# Research Papers — 2026-01 · bundle page 183 of 189

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### VEAT Quantifies Implicit Associations in Text-to-Video Generator Sora and Reveals Challenges in Bias Mitigation

Authors: Yongxu Sun, Michael Saxon, Ian Yang, Anna-Maria Gueorguieva, Aylin Caliskan
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00996v1

Text-to-Video (T2V) generators such as Sora raise concerns about whether generated content reflects societal bias. We extend embedding-association tests from words and images to video by introducing the Video Embedding Association Test (VEAT) and Single-Category VEAT (SC-VEAT). We validate these methods by reproducing the direction and magnitude of associations from widely used baselines, including Implicit Association Test (IAT) scenarios and OASIS image categories. We then quantify race (African American vs. European American) and gender (women vs. men) associations with valence (pleasant vs. unpleasant) across 17 occupations and 7 awards. Sora videos associate European Americans and women more with pleasantness (both d>0.8). Effect sizes correlate with real-world demographic distributions: percent men and White in occupations (r=0.93, r=0.83) and percent male and non-Black among award recipients (r=0.88, r=0.99). Applying explicit debiasing prompts generally reduces effect-size magnitudes, but can backfire: two Black-associated occupations (janitor, postal service) become more Black-associated after debiasing. Together, these results reveal that easily accessible T2V generators can actually amplify representational harms if not rigorously evaluated and responsibly deployed.

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### ElecTwit: A Framework for Studying Persuasion in Multi-Agent Social Systems

Authors: Michael Bao
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.AI, cs.CY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00994v1

This paper introduces ElecTwit, a simulation framework designed to study persuasion within multi-agent systems, specifically emulating the interactions on social media platforms during a political election. By grounding our experiments in a realistic environment, we aimed to overcome the limitations of game-based simulations often used in prior research. We observed the comprehensive use of 25 specific persuasion techniques across most tested LLMs, encompassing a wider range than previously reported. The variations in technique usage and overall persuasion output between models highlight how different model architectures and training can impact the dynamics in realistic social simulations. Additionally, we observed unique phenomena such as "kernel of truth" messages and spontaneous developments with an "ink" obsession, where agents collectively demanded written proof. Our study provides a foundation for evaluating persuasive LLM agents in real-world contexts, ensuring alignment and preventing dangerous outcomes.

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### WildIng: A Wildlife Image Invariant Representation Model for Geographical Domain Shift

Authors: Julian D. Santamaria, Claudia Isaza, Jhony H. Giraldo
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00993v1

Wildlife monitoring is crucial for studying biodiversity loss and climate change. Camera trap images provide a non-intrusive method for analyzing animal populations and identifying ecological patterns over time. However, manual analysis is time-consuming and resource-intensive. Deep learning, particularly foundation models, has been applied to automate wildlife identification, achieving strong performance when tested on data from the same geographical locations as their training sets. Yet, despite their promise, these models struggle to generalize to new geographical areas, leading to significant performance drops. For example, training an advanced vision-language model, such as CLIP with an adapter, on an African dataset achieves an accuracy of 84.77%. However, this performance drops significantly to 16.17% when the model is tested on an American dataset. This limitation partly arises because existing models rely predominantly on image-based representations, making them sensitive to geographical data distribution shifts, such as variation in background, lighting, and environmental conditions. To address this, we introduce WildIng, a Wildlife image Invariant representation model for geographical domain shift. WildIng integrates text descriptions with image features, creating a more robust representation to geographical domain shifts. By leveraging textual descriptions, our approach captures consistent semantic information, such as detailed descriptions of the appearance of the species, improving generalization across different geographical locations. Experiments show that WildIng enhances the accuracy of foundation models such as BioCLIP by 30% under geographical domain shift conditions. We evaluate WildIng on two datasets collected from different regions, namely America and Africa. The code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/Julian075/CATALOG/tree/WildIng.

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### UnrealPose: Leveraging Game Engine Kinematics for Large-Scale Synthetic Human Pose Data

Authors: Joshua Kawaguchi, Saad Manzur, Emily Gao Wang, Maitreyi Sinha, Bryan Vela, Yunxi Wang, Brandon Vela, Wayne B. Hayes
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00991v1

Diverse, accurately labeled 3D human pose data is expensive and studio-bound, while in-the-wild datasets lack known ground truth. We introduce UnrealPose-Gen, an Unreal Engine 5 pipeline built on Movie Render Queue for high-quality offline rendering. Our generated frames include: (i) 3D joints in world and camera coordinates, (ii) 2D projections and COCO-style keypoints with occlusion and joint-visibility flags, (iii) person bounding boxes, and (iv) camera intrinsics and extrinsics. We use UnrealPose-Gen to present UnrealPose-1M, an approximately one million frame corpus comprising eight sequences: five scripted "coherent" sequences spanning five scenes, approximately 40 actions, and five subjects; and three randomized sequences across three scenes, approximately 100 actions, and five subjects, all captured from diverse camera trajectories for broad viewpoint coverage. As a fidelity check, we report real-to-synthetic results on four tasks: image-to-3D pose, 2D keypoint detection, 2D-to-3D lifting, and person detection/segmentation. Though time and resources constrain us from an unlimited dataset, we release the UnrealPose-1M dataset, as well as the UnrealPose-Gen pipeline to support third-party generation of human pose data.

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### Uncertainty-Calibrated Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Fetal Ultrasound Plane Classification: A Systematic Review

Authors: Gustav Olaf Yunus Laitinen-Fredriksson Lundström-Imanov, Ozkan Gunalp
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00990v3

Fetal ultrasound is the cornerstone of antenatal care, and accurate recognition of a small set of standard anatomical planes underpins biometry, growth surveillance, and detection of structural anomalies. Deep learning classifiers now match or exceed expert accuracy on curated benchmarks, but most remain opaque and miscalibrated, leaving clinicians without the calibrated confidence or faithful explanations needed for safe decision support. We systematically reviewed 78 studies published between January 1, 2015 and April 30, 2026 that paired automated fetal plane classification with explainability or predictive uncertainty quantification, following PRISMA 2020. Pooled balanced accuracy across six standard planes was 0.93 (95% CI 0.91 to 0.95), but only 19 studies (24%) reported calibration and 14 (18%) reported selective prediction. We propose CALIB-XFUS, a 22-item reporting framework that operationalises calibration, explanation faithfulness, and fairness for regulated fetal ultrasound artificial intelligence. The framework spans six domains: clinical task and indication for use; dataset provenance and representativeness; model and training pipeline; calibration and selective prediction; explanation faithfulness and clinician validation; and post-market surveillance. We argue that uncertainty-calibrated, faithfully explained, and fairness-audited fetal ultrasound AI is now both technically feasible and regulatorily expected under the FDA Good Machine Learning Practice principles and the EU AI Act high-risk obligations.

