# Research Papers — 2026-01 · bundle page 187 of 189

> Full-text markdown of papers #9301–9350 of 9403 published in 2026-01, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 9403-paper 2026-01 archive (50 papers per file).

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### Can Semantic Methods Enhance Team Sports Tactics? A Methodology for Football with Broader Applications

Authors: Alessio Di Rubbo, Mattia Neri, Remo Pareschi, Marco Pedroni, Roberto Valtancoli, Paolino Zica
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00421v2

This paper explores how semantic-space reasoning, traditionally used in computational linguistics, can be extended to tactical decision-making in team sports. Building on the analogy between texts and teams -- where players act as words and collective play conveys meaning -- the proposed methodology models tactical configurations as compositional semantic structures. Each player is represented as a multidimensional vector integrating technical, physical, and psychological attributes; team profiles are aggregated through contextual weighting into a higher-level semantic representation. Within this shared vector space, tactical templates such as high press, counterattack, or possession build-up are encoded analogously to linguistic concepts. Their alignment with team profiles is evaluated using vector-distance metrics, enabling the computation of tactical ``fit'' and opponent-exploitation potential. A Python-based prototype demonstrates how these methods can generate interpretable, dynamically adaptive strategy recommendations, accompanied by fine-grained diagnostic insights at the attribute level. Beyond football, the approach offers a generalizable framework for collective decision-making and performance optimization in team-based domains -- ranging from basketball and hockey to cooperative robotics and human-AI coordination systems. The paper concludes by outlining future directions toward real-world data integration, predictive simulation, and hybrid human-machine tactical intelligence.

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### Secure, Verifiable, and Scalable Multi-Client Data Sharing via Consensus-Based Privacy-Preserving Data Distribution

Authors: Prajwal Panth, Sahaj Raj Malla
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CR, cs.DC, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00418v2

We propose the Consensus-Based Privacy-Preserving Data Distribution (CPPDD) framework, a lightweight and post-setup autonomous protocol for secure multi-client data aggregation. The framework enforces unanimous-release confidentiality through a dual-layer protection mechanism that combines per-client affine masking with priority-driven sequential consensus locking. Decentralized integrity is verified via step (sigma_S) and data (sigma_D) checksums, facilitating autonomous malicious deviation detection and atomic abort without requiring persistent coordination. The design supports scalar, vector, and matrix payloads with O(N*D) computation and communication complexity, optional edge-server offloading, and resistance to collusion under N-1 corruptions. Formal analysis proves correctness, Consensus-Dependent Integrity and Fairness (CDIF) with overwhelming-probability abort on deviation, and IND-CPA security assuming a pseudorandom function family. Empirical evaluations on MNIST-derived vectors demonstrate linear scalability up to N = 500 with sub-millisecond per-client computation times. The framework achieves 100% malicious deviation detection, exact data recovery, and three-to-four orders of magnitude lower FLOPs compared to MPC and HE baselines. CPPDD enables atomic collaboration in secure voting, consortium federated learning, blockchain escrows, and geo-information capacity building, addressing critical gaps in scalability, trust minimization, and verifiable multi-party computation for regulated and resource-constrained environments.

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### Deep Delta Learning

Authors: Yifan Zhang, Yifeng Liu, Mengdi Wang, Quanquan Gu
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00417v5

Transformer residual streams are updated by addition. A sufficiently expressive residual block can represent content replacement, but the residual update itself has no operation that reads, compares, and replaces content. We introduce Deep Delta Learning (DDL), which applies the delta rule over network depth. Each layer reads the residual state along a learned direction, compares the readout with a learned target, and writes a gated rank-1 correction back along the same direction. A closed gate gives the identity map, and a unit gate overwrites the selected readout with the target. DDL works with the usual vector state or with an expanded state that stores several value channels, while attention and MLP blocks keep the original model width. We pretrain decoder-only models with approximately GPT-2 small and medium sizes on the FineWeb-Edu dataset. At both scales, every DDL variant has lower validation loss and higher average one-shot accuracy than the additive baseline, and the best expanded variants raise that average by 0.91 and 1.18 points.

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### ABFR-KAN: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Functional Brain Analysis

Authors: Tyler Ward, Abdullah Imran
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00416v2

Functional connectivity (FC) analysis, a valuable tool for computer-aided brain disorder diagnosis, traditionally relies on atlas-based parcellation. However, issues relating to selection bias and a lack of regard for subject specificity can arise as a result of such parcellations. Addressing this, we propose ABFR-KAN, a transformer-based classification network that incorporates novel advanced brain function representation components with the power of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) to mitigate structural bias, improve anatomical conformity, and enhance the reliability of FC estimation. Extensive experiments on the ABIDE I dataset, including cross-site evaluation and ablation studies across varying model backbones and KAN configurations, demonstrate that ABFR-KAN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines for autism spectrum distorder (ASD) classification. Our code is available at https://github.com/tbwa233/ABFR-KAN.

