical Report

Authors: MOSI. AI, :, Donghua Yu, Zhengyuan Lin, Hanfu Chen, Chen Yang, Yiyang Zhang, Jingqi Chen, Ke Chen, Liwei Fan, Yi Jiang, Jie Zhu et al.
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI, eess.AS
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01554v7

Speaker-Attributed, Time-Stamped Transcription (SATS) aims to transcribe what is said and to precisely determine the timing of each speaker, which is particularly valuable for meeting transcription. Existing SATS systems rarely adopt an end-to-end formulation and are further constrained by limited context windows, weak long-range speaker memory, and the inability to output timestamps. To address these limitations, we present MOSS Transcribe Diarize, a unified multimodal large language model that jointly performs Speaker-Attributed, Time-Stamped Transcription in an end-to-end paradigm. Trained on extensive real wild data and equipped with a 128k context window for up to 90-minute inputs, MOSS Transcribe Diarize scales well and generalizes robustly. Across comprehensive evaluations, it outperforms state-of-the-art commercial systems on multiple public and in-house benchmarks.

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### HalluZig: Hallucination Detection using Zigzag Persistence

Authors: Shreyas N. Samaga, Gilberto Gonzalez Arroyo, Tamal K. Dey
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01552v2

The factual reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains a critical barrier to their adoption in high-stakes domains due to their propensity to hallucinate. Current detection methods often rely on surface-level signals from the model's output, overlooking the failures that occur within the model's internal reasoning process. In this paper, we introduce a new paradigm for hallucination detection by analyzing the dynamic topology of the evolution of model's layer-wise attention. We model the sequence of attention matrices as a zigzag graph filtration and use zigzag persistence, a tool from Topological Data Analysis, to extract a topological signature. Our core hypothesis is that factual and hallucinated generations exhibit distinct topological signatures. We validate our framework, HalluZig, on multiple benchmarks, demonstrating that it outperforms strong baselines. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that these topological signatures are generalizable across different models and hallucination detection is possible only using structural signatures from partial network depth.

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### Vision-language models lag human performance on physical dynamics and intent reasoning

Authors: Tianjun Gu, Jingyu Gong, Zhizhong Zhang, Yuan Xie, Lizhuang Ma, Xin Tan, Athanasios V
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01547v2

Spatial intelligence is central to embodied cognition, yet contemporary AI systems still struggle to reason about physical interactions in open-world human environments. Despite strong performance on controlled benchmarks, vision-language models often fail to jointly model physical dynamics, reference frames, and the latent human intentions that drive spatial change. We introduce Teleo-Spatial Intelligence (TSI), a reasoning capability that links spatiotemporal change to goal-directed structure. To evaluate TSI, we present EscherVerse, a large-scale open-world resource built from 11,328 real-world videos, including an 8,000-example benchmark and a 35,963-example instruction-tuning set. Across 27 state-of-the-art vision-language models and an independent analysis of first-pass human responses from 11 annotators, we identify a persistent teleo-spatial reasoning gap: the strongest proprietary model achieves 57.26\% overall accuracy, far below first-pass human performance, which ranges from 84.81\% to 95.14\% with a mean of 90.62\%. Fine-tuning on real-world, intent-aware data narrows this gap for open-weight models, but does not close it. EscherVerse provides a diagnostic testbed for purpose-aware spatial reasoning and highlights a critical gap between pattern recognition and human-level understanding in embodied AI.

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### Improving Behavioral Alignment in LLM Social Simulations via Context Formation and Navigation

Authors: Letian Kong, Qianran, Jin, Renyu Zhang
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01546v1

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human behavior in experimental settings, but they systematically diverge from human decisions in complex decision-making environments, where participants must anticipate others' actions and form beliefs based on observed behavior. We propose a two-stage framework for improving behavioral alignment. The first stage, context formation, explicitly specifies the experimental design to establish an accurate representation of the decision task and its context. The second stage, context navigation, guides the reasoning process within that representation to make decisions. We validate this framework through a focal replication of a sequential purchasing game with quality signaling (Kremer and Debo, 2016), extending to a crowdfunding game with costly signaling (Cason et al., 2025) and a demand-estimation task (Gui and Toubia, 2025) to test generalizability across decision environments. Across four state-of-the-art (SOTA) models (GPT-4o, GPT-5, Claude-4.0-Sonnet-Thinking, DeepSeek-R1), we find that complex decision-making environments require both stages to achieve behavioral alignment with human benchmarks, whereas the simpler demand-estimation task requires only context formation. Our findings clarify when each stage is necessary and provide a systematic approach for designing and diagnosing LLM social simulations as complements to human subjects in behavioral research.

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### Bridging the Data Gap: Creating a Hindi Text Summarization Dataset from the English XSUM

Authors: Praveenkumar Katwe, RakeshChandra Balabantaray, Kaliprasad Vittala
Published: 2026-01-04
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01543v1

Current advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have largely favored resource-rich languages, leaving a significant gap in high-quality datasets for low-resource languages like Hindi. This scarcity is particularly evident in text summarization, where the development of robust models is hindered by a lack of diverse, specialized corpora. To address this disparity, this study introduces a cost-effective, automated framework for creating a comprehensive Hindi text summarization dataset. By leveraging the English Extreme Summarization (XSUM) dataset as a source, we employ advanced translation and linguistic adaptation techniques. To ensure high fidelity and contextual relevance, we utilize the Crosslingual Optimized Metric for Evaluation of Translation (COMET) for validation, supplemented by the selective use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for curation. The resulting dataset provides a diverse, multi-thematic resource that mirrors the complexity of the original XSUM corpus. This initiative not only provides a direct tool for Hindi NLP research but also offers a scalable methodology for democratizing NLP in other underserved languages. By reducing the costs associated with dataset creation, this work fosters the development of more nuanced, culturally relevant models in computational linguistics.

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