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### Few-Shot Video Object Segmentation in X-Ray Angiography Using Local Matching and Spatio-Temporal Consistency Loss

Authors: Lin Xi, Yingliang Ma, Xiahai Zhuang
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00988v2

We introduce a novel FSVOS model that employs a local matching strategy to restrict the search space to the most relevant neighboring pixels. Rather than relying on inefficient standard im2col-like implementations (e.g., spatial convolutions, depthwise convolutions and feature-shifting mechanisms) or hardware-specific CUDA kernels (e.g., deformable and neighborhood attention), which often suffer from limited portability across non-CUDA devices, we reorganize the local sampling process through a direction-based sampling perspective. Specifically, we implement a non-parametric sampling mechanism that enables dynamically varying sampling regions. This approach provides the flexibility to adapt to diverse spatial structures without the computational costs of parametric layers and the need for model retraining. To further enhance feature coherence across frames, we design a supervised spatio-temporal contrastive learning scheme that enforces consistency in feature representations. In addition, we introduce a publicly available benchmark dataset for multi-object segmentation in X-ray angiography videos (MOSXAV), featuring detailed, manually labeled segmentation ground truth. Extensive experiments on the CADICA, XACV, and MOSXAV datasets show that our proposed FSVOS method outperforms current state-of-the-art video segmentation methods in terms of segmentation accuracy and generalization capability (i.e., seen and unseen categories). This work offers enhanced flexibility and potential for a wide range of clinical applications. Code is available at https://github.com/xilin-x/XRAVOS

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### Tessellation Localized Transfer learning for nonparametric regression

Authors: Hélène Halconruy, Benjamin Bobbia, Paul Lejamtel
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: math.ST, stat.AP, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00987v2

Transfer learning aims to improve performance on a target task by leveraging information from related source tasks. We propose a nonparametric regression transfer learning framework that explicitly models heterogeneity in the source-target relationship. Our approach relies on a local transfer assumption: the covariate space is partitioned into finitely many cells such that, within each cell, the target regression function can be expressed as a low-complexity transformation of the source regression function. This localized structure enables effective transfer where similarity is present while limiting negative transfer elsewhere. We introduce estimators that jointly learn the local transfer functions and the target regression, together with fully data-driven procedures that adapt to unknown partition structure and transfer strength. We establish sharp minimax rates for target regression estimation, showing that local transfer can mitigate the curse of dimensionality by exploiting reduced functional complexity. Our theoretical guarantees take the form of oracle inequalities that decompose excess risk into estimation and approximation terms, ensuring robustness to model misspecification. Numerical experiments illustrate the benefits of the proposed approach.

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### Simulations of MRI Guided and Powered Ferric Applicators for Tetherless Delivery of Therapeutic Interventions

Authors: Wenhui Chu, Khang Tran, Nikolaos V. Tsekos
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV, eess.SY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00981v1

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a well-established modality for pre-operative planning and is also explored for intra-operative guidance of procedures such as intravascular interventions. Among the experimental robot-assisted technologies, the magnetic field gradients of the MRI scanner are used to power and maneuver ferromagnetic applicators for accessing sites in the patient's body via the vascular network. In this work, we propose a computational platform for preoperative planning and modeling of MRI-powered applicators inside blood vessels. This platform was implemented as a two-way data and command pipeline that links the MRI scanner, the computational core, and the operator. The platform first processes multi-slice MR data to extract the vascular bed and then fits a virtual corridor inside the vessel. This corridor serves as a virtual fixture (VF), a forbidden region for the applicators to avoid vessel perforation or collision. The geometric features of the vessel centerline, the VF, and MRI safety compliance (dB/dt, max available gradient) are then used to generate magnetic field gradient waveforms. Different blood flow profiles can be user-selected, and those parameters are used for modeling the applicator's maneuvering. The modeling module further generates cues about whether the selected vascular path can be safely maneuvered. Given future experimental studies that require a real-time operation, the platform was implemented on the Qt framework (C/C++) with software modules performing specific tasks running on dedicated threads: PID controller, generation of VF, generation of MR gradient waveforms.

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### Zero-shot Forecasting by Simulation Alone

Authors: Boris N. Oreshkin, Mayank Jauhari, Ravi Kiran Selvam, Malcolm Wolff, Wenhao Pan, Shankar Ramasubramanian, Kin G. Olivares, Tatiana Konstantinova, Andres Potapczynski, Mengfei Cao, Dmitry Efimov, Michael W. Mahoney et al.
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00970v1

Zero-shot time-series forecasting holds great promise, but is still in its infancy, hindered by limited and biased data corpora, leakage-prone evaluation, and privacy and licensing constraints. Motivated by these challenges, we propose the first practical univariate time series simulation pipeline which is simultaneously fast enough for on-the-fly data generation and enables notable zero-shot forecasting performance on M-Series and GiftEval benchmarks that capture trend/seasonality/intermittency patterns, typical of industrial forecasting applications across a variety of domains. Our simulator, which we call SarSim0 (SARIMA Simulator for Zero-Shot Forecasting), is based off of a seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA) model as its core data source. Due to instability in the autoregressive component, naive SARIMA simulation often leads to unusable paths. Instead, we follow a three-step procedure: (1) we sample well-behaved trajectories from its characteristic polynomial stability region; (2) we introduce a superposition scheme that combines multiple paths into rich multi-seasonality traces; and (3) we add rate-based heavy-tailed noise models to capture burstiness and intermittency alongside seasonalities and trends. SarSim0 is orders of magnitude faster than kernel-based generators, and it enables training on circa 1B unique purely simulated series, generated on the fly; after which well-established neural network backbones exhibit strong zero-shot generalization, surpassing strong statistical forecasters and recent foundation baselines, while operating under strict zero-shot protocol. Notably, on GiftEval we observe a "student-beats-teacher" effect: models trained on our simulations exceed the forecasting accuracy of the AutoARIMA generating processes.

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### V-VLAPS: Value-Guided Planning for Vision-Language-Action Models

Authors: Ke Ren, Ali Salamatian, Kieran Pattison, Cyrus Neary
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00969v3

Vision-language-action (VLA) models provide strong action priors for robotic manipulation, but their reactive behavior can fail under distribution shift and long-horizon task structure. Recent VLA-guided planning methods improve execution by using pretrained policies to guide tree search, yet node selection still depends heavily on policy priors and visit-count exploration. Consequently, when the policy favors poor actions, the planner lacks a learned value signal to correct this bias. Prior work has shown that VLA representations encode rollout success and failure information, suggesting that they may also support value estimation during planning. We introduce Value-Guided Vision-Language-Action Planning and Search (V-VLAPS), which augments VLA-guided planning with a lightweight value head trained on offline VLA rollouts to predict Monte Carlo returns. These predictions guide Monte Carlo Tree Search in simulation toward higher-value branches. Across five LIBERO suites, V-VLAPS matches value-free planning baseline at the default search budget in aggregate, and analysis shows that many hard failures are root-level timeouts where predicted values are weakly separated. With a larger search budget, V-VLAPS improves over the baseline in all task suites with +6 percentage points on LIBERO-Object and +4 percentage points on LIBERO-10. Our results suggest that VLA representations can support not only failure prediction, but also value-guided planning when search reaches branches where value-based ranking matters.

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### Explainability-Guided Defense: Attribution-Aware Model Refinement Against Adversarial Data Attacks

Authors: Longwei Wang, Mohammad Navid Nayyem, Abdullah Al Rakin, KC Santosh, Chaowei Zhang, Yang Zhou
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00968v1

The growing reliance on deep learning models in safety-critical domains such as healthcare and autonomous navigation underscores the need for defenses that are both robust to adversarial perturbations and transparent in their decision-making. In this paper, we identify a connection between interpretability and robustness that can be directly leveraged during training. Specifically, we observe that spurious, unstable, or semantically irrelevant features identified through Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) contribute disproportionately to adversarial vulnerability. Building on this insight, we introduce an attribution-guided refinement framework that transforms LIME from a passive diagnostic into an active training signal. Our method systematically suppresses spurious features using feature masking, sensitivity-aware regularization, and adversarial augmentation in a closed-loop refinement pipeline. This approach does not require additional datasets or model architectures and integrates seamlessly into standard adversarial training. Theoretically, we derive an attribution-aware lower bound on adversarial distortion that formalizes the link between explanation alignment and robustness. Empirical evaluations on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-10-C, and CIFAR-100 demonstrate substantial improvements in adversarial robustness and out-of-distribution generalization.