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### Do LLMs Judge Distantly Supervised Named Entity Labels Well? Constructing the JudgeWEL Dataset

Authors: Alistair Plum, Laura Bernardy, Tharindu Ranasinghe
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00411v2

We present judgeWEL, a dataset for named entity recognition (NER) in Luxembourgish, automatically labelled and subsequently verified using large language models (LLM) in a novel pipeline. Building datasets for under-represented languages remains one of the major bottlenecks in natural language processing, where the scarcity of resources and linguistic particularities make large-scale annotation costly and potentially inconsistent. To address these challenges, we propose and evaluate a novel approach that leverages Wikipedia and Wikidata as structured sources of weak supervision. By exploiting internal links within Wikipedia articles, we infer entity types based on their corresponding Wikidata entries, thereby generating initial annotations with minimal human intervention. Because such links are not uniformly reliable, we mitigate noise by employing and comparing several LLMs to identify and retain only high-quality labelled sentences. The resulting corpus is approximately five times larger than the currently available Luxembourgish NER dataset and offers broader and more balanced coverage across entity categories, providing a substantial new resource for multilingual and low-resource NER research.

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### Adaptive Causal Coordination Detection for Social Media: A Memory-Guided Framework with Semi-Supervised Learning

Authors: Weng Ding, Yi Han, Mu-Jiang-Shan Wang
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00400v1

Detecting coordinated inauthentic behavior on social media remains a critical and persistent challenge, as most existing approaches rely on superficial correlation analysis, employ static parameter settings, and demand extensive and labor-intensive manual annotation. To address these limitations systematically, we propose the Adaptive Causal Coordination Detection (ACCD) framework. ACCD adopts a three-stage, progressive architecture that leverages a memory-guided adaptive mechanism to dynamically learn and retain optimal detection configurations for diverse coordination scenarios. Specifically, in the first stage, ACCD introduces an adaptive Convergent Cross Mapping (CCM) technique to deeply identify genuine causal relationships between accounts. The second stage integrates active learning with uncertainty sampling within a semi-supervised classification scheme, significantly reducing the burden of manual labeling. The third stage deploys an automated validation module driven by historical detection experience, enabling self-verification and optimization of the detection outcomes. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation using real-world datasets, including the Twitter IRA dataset, Reddit coordination traces, and several widely-adopted bot detection benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that ACCD achieves an F1-score of 87.3\% in coordinated attack detection, representing a 15.2\% improvement over the strongest existing baseline. Furthermore, the system reduces manual annotation requirements by 68\% and achieves a 2.8x speedup in processing through hierarchical clustering optimization. In summary, ACCD provides a more accurate, efficient, and highly automated end-to-end solution for identifying coordinated behavior on social platforms, offering substantial practical value and promising potential for broad application.

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### RoLID-11K: A Dashcam Dataset for Small-Object Roadside Litter Detection

Authors: Tao Wu, Qing Xu, Xiangjian He, Oakleigh Weekes, James Brown, Wenting Duan
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00398v1

Roadside litter poses environmental, safety and economic challenges, yet current monitoring relies on labour-intensive surveys and public reporting, providing limited spatial coverage. Existing vision datasets for litter detection focus on street-level still images, aerial scenes or aquatic environments, and do not reflect the unique characteristics of dashcam footage, where litter appears extremely small, sparse and embedded in cluttered road-verge backgrounds. We introduce RoLID-11K, the first large-scale dataset for roadside litter detection from dashcams, comprising over 11k annotated images spanning diverse UK driving conditions and exhibiting pronounced long-tail and small-object distributions. We benchmark a broad spectrum of modern detectors, from accuracy-oriented transformer architectures to real-time YOLO models, and analyse their strengths and limitations on this challenging task. Our results show that while CO-DETR and related transformers achieve the best localisation accuracy, real-time models remain constrained by coarse feature hierarchies. RoLID-11K establishes a challenging benchmark for extreme small-object detection in dynamic driving scenes and aims to support the development of scalable, low-cost systems for roadside-litter monitoring. The dataset is available at https://github.com/xq141839/RoLID-11K.

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### Revati: Transparent GPU-Free Time-Warp Emulation for LLM Serving

Authors: Amey Agrawal, Mayank Yadav, Sukrit Kumar, Anirudha Agrawal, Garv Ghai, Souradeep Bera, Elton Pinto, Sirish Gambhira, Mohammad Adain, Kasra Sohrab, Chus Antonanzas, Alexey Tumanov
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.DC, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00397v1

Deploying LLMs efficiently requires testing hundreds of serving configurations, but evaluating each one on a GPU cluster takes hours and costs thousands of dollars. Discrete-event simulators are faster and cheaper, but they require re-implementing the serving system's control logic -- a burden that compounds as frameworks evolve. We present Revati, a time-warp emulator that enables performance modeling by directly executing real serving system code at simulation-like speed. The system intercepts CUDA API calls to virtualize device management, allowing serving frameworks to run without physical GPUs. Instead of executing GPU kernels, it performs time jumps -- fast-forwarding virtual time by predicted kernel durations. We propose a coordination protocol that synchronizes these jumps across distributed processes while preserving causality. On vLLM and SGLang, Revati achieves less than 5% prediction error across multiple models and parallelism configurations, while running 5-17x faster than real GPU execution.