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### Adapting Feature Attenuation to NLP

Authors: Tianshuo Yang, Ryan Rabinowitz, Terrance E. Boult, Jugal Kalita
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00965v1

Transformer classifiers such as BERT deliver impressive closed-set accuracy, yet they remain brittle when confronted with inputs from unseen categories--a common scenario for deployed NLP systems. We investigate Open-Set Recognition (OSR) for text by porting the feature attenuation hypothesis from computer vision to transformers and by benchmarking it against state-of-the-art baselines. Concretely, we adapt the COSTARR framework--originally designed for classification in computer vision--to two modest language models (BERT (base) and GPT-2) trained to label 176 arXiv subject areas. Alongside COSTARR, we evaluate Maximum Softmax Probability (MSP), MaxLogit, and the temperature-scaled free-energy score under the OOSA and AUOSCR metrics. Our results show (i) COSTARR extends to NLP without retraining but yields no statistically significant gain over MaxLogit or MSP, and (ii) free-energy lags behind all other scores in this high-class-count setting. The study highlights both the promise and the current limitations of transplanting vision-centric OSR ideas to language models, and points toward the need for larger backbones and task-tailored attenuation strategies.

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### A Deep Learning Approach for Automated Skin Lesion Diagnosis with Explainable AI

Authors: Md. Maksudul Haque, Rahnuma Akter, A S M Ahsanul Sarkar Akib, Abdul Hasib
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00964v1

Skin cancer is also one of the most common and dangerous types of cancer in the world that requires timely and precise diagnosis. In this paper, a deep-learning architecture of the multi-class skin lesion classification on the HAM10000 dataset will be described. The system suggested combines high-quality data balancing methods, large-scale data augmentation, hybridized EfficientNetV2-L framework with channel attention, and a three-stage progressive learning approach. Moreover, we also use explainable AI (XAI) techniques such as Grad-CAM and saliency maps to come up with intelligible visual representations of model predictions. Our strategy is with a total accuracy of 91.15 per cent, macro F1 of 85.45\% and micro-average AUC of 99.33\%. The model has shown high performance in all the seven lesion classes with specific high performance of melanoma and melanocytic nevi. In addition to enhancing diagnostic transparency, XAI also helps to find out the visual characteristics that cause the classifications, which enhances clinical trustworthiness.

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### Deep Clustering with Associative Memories

Authors: Bishwajit Saha, Dmitry Krotov, Mohammed J. Zaki, Parikshit Ram
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00963v1

Deep clustering - joint representation learning and latent space clustering - is a well studied problem especially in computer vision and text processing under the deep learning framework. While the representation learning is generally differentiable, clustering is an inherently discrete optimization task, requiring various approximations and regularizations to fit in a standard differentiable pipeline. This leads to a somewhat disjointed representation learning and clustering. In this work, we propose a novel loss function utilizing energy-based dynamics via Associative Memories to formulate a new deep clustering method, DCAM, which ties together the representation learning and clustering aspects more intricately in a single objective. Our experiments showcase the advantage of DCAM, producing improved clustering quality for various architecture choices (convolutional, residual or fully-connected) and data modalities (images or text).

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### PhyEduVideo: A Benchmark for Evaluating Text-to-Video Models for Physics Education

Authors: Megha Mariam K. M, Aditya Arun, Zakaria Laskar, C. V. Jawahar
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00943v1

Generative AI models, particularly Text-to-Video (T2V) systems, offer a promising avenue for transforming science education by automating the creation of engaging and intuitive visual explanations. In this work, we take a first step toward evaluating their potential in physics education by introducing a dedicated benchmark for explanatory video generation. The benchmark is designed to assess how well T2V models can convey core physics concepts through visual illustrations. Each physics concept in our benchmark is decomposed into granular teaching points, with each point accompanied by a carefully crafted prompt intended for visual explanation of the teaching point. T2V models are evaluated on their ability to generate accurate videos in response to these prompts. Our aim is to systematically explore the feasibility of using T2V models to generate high-quality, curriculum-aligned educational content-paving the way toward scalable, accessible, and personalized learning experiences powered by AI. Our evaluation reveals that current models produce visually coherent videos with smooth motion and minimal flickering, yet their conceptual accuracy is less reliable. Performance in areas such as mechanics, fluids, and optics is encouraging, but models struggle with electromagnetism and thermodynamics, where abstract interactions are harder to depict. These findings underscore the gap between visual quality and conceptual correctness in educational video generation. We hope this benchmark helps the community close that gap and move toward T2V systems that can deliver accurate, curriculum-aligned physics content at scale. The benchmark and accompanying codebase are publicly available at https://github.com/meghamariamkm/PhyEduVideo.

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### Reliability Under Randomness: An Empirical Analysis of Sparse and Dense Language Models Across Decoding Temperatures

Authors: Kabir Grover
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00942v1

The increasing prevalence of sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures in large language models raises important questions regarding their reliability under stochastic decoding. While conditional computation enables substantial gains in computational efficiency, it remains unclear whether the interaction between sparse routing and temperature-based sampling compromises output stability relative to dense architectures. This work investigates whether conditional computation in MoE models amplifies decoding-induced randomness, leading to reduced reliability as temperature increases. We evaluate three representative models: OLMoE-7B (sparse base), Mixtral-8x7B (sparse instruction-tuned), and Qwen2.5-3B (dense instruction-tuned) on deterministic arithmetic reasoning tasks with objectively verifiable answers. Experiments span four decoding configurations, ranging from greedy decoding to T=1.0. Our evaluation encompasses accuracy, format compliance, output consistency across repeated generations, and confidence metrics, totaling 9,360 model generations. Results demonstrate that the sparse instruction-tuned model exhibits stability comparable to the dense instruction-tuned model across all decoding temperatures, while the sparse base model shows systematic degradation as temperature increases. These findings indicate that instruction tuning, rather than architectural sparsity, is the primary determinant of robustness to decoding randomness on deterministic tasks. We discuss the implications of these results for deploying sparse language models in reliability-critical applications, highlighting scenarios in which sparse architectures can be safely adopted without sacrificing output stability.

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### Comparative Analysis of Formula and Structure Prediction from Tandem Mass Spectra

Authors: Xujun Che, Xiuxia Du, Depeng Xu
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: q-bio.QM, cs.AI, cs.CE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00941v1

Liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (LC-MS)-based metabolomics and exposomics aim to measure detectable small molecules in biological samples. The results facilitate hypothesis-generating discovery of metabolic changes and disease mechanisms and provide information about environmental exposures and their effects on human health. Metabolomics and exposomics are made possible by the high resolving power of LC and high mass measurement accuracy of MS. However, a majority of the signals from such studies still cannot be identified or annotated using conventional library searching because existing spectral libraries are far from covering the vast chemical space captured by LC-MS/MS. To address this challenge and unleash the full potential of metabolomics and exposomics, a number of computational approaches have been developed to predict compounds based on tandem mass spectra. Published assessment of these approaches used different datasets and evaluation. To select prediction workflows for practical applications and identify areas for further improvements, we have carried out a systematic evaluation of the state-of-the-art prediction algorithms. Specifically, the accuracy of formula prediction and structure prediction was evaluated for different types of adducts. The resulting findings have established realistic performance baselines, identified critical bottlenecks, and provided guidance to further improve compound predictions based on MS.

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### Learning to Segment Liquids in Real-world Images

Authors: Jonas Li, Michelle Li, Luke Liu, Xiaohui Yuan, Heng Fan
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00940v2

Liquids like water, wine and medicine are everywhere. However, limited attention has been given to the task of segmenting liquids, hindering the ability of robots to safely avoid and interact with them. The segmentation of liquids is difficult because liquids come in diverse appearances and shapes; moreover, they can be both transparent or reflective, taking on arbitrary objects and scenes from their background and surroundings. To take on this challenge, we construct a liquid dataset, LQDS, consisting of 5000 real-world images annotated into 14 distinct classes, and design a novel liquid detection model, LQDM, which leverages cross-attention between a dedicated boundary branch and the main segmentation branch to enhance mask predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of LQDM on the testing set of LQDS, outperforming state-of-the-art methods to establish a strong baseline for the semantic segmentation of liquids. We believe that LQDS and LQDM will facilitate future research in liquid segmentation and enable practical applications in robotics. Our dataset and code is released at https://lonaslee.github.io/LQDM/.

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### Rate-Distortion Analysis of Compressed Query Delegation with Low-Rank Riemannian Updates

Authors: Faruk Alpay, Bugra Kilictas
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.CL, math.OC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00938v1

Bounded-context agents fail when intermediate reasoning exceeds an effective working-memory budget. We study compressed query delegation (CQD): (i) compress a high-dimensional latent reasoning state into a low-rank tensor query, (ii) delegate the minimal query to an external oracle, and (iii) update the latent state via Riemannian optimization on fixed-rank manifolds. We give a math-first formulation: CQD is a constrained stochastic program with a query-budget functional and an oracle modeled as a noisy operator. We connect CQD to classical rate-distortion and information bottleneck principles, showing that spectral hard-thresholding is optimal for a natural constrained quadratic distortion problem, and we derive convergence guarantees for Riemannian stochastic approximation under bounded oracle noise and smoothness assumptions. Empirically, we report (A) a 2,500-item bounded-context reasoning suite (BBH-derived tasks plus curated paradox instances) comparing CQD against chain-of-thought baselines under fixed compute and context; and (B) a human "cognitive mirror" benchmark (N=200) measuring epistemic gain and semantic drift across modern oracles.

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### Emoji-Based Jailbreaking of Large Language Models

Authors: M P V S Gopinadh, S Mahaboob Hussain
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00936v1

Large Language Models (LLMs) are integral to modern AI applications, but their safety alignment mechanisms can be bypassed through adversarial prompt engineering. This study investigates emoji-based jailbreaking, where emoji sequences are embedded in textual prompts to trigger harmful and unethical outputs from LLMs. We evaluated 50 emoji-based prompts on four open-source LLMs: Mistral 7B, Qwen 2 7B, Gemma 2 9B, and Llama 3 8B. Metrics included jailbreak success rate, safety alignment adherence, and latency, with responses categorized as successful, partial and failed. Results revealed model-specific vulnerabilities: Gemma 2 9B and Mistral 7B exhibited 10 % success rates, while Qwen 2 7B achieved full alignment (0% success). A chi-square test (chi^2 = 32.94, p < 0.001) confirmed significant inter-model differences. While prior works focused on emoji attacks targeting safety judges or classifiers, our empirical analysis examines direct prompt-level vulnerabilities in LLMs. The results reveal limitations in safety mechanisms and highlight the necessity for systematic handling of emoji-based representations in prompt-level safety and alignment pipelines.

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### Improving Code-Switching Speech Recognition with TTS Data Augmentation

Authors: Yue Heng Yeo, Yuchen Hu, Shreyas Gopal, Yizhou Peng, Hexin Liu, Eng Siong Chng
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: eess.AS, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00935v1

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) for conversational code-switching speech remains challenging due to the scarcity of realistic, high-quality labeled speech data. This paper explores multilingual text-to-speech (TTS) models as an effective data augmentation technique to address this shortage. Specifically, we fine-tune the multilingual CosyVoice2 TTS model on the SEAME dataset to generate synthetic conversational Chinese-English code-switching speech, significantly increasing the quantity and speaker diversity of available training data. Our experiments demonstrate that augmenting real speech with synthetic speech reduces the mixed error rate (MER) from 12.1 percent to 10.1 percent on DevMan and from 17.8 percent to 16.0 percent on DevSGE, indicating consistent performance gains. These results confirm that multilingual TTS is an effective and practical tool for enhancing ASR robustness in low-resource conversational code-switching scenarios.

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### LOFA: Online Influence Maximization under Full-Bandit Feedback using Lazy Forward Selection

Authors: Jinyu Xu, Abhishek K. Umrawal
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.SI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00933v1

We study the problem of influence maximization (IM) in an online setting, where the goal is to select a subset of nodes$\unicode{x2014}$called the seed set$\unicode{x2014}$at each time step over a fixed time horizon, subject to a cardinality budget constraint, to maximize the expected cumulative influence. We operate under a full-bandit feedback model, where only the influence of the chosen seed set at each time step is observed, with no additional structural information about the network or diffusion process. It is well-established that the influence function is submodular, and existing algorithms exploit this property to achieve low regret. In this work, we leverage this property further and propose the Lazy Online Forward Algorithm (LOFA), which achieves a lower empirical regret. We conduct experiments on a real-world social network to demonstrate that LOFA achieves superior performance compared to existing bandit algorithms in terms of cumulative regret and instantaneous reward.

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### Enhanced Data-Driven Product Development via Gradient Based Optimization and Conformalized Monte Carlo Dropout Uncertainty Estimation

Authors: Andrea Thomas Nava, Lijo Johny, Fabio Azzalini, Johannes Schneider, Arianna Casanova
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00932v1

Data-Driven Product Development (DDPD) leverages data to learn the relationship between product design specifications and resulting properties. To discover improved designs, we train a neural network on past experiments and apply Projected Gradient Descent to identify optimal input features that maximize performance. Since many products require simultaneous optimization of multiple correlated properties, our framework employs joint neural networks to capture interdependencies among targets. Furthermore, we integrate uncertainty estimation via \emph{Conformalised Monte Carlo Dropout} (ConfMC), a novel method combining Nested Conformal Prediction with Monte Carlo dropout to provide model-agnostic, finite-sample coverage guarantees under data exchangeability. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets show that our method matches state-of-the-art performance while offering adaptive, non-uniform prediction intervals and eliminating the need for retraining when adjusting coverage levels.

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### AlignUSER: Human-Aligned LLM Agents via World Models for Recommender System Evaluation

Authors: Nicolas Bougie, Gian Maria Marconi, Tony Yip, Narimasa Watanabe
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00930v1

Evaluating recommender systems remains challenging due to the gap between offline metrics and real user behavior, as well as the scarcity of interaction data. Recent work explores large language model (LLM) agents as synthetic users, yet they typically rely on few-shot prompting, which yields a shallow understanding of the environment and limits their ability to faithfully reproduce user actions. We introduce AlignUSER, a framework that learns world-model-driven agents from human interactions. Given rollout sequences of actions and states, we formalize world modeling as a next state prediction task that helps the agent internalize the environment. To align actions with human personas, we generate counterfactual trajectories around demonstrations and prompt the LLM to compare its decisions with human choices, identify suboptimal actions, and extract lessons. The learned policy is then used to drive agent interactions with the recommender system. We evaluate AlignUSER across multiple datasets and demonstrate closer alignment with genuine humans than prior work, both at the micro and macro levels.