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### NeoVerse: Enhancing 4D World Model with in-the-wild Monocular Videos

Authors: Yuxue Yang, Lue Fan, Ziqi Shi, Junran Peng, Feng Wang, Zhaoxiang Zhang
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00393v2

In this paper, we propose NeoVerse, a versatile 4D world model that is capable of 4D reconstruction, novel-trajectory video generation, and rich downstream applications. We first identify a common limitation of scalability in current 4D world modeling methods, caused either by expensive and specialized multi-view 4D data or by cumbersome training pre-processing. In contrast, our NeoVerse is built upon a core philosophy that makes the full pipeline scalable to diverse in-the-wild monocular videos. Specifically, NeoVerse features pose-free feed-forward 4D reconstruction, online monocular degradation pattern simulation, and other well-aligned techniques. These designs empower NeoVerse with versatility and generalization to various domains. Meanwhile, NeoVerse achieves state-of-the-art performance in standard reconstruction and generation benchmarks. Our project page is available at https://neoverse-4d.github.io.

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### Real-Time Human Detection for Aerial Captured Video Sequences via Deep Models

Authors: Nouar AlDahoul, Aznul Qalid Md Sabri, Ali Mohammed Mansoor
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00391v1

Human detection in videos plays an important role in various real-life applications. Most traditional approaches depend on utilizing handcrafted features, which are problem-dependent and optimal for specific tasks. Moreover, they are highly susceptible to dynamical events such as illumination changes, camera jitter, and variations in object sizes. On the other hand, the proposed feature learning approaches are cheaper and easier because highly abstract and discriminative features can be produced automatically without the need of expert knowledge. In this paper, we utilize automatic feature learning methods, which combine optical flow and three different deep models (i.e., supervised convolutional neural network (S-CNN), pretrained CNN feature extractor, and hierarchical extreme learning machine) for human detection in videos captured using a nonstatic camera on an aerial platform with varying altitudes. The models are trained and tested on the publicly available and highly challenging UCF-ARG aerial dataset. The comparison between these models in terms of training, testing accuracy, and learning speed is analyzed. The performance evaluation considers five human actions (digging, waving, throwing, walking, and running). Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed methods are successful for the human detection task. The pretrained CNN produces an average accuracy of 98.09%. S-CNN produces an average accuracy of 95.6% with softmax and 91.7% with Support Vector Machines (SVM). H-ELM has an average accuracy of 95.9%. Using a normal Central Processing Unit (CPU), H-ELM's training time takes 445 seconds. Learning in S-CNN takes 770 seconds with a high-performance Graphical Processing Unit (GPU).

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### NOS-Gate: Queue-Aware Streaming IDS for Consumer Gateways under Timing-Controlled Evasion

Authors: Muhammad Bilal, Omer Tariq, Hasan Ahmed
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG, cs.NI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00389v2

Timing and burst patterns can leak through encryption, and an adaptive adversary can exploit them. This undermines metadata-only detection in a stand-alone consumer gateway. Therefore, consumer gateways need streaming intrusion detection on encrypted traffic using metadata only, under tight CPU and latency budgets. We present a streaming IDS for stand-alone gateways that instantiates a lightweight two-state unit derived from Network-Optimised Spiking (NOS) dynamics per flow, named \emph{NOS-Gate}. NOS-Gate scores fixed-length windows of metadata features and, under a $K$-of-$M$ persistence rule, triggers a reversible mitigation that temporarily reduces the flow's weight under weighted fair queueing (WFQ). We evaluate NOS-Gate under timing-controlled evasion using an executable \emph{worlds} benchmark that specifies benign device processes, auditable attacker budgets, contention structure, and packet-level WFQ replay to quantify queue impact. All methods are calibrated label-free via burn-in quantile thresholding. Across multiple reproducible worlds and malicious episodes, at an achieved $0.1\%$ false-positive operating point, NOS-Gate attains 0.952 incident recall versus 0.857 for the best baseline in these runs. Under gating, it reduces p99.9 queueing delay and p99.9 collateral delay with a mean scoring cost of $\approx 2.09\,μ\mathrm{s}$ per flow-window on CPU.

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### Vision-Language Reasoning for Geolocalization: A Reinforcement Learning Approach

Authors: Biao Wu, Meng Fang, Ling Chen, Ke Xu, Tao Cheng, Jun Wang
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00388v2

Recent advances in vision-language models have opened up new possibilities for reasoning-driven image geolocalization. However, existing approaches often rely on synthetic reasoning annotations or external image retrieval