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### Analyzing the Shopping Journey: Computing Shelf Browsing Visits in a Physical Retail Store

Authors: Luis Yoichi Morales, Francesco Zanlungo, David M. Woollard
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00928v1

Motivated by recent challenges in the deployment of robots into customer-facing roles within retail, this work introduces a study of customer activity in physical stores as a step toward autonomous understanding of shopper intent. We introduce an algorithm that computes shoppers' ``shelf visits'' -- capturing their browsing behavior in the store. Shelf visits are extracted from trajectories obtained via machine vision-based 3D tracking and overhead cameras. We perform two independent calibrations of the shelf visit algorithm, using distinct sets of trajectories (consisting of 8138 and 15129 trajectories), collected in different stores and labeled by human reviewers. The calibrated models are then evaluated on trajectories held out of the calibration process both from the same store on which calibration was performed and from the other store. An analysis of the results shows that the algorithm can recognize customers' browsing activity when evaluated in an environment different from the one on which calibration was performed. We then use the model to analyze the customers' ``browsing patterns'' on a large set of trajectories and their relation to actual purchases in the stores. Finally, we discuss how shelf browsing information could be used for retail planning and in the domain of human-robot interaction scenarios.

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### Measuring Social Media Polarization Using Large Language Models and Heuristic Rules

Authors: Jawad Chowdhury, Rezaur Rashid, Gabriel Terejanu
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.SI, cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00927v1

Understanding affective polarization in online discourse is crucial for evaluating the societal impact of social media interactions. This study presents a novel framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) and domain-informed heuristics to systematically analyze and quantify affective polarization in discussions on divisive topics such as climate change and gun control. Unlike most prior approaches that relied on sentiment analysis or predefined classifiers, our method integrates LLMs to extract stance, affective tone, and agreement patterns from large-scale social media discussions. We then apply a rule-based scoring system capable of quantifying affective polarization even in small conversations consisting of single interactions, based on stance alignment, emotional content, and interaction dynamics. Our analysis reveals distinct polarization patterns that are event dependent: (i) anticipation-driven polarization, where extreme polarization escalates before well-publicized events, and (ii) reactive polarization, where intense affective polarization spikes immediately after sudden, high-impact events. By combining AI-driven content annotation with domain-informed scoring, our framework offers a scalable and interpretable approach to measuring affective polarization. The source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/hasanjawad001/llm-social-media-polarization.

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### AdaGaR: Adaptive Gabor Representation for Dynamic Scene Reconstruction

Authors: Jiewen Chan, Zhenjun Zhao, Yu-Lun Liu
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00796v1

Reconstructing dynamic 3D scenes from monocular videos requires simultaneously capturing high-frequency appearance details and temporally continuous motion. Existing methods using single Gaussian primitives are limited by their low-pass filtering nature, while standard Gabor functions introduce energy instability. Moreover, lack of temporal continuity constraints often leads to motion artifacts during interpolation. We propose AdaGaR, a unified framework addressing both frequency adaptivity and temporal continuity in explicit dynamic scene modeling. We introduce Adaptive Gabor Representation, extending Gaussians through learnable frequency weights and adaptive energy compensation to balance detail capture and stability. For temporal continuity, we employ Cubic Hermite Splines with Temporal Curvature Regularization to ensure smooth motion evolution. An Adaptive Initialization mechanism combining depth estimation, point tracking, and foreground masks establishes stable point cloud distributions in early training. Experiments on Tap-Vid DAVIS demonstrate state-of-the-art performance (PSNR 35.49, SSIM 0.9433, LPIPS 0.0723) and strong generalization across frame interpolation, depth consistency, video editing, and stereo view synthesis. Project page: https://jiewenchan.github.io/AdaGaR/

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### Two Deep Learning Approaches for Automated Segmentation of Left Ventricle in Cine Cardiac MRI

Authors: Wenhui Chu, Nikolaos V. Tsekos
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00794v1

Left ventricle (LV) segmentation is critical for clinical quantification and diagnosis of cardiac images. In this work, we propose two novel deep learning architectures called LNU-Net and IBU-Net for left ventricle segmentation from short-axis cine MRI images. LNU-Net is derived from layer normalization (LN) U-Net architecture, while IBU-Net is derived from the instance-batch normalized (IB) U-Net for medical image segmentation. The architectures of LNU-Net and IBU-Net have a down-sampling path for feature extraction and an up-sampling path for precise localization. We use the original U-Net as the basic segmentation approach and compared it with our proposed architectures. Both LNU-Net and IBU-Net have left ventricle segmentation methods: LNU-Net applies layer normalization in each convolutional block, while IBU-Net incorporates instance and batch normalization together in the first convolutional block and passes its result to the next layer. Our method incorporates affine transformations and elastic deformations for image data processing. Our dataset that contains 805 MRI images regarding the left ventricle from 45 patients is used for evaluation. We experimentally evaluate the results of the proposed approaches outperforming the dice coefficient and the average perpendicular distance than other state-of-the-art approaches.

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### Geometry of Reason: Spectral Signatures of Valid Mathematical Reasoning

Authors: Valentin Noël
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00791v2

Verifying whether a language model is genuinely reasoning or pattern-matching remains an open problem: learned verifiers are expensive, and output-based heuristics are brittle. We show that valid mathematical reasoning induces a measurable, training-free spectral signature in transformer attention. By treating each attention matrix as a weighted token graph, we extract four diagnostics: Fiedler value, High-Frequency Energy Ratio (HFER), spectral entropy, and smoothness, that require no learned parameters. Experiments across seven models from four architectural families yield effect sizes up to Cohen's $d = 3.30$ ($p < 10^{-116}$), enabling $85$--$96\%$ single-threshold classification accuracy. Two findings sharpen the interpretation. First, \emph{Platonic validity}: the spectral signal tracks logical coherence rather than compiler acceptance, proofs rejected for timeouts or missing imports are correctly classified as valid, a distinction confirmed by a manual audit ($κ= 0.82$, $n = 51$). Second, \emph{architectural determinism}: Sliding Window Attention shifts the discriminative feature from HFER to smoothness ($d = 2.09$, $p < 10^{-48}$), showing that attention design governs which spectral channel encodes reasoning quality. Causal ablation confirms the signature traces induction-head circuits. The method generalises to informal chain-of-thought ($d = 0.78$, $p < 10^{-3}$), and in proof search, HFER reranking improves Best-of-16 Pass@1 by $+4.4$--$6.6$\%, matching $98\%$ of the AUC of fully supervised probes with zero labels. Spectral graph analysis is a principled, architecture-aware primitive for reasoning verification.

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### Geometry of Reason: Spectral Signatures of Valid Mathematical Reasoning

Authors: Valentin Noël
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00791v1

We present a training-free method for detecting valid mathematical reasoning in large language models through spectral analysis of attention patterns. By treating attention matrices as adjacency matrices of dynamic graphs over tokens, we extract four interpretable spectral diagnostics, the Fiedler value (algebraic connectivity), high-frequency energy ratio (HFER), graph signal smoothness, and spectral entropy, that exhibit statistically significant differences between valid and invalid mathematical proofs. Experiments across seven transformer models from four independent architectural families (Meta Llama, Alibaba Qwen, Microsoft Phi, and Mistral AI) demonstrate that this spectral signature produces effect sizes up to Cohen's $d = 3.30$ ($p < 10^{-116}$), enabling 85.0--95.6\% classification accuracy under rigorous evaluation, with calibrated thresholds reaching 93--95\% on the full dataset. The method requires no training data, fine-tuning, or learned classifiers: a single threshold on a spectral metric suffices for high accuracy. Through systematic label correction, we discover that the spectral method detects logical coherence rather than compiler acceptance, identifying mathematically valid proofs that formal verifiers reject due to technical failures. We further identify an architectural dependency: Mistral-7B's Sliding Window Attention shifts the discriminative signal from HFER to late-layer Smoothness ($d = 2.09$, $p_{\text{MW}} = 1.16 \times 10^{-48}$), revealing that attention mechanism design affects which spectral features capture reasoning validity. These findings establish spectral graph analysis as a principled framework for reasoning verification with immediate applications to hallucination detection and AI safety monitoring.

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### Fusion-SSAT: Unleashing the Potential of Self-supervised Auxiliary Task by Feature Fusion for Generalized Deepfake Detection

Authors: Shukesh Reddy, Srijan Das, Abhijit Das
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00789v1

In this work, we attempted to unleash the potential of self-supervised learning as an auxiliary task that can optimise the primary task of generalised deepfake detection. To explore this, we examined different combinations of the training schemes for these tasks that can be most effective. Our findings reveal that fusing the feature representation from self-supervised auxiliary tasks is a powerful feature representation for the problem at hand. Such a representation can leverage the ultimate potential and bring in a unique representation of both the self-supervised and primary tasks, achieving better performance for the primary task. We experimented on a large set of datasets, which includes DF40, FaceForensics++, Celeb-DF, DFD, FaceShifter, UADFV, and our results showed better generalizability on cross-dataset evaluation when compared with current state-of-the-art detectors.

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### Adapting Natural Language Processing Models Across Jurisdictions: A pilot Study in Canadian Cancer Registries

Authors: Jonathan Simkin, Lovedeep Gondara, Zeeshan Rizvi, Gregory Doyle, Jeff Dowden, Dan Bond, Desmond Martin, Raymond Ng
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00787v1

Population-based cancer registries depend on pathology reports as their primary diagnostic source, yet manual abstraction is resource-intensive and contributes to delays in cancer data. While transformer-based NLP systems have improved registry workflows, their ability to generalize across jurisdictions with differing reporting conventions remains poorly understood. We present the first cross-provincial evaluation of adapting BCCRTron, a domain-adapted transformer model developed at the British Columbia Cancer Registry, alongside GatorTron, a biomedical transformer model, for cancer surveillance in Canada. Our training dataset consisted of approximately 104,000 and 22,000 de-identified pathology reports from the Newfoundland & Labrador Cancer Registry (NLCR) for Tier 1 (cancer vs. non-cancer) and Tier 2 (reportable vs. non-reportable) tasks, respectively. Both models were fine-tuned using complementary synoptic and diagnosis focused report section input pipelines. Across NLCR test sets, the adapted models maintained high performance, demonstrating transformers pretrained in one jurisdiction can be localized to another with modest fine-tuning. To improve sensitivity, we combined the two models using a conservative OR-ensemble achieving a Tier 1 recall of 0.99 and reduced missed cancers to 24, compared with 48 and 54 for the standalone models. For Tier 2, the ensemble achieved 0.99 recall and reduced missed reportable cancers to 33, compared with 54 and 46 for the individual models. These findings demonstrate that an ensemble combining complementary text representations substantially reduce missed cancers and improve error coverage in cancer-registry NLP. We implement a privacy-preserving workflow in which only model weights are shared between provinces, supporting interoperable NLP infrastructure and a future pan-Canadian foundation model for cancer pathology and registry workflows.

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### FedHypeVAE: Federated Learning with Hypernetwork Generated Conditional VAEs for Differentially Private Embedding Sharing

Authors: Sunny Gupta, Amit Sethi
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00785v1

Federated data sharing promises utility without centralizing raw data, yet existing embedding-level generators struggle under non-IID client heterogeneity and provide limited formal protection against gradient leakage. We propose FedHypeVAE, a differentially private, hypernetwork-driven framework for synthesizing embedding-level data across decentralized clients. Building on a conditional VAE backbone, we replace the single global decoder and fixed latent prior with client-aware decoders and class-conditional priors generated by a shared hypernetwork from private, trainable client codes. This bi-level design personalizes the generative layerrather than the downstream modelwhile decoupling local data from communicated parameters. The shared hypernetwork is optimized under differential privacy, ensuring that only noise-perturbed, clipped gradients are aggregated across clients. A local MMD alignment between real and synthetic embeddings and a Lipschitz regularizer on hypernetwork outputs further enhance stability and distributional coherence under non-IID conditions. After training, a neutral meta-code enables domain agnostic synthesis, while mixtures of meta-codes provide controllable multi-domain coverage. FedHypeVAE unifies personalization, privacy, and distribution alignment at the generator level, establishing a principled foundation for privacy-preserving data synthesis in federated settings. Code: github.com/sunnyinAI/FedHypeVAE

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### Categorical Reparameterization with Denoising Diffusion models

Authors: Samson Gourevitch, Alain Durmus, Eric Moulines, Jimmy Olsson, Yazid Janati
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00781v2

Learning models with categorical variables requires optimizing expectations over discrete distributions, a setting in which stochastic gradient-based optimization is challenging due to the non-differentiability of categorical sampling. A common workaround is to replace the discrete distribution with a continuous relaxation, yielding a smooth surrogate that admits reparameterized gradient estimates via the reparameterization trick. Building on this idea, we introduce ReDGE, a novel and efficient diffusion-based soft reparameterization method for categorical distributions. Our approach defines a flexible class of gradient estimators that includes the Straight-Through estimator as a special case. Experiments spanning latent variable models and inference-time reward guidance in discrete diffusion models demonstrate that ReDGE consistently matches or outperforms existing gradient-based methods. The code will be made available at https://github.com/samsongourevitch/redge.

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### Categorical Reparameterization with Denoising Diffusion models

Authors: Samson Gourevitch, Alain Durmus, Eric Moulines, Jimmy Olsson, Yazid Janati
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00781v1

Gradient-based optimization with categorical variables typically relies on score-function estimators, which are unbiased but noisy, or on continuous relaxations that replace the discrete distribution with a smooth surrogate admitting a pathwise (reparameterized) gradient, at the cost of optimizing a biased, temperature-dependent objective. In this paper, we extend this family of relaxations by introducing a diffusion-based soft reparameterization for categorical distributions. For these distributions, the denoiser under a Gaussian noising process admits a closed form and can be computed efficiently, yielding a training-free diffusion sampler through which we can backpropagate. Our experiments show that the proposed reparameterization trick yields competitive or improved optimization performance on various benchmarks.

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### Investigating the Viability of Employing Multi-modal Large Language Models in the Context of Audio Deepfake Detection

Authors: Akanksha Chuchra, Shukesh Reddy, Sudeepta Mishra, Abhijit Das, Abhinav Dhall
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.SD, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00777v1

While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown strong generalisation in detecting image and video deepfakes, their use for audio deepfake detection remains largely unexplored. In this work, we aim to explore the potential of MLLMs for audio deepfake detection. Combining audio inputs with a range of text prompts as queries to find out the viability of MLLMs to learn robust representations across modalities for audio deepfake detection. Therefore, we attempt to explore text-aware and context-rich, question-answer based prompts with binary decisions. We hypothesise that such a feature-guided reasoning will help in facilitating deeper multimodal understanding and enable robust feature learning for audio deepfake detection. We evaluate the performance of two MLLMs, Qwen2-Audio-7B-Instruct and SALMONN, in two evaluation modes: (a) zero-shot and (b) fine-tuned. Our experiments demonstrate that combining audio with a multi-prompt approach could be a viable way forward for audio deepfake detection. Our experiments show that the models perform poorly without task-specific training and struggle to generalise to out-of-domain data. However, they achieve good performance on in-domain data with minimal supervision, indicating promising potential for audio deepfake detection.

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### LLM Agents for Combinatorial Efficient Frontiers: Investment Portfolio Optimization

Authors: Simon Paquette-Greenbaum, Jiangbo Yu
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.CE, cs.AI, econ.GN
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00770v1

Investment portfolio optimization is a task conducted in all major financial institutions. The Cardinality Constrained Mean-Variance Portfolio Optimization (CCPO) problem formulation is ubiquitous for portfolio optimization. The challenge of this type of portfolio optimization, a mixed-integer quadratic programming (MIQP) problem, arises from the intractability of solutions from exact solvers, where heuristic algorithms are used to find approximate portfolio solutions. CCPO entails many laborious and complex workflows and also requires extensive effort pertaining to heuristic algorithm development, where the combination of pooled heuristic solutions results in improved efficient frontiers. Hence, common approaches are to develop many heuristic algorithms. Agentic frameworks emerge as a promising candidate for many problems within combinatorial optimization, as they have been shown to be equally efficient with regard to automating large workflows and have been shown to be excellent in terms of algorithm development, sometimes surpassing human-level performance. This study implements a novel agentic framework for the CCPO and explores several concrete architectures. In benchmark problems, the implemented agentic framework matches state-of-the-art algorithms. Furthermore, complex workflows and algorithm development efforts are alleviated, while in the worst case, lower but acceptable error is reported.

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### Unified Primitive Proxies for Structured Shape Completion

Authors: Zhaiyu Chen, Yuqing Wang, Xiao Xiang Zhu
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00759v2

Structured shape completion recovers missing geometry as primitives rather than as unstructured points, which enables primitive-based surface reconstruction. Instead of following the prevailing cascade, we rethink how primitives and points should interact, and find it more effective to decode primitives in a dedicated pathway that attends to shared shape features. Following this principle, we present UniCo, which in a single feed-forward pass predicts a set of primitives with complete geometry, semantics, and inlier membership. To drive this unified representation, we introduce primitive proxies, learnable queries that are contextualized to produce assembly-ready outputs. To ensure consistent optimization, our training strategy couples primitives and points with online target updates. Across synthetic and real-world benchmarks with four independent assembly solvers, UniCo consistently outperforms recent baselines, lowering Chamfer distance by up to 50% and improving normal consistency by up to 7%. These results establish an attractive recipe for structured 3D understanding from incomplete data. Project page: https://unico-completion.github.io.

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### Unified Primitive Proxies for Structured Shape Completion

Authors: Zhaiyu Chen, Yuqing Wang, Xiao Xiang Zhu
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00759v1

Structured shape completion recovers missing geometry as primitives rather than as unstructured points, which enables primitive-based surface reconstruction. Instead of following the prevailing cascade, we rethink how primitives and points should interact, and find it more effective to decode primitives in a dedicated pathway that attends to shared shape features. Following this principle, we present UniCo, which in a single feed-forward pass predicts a set of primitives with complete geometry, semantics, and inlier membership. To drive this unified representation, we introduce primitive proxies, learnable queries that are contextualized to produce assembly-ready outputs. To ensure consistent optimization, our training strategy couples primitives and points with online target updates. Across synthetic and real-world benchmarks with four independent assembly solvers, UniCo consistently outperforms recent baselines, lowering Chamfer distance by up to 50% and improving normal consistency by up to 7%. These results establish an attractive recipe for structured 3D understanding from incomplete data. Project page: https://unico-completion.github.io.

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### Memory Bank Compression for Continual Adaptation of Large Language Models

Authors: Thomas Katraouras, Dimitrios Rafailidis
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00756v1

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a mainstay for many everyday applications. However, as data evolve their knowledge quickly becomes outdated. Continual learning aims to update LLMs with new information without erasing previously acquired knowledge. Although methods such as full fine-tuning can incorporate new data, they are computationally expensive and prone to catastrophic forgetting, where prior knowledge is overwritten. Memory-augmented approaches address this by equipping LLMs with a memory bank, that is an external memory module which stores information for future use. However, these methods face a critical limitation, in particular, the memory bank constantly grows in the real-world scenario when large-scale data streams arrive. In this paper, we propose MBC, a model that compresses the memory bank through a codebook optimization strategy during online adaptation learning. To ensure stable learning, we also introduce an online resetting mechanism that prevents codebook collapse. In addition, we employ Key-Value Low-Rank Adaptation in the attention layers of the LLM, enabling efficient utilization of the compressed memory representations. Experiments with benchmark question-answering datasets demonstrate that MBC reduces the memory bank size to 0.3% when compared against the most competitive baseline, while maintaining high retention accuracy during online adaptation learning. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Thomkat/MBC.

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### A Machine Learning Framework for Off Ball Defensive Role and Performance Evaluation in Football

Authors: Sean Groom, Shuo Wang, Francisco Belo, Axl Rice, Liam Anderson
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00748v1

Evaluating off-ball defensive performance in football is challenging, as traditional metrics do not capture the nuanced coordinated movements that limit opponent action selection and success probabilities. Although widely used possession value models excel at appraising on-ball actions, their application to defense remains limited. Existing counterfactual methods, such as ghosting models, help extend these analyses but often rely on simulating "average" behavior that lacks tactical context. To address this, we introduce a covariate-dependent Hidden Markov Model (CDHMM) tailored to corner kicks, a highly structured aspect of football games. Our label-free model infers time-resolved man-marking and zonal assignments directly from player tracking data. We leverage these assignments to propose a novel framework for defensive credit attribution and a role-conditioned ghosting method for counterfactual analysis of off-ball defensive performance. We show how these contributions provide a interpretable evaluation of defensive contributions against context-aware baselines.

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### The Reasoning-Creativity Trade-off: Toward Creativity-Driven Problem Solving

Authors: Max Ruiz Luyten, Mihaela van der Schaar
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00747v1

State-of-the-art large language model (LLM) pipelines rely on bootstrapped reasoning loops: sampling diverse chains of thought and reinforcing the highest-scoring ones, mainly optimizing correctness. We analyze how this design choice is sensitive to the collapse of the model's distribution over reasoning paths, slashing semantic entropy and undermining creative problem-solving. To analyze this failure, we introduce Distributional Creative Reasoning (DCR), a unified variational objective that casts training as gradient flow through probability measures on solution traces. STaR, GRPO, and DPO, as well as entropy bonuses, and other methods, all constitute special cases of the same loss. The framework delivers three core results: (i) the diversity decay theorem, describing how correctness-based objectives lead to distinct modes of diversity decay for STaR, GRPO, and DPO; (ii) designs that ensure convergence to a stable and diverse policy, effectively preventing collapse; and (iii) simple, actionable recipes to achieve this in practice. DCR thus offers the first principled recipe for LLMs that remain both correct and creative.

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### An Agentic Framework for Neuro-Symbolic Programming

Authors: Aliakbar Nafar, Chetan Chigurupati, Danial Kamali, Hamid Karimian, Parisa Kordjamshidi
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00743v2

Integrating symbolic constraints into deep learning models could make them more robust, interpretable, and data-efficient. Still, it remains a time-consuming and challenging task. Existing frameworks like DomiKnowS help this integration by providing a high-level declarative programming interface, but they still assume the user is proficient with the library's specific syntax. We propose AgenticDomiKnowS (ADS) to eliminate this dependency. ADS translates free-form task descriptions into a complete DomiKnowS program using an agentic workflow that creates and tests each DomiKnowS component separately. The workflow supports optional human-in-the-loop intervention, enabling users familiar with DomiKnowS to refine intermediate outputs. We show how ADS enables experienced DomiKnowS users and non-users alike to construct complete neuro-symbolic programs in 10-15 minutes, whereas manually coding even a component of DomiKnowS takes an hour. Access the UI at https://hlr-demo.egr.msu.edu/.

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### An Agentic Framework for Neuro-Symbolic Programming

Authors: Aliakbar Nafar, Chetan Chigurupati, Danial Kamali, Hamid Karimian, Parisa Kordjamshidi
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00743v1

Integrating symbolic constraints into deep learning models could make them more robust, interpretable, and data-efficient. Still, it remains a time-consuming and challenging task. Existing frameworks like DomiKnowS help this integration by providing a high-level declarative programming interface, but they still assume the user is proficient with the library's specific syntax. We propose AgenticDomiKnowS (ADS) to eliminate this dependency. ADS translates free-form task descriptions into a complete DomiKnowS program using an agentic workflow that creates and tests each DomiKnowS component separately. The workflow supports optional human-in-the-loop intervention, enabling users familiar with DomiKnowS to refine intermediate outputs. We show how ADS enables experienced DomiKnowS users and non-users to rapidly construct neuro-symbolic programs, reducing development time from hours to 10-15 minutes.

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### Stochastic Actor-Critic: Mitigating Overestimation via Temporal Aleatoric Uncertainty

Authors: Uğurcan Özalp
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, eess.SY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00737v1

Off-policy actor-critic methods in reinforcement learning train a critic with temporal-difference updates and use it as a learning signal for the policy (actor). This design typically achieves higher sample efficiency than purely on-policy methods. However, critic networks tend to overestimate value estimates systematically. This is often addressed by introducing a pessimistic bias based on uncertainty estimates. Current methods employ ensembling to quantify the critic's epistemic uncertainty-uncertainty due to limited data and model ambiguity-to scale pessimistic updates. In this work, we propose a new algorithm called Stochastic Actor-Critic (STAC) that incorporates temporal (one-step) aleatoric uncertainty-uncertainty arising from stochastic transitions, rewards, and policy-induced variability in Bellman targets-to scale pessimistic bias in temporal-difference updates, rather than relying on epistemic uncertainty. STAC uses a single distributional critic network to model the temporal return uncertainty, and applies dropout to both the critic and actor networks for regularization. Our results show that pessimism based on a distributional critic alone suffices to mitigate overestimation, and naturally leads to risk-averse behavior in stochastic environments. Introducing dropout further improves training stability and performance by means of regularization. With this design, STAC achieves improved computational efficiency using a single distributional critic network.

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### Exploring the Performance of Large Language Models on Subjective Span Identification Tasks

Authors: Alphaeus Dmonte, Roland Oruche, Tharindu Ranasinghe, Marcos Zampieri, Prasad Calyam
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00736v1

Identifying relevant text spans is important for several downstream tasks in NLP, as it contributes to model explainability. While most span identification approaches rely on relatively smaller pre-trained language models like BERT, a few recent approaches have leveraged the latest generation of Large Language Models (LLMs) for the task. Current work has focused on explicit span identification like Named Entity Recognition (NER), while more subjective span identification with LLMs in tasks like Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) has been underexplored. In this paper, we fill this important gap by presenting an evaluation of the performance of various LLMs on text span identification in three popular tasks, namely sentiment analysis, offensive language identification, and claim verification. We explore several LLM strategies like instruction tuning, in-context learning, and chain of thought. Our results indicate underlying relationships within text aid LLMs in identifying precise text spans.

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### Grading Handwritten Engineering Exams with Multimodal Large Language Models

Authors: Janez Perš, Jon Muhovič, Andrej Košir, Boštjan Murovec
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00730v1

Handwritten STEM exams capture open-ended reasoning and diagrams, but manual grading is slow and difficult to scale. We present an end-to-end workflow for grading scanned handwritten engineering quizzes with multimodal large language models (LLMs) that preserves the standard exam process (A4 paper, unconstrained student handwriting). The lecturer provides only a handwritten reference solution (100%) and a short set of grading rules; the reference is converted into a text-only summary that conditions grading without exposing the reference scan. Reliability is achieved through a multi-stage design with a format/presence check to prevent grading blank answers, an ensemble of independent graders, supervisor aggregation, and rigid templates with deterministic validation to produce auditable, machine-parseable reports. We evaluate the frozen pipeline in a clean-room protocol on a held-out real course quiz in Slovenian, including hand-drawn circuit schematics. With state-of-the-art backends (GPT-5.2 and Gemini-3 Pro), the full pipeline achieves $\approx$8-point mean absolute difference to lecturer grades with low bias and an estimated manual-review trigger rate of $\approx$17% at $D_{\max}=40$. Ablations show that trivial prompting and removing the reference solution substantially degrade accuracy and introduce systematic over-grading, confirming that structured prompting and reference grounding are essential.

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### Precision autotuning for linear solvers via contextual bandit-based RL

Authors: Erin Carson, Xinye Chen
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.LG, math.NA
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00728v5

We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for \xy{responsive} precision tuning for linear solvers, which can be extended to general algorithms. The framework is formulated as a contextual bandit problem and solved using incremental action-value estimation with a discretized state space to select optimal precision configurations for computational steps, \xy{retaining} precision and computational efficiency. To verify its effectiveness, we apply the framework to iterative refinement for solving linear systems $Ax = b$. In this application, our approach dynamically chooses precisions based on calculated features from the system while maintaining acceptable accuracy and convergence. In detail, an action-value estimator takes discretized features (e.g., approximate condition number and matrix norm) as input and outputs estimated action values, from which a policy selects the actions (chosen precision configurations for specific steps), optimized via an $ε$-greedy strategy to maximize a multi-objective reward to balance accuracy and computational cost. Empirical results demonstrate effective precision selection, \xy{increasing the use of lower-precision arithmetic} while maintaining accuracy comparable to double-precision baselines. \xy{We further evaluate the learned policies in a compiled CPU GMRES-IR implementation using FP16, FP32, and FP64 arithmetic for solver-level native validation.} The framework generalizes to diverse out-of-sample data and provides insights into applying RL precision selection to other numerical algorithms, advancing mixed-precision numerical methods in scientific computing. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on precision autotuning with RL with verification on unseen datasets.

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### Precision Autotuning for Linear Solvers via Contextual Bandit-Based RL

Authors: Erin Carson, Xinye Chen
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.LG, math.NA
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00728v1

We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for adaptive precision tuning of linear solvers, and can be extended to general algorithms. The framework is formulated as a contextual bandit problem and solved using incremental action-value estimation with a discretized state space to select optimal precision configurations for computational steps, balancing precision and computational efficiency. To verify its effectiveness, we apply the framework to iterative refinement for solving linear systems $Ax = b$. In this application, our approach dynamically chooses precisions based on calculated features from the system. In detail, a Q-table maps discretized features (e.g., approximate condition number and matrix norm)to actions (chosen precision configurations for specific steps), optimized via an epsilon-greedy strategy to maximize a multi-objective reward balancing accuracy and computational cost. Empirical results demonstrate effective precision selection, reducing computational cost while maintaining accuracy comparable to double-precision baselines. The framework generalizes to diverse out-of-sample data and offers insight into utilizing RL precision selection for other numerical algorithms, advancing mixed-precision numerical methods in scientific computing. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on precision autotuning with RL and verified on unseen datasets.

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### Multi-Level Feature Fusion for Continual Learning in Visual Quality Inspection

Authors: Johannes C. Bauer, Paul Geng, Stephan Trattnig, Petr Dokládal, Rüdiger Daub
Published: 2026-01-02
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00725v2

Deep neural networks show great potential for automating various visual quality inspection tasks in manufacturing. However, their applicability is limited in more volatile scenarios, such as remanufacturing, where the inspected products and defect patterns often change. In such settings, deployed models require frequent adaptation to novel conditions, effectively posing a continual learning problem. To enable quick adaptation, the necessary training processes must be computationally efficient while still avoiding effects like catastrophic forgetting. This work presents a multi-level feature fusion (MLFF) approach that aims to improve both aspects simultaneously by utilizing representations from different depths of a pretrained network. We show that our approach is able to match the performance of end-to-end training for different quality inspection problems while using significantly less trainable parameters. Furthermore, it reduces catastrophic forgetting and improves generalization robustness to new product types or defects.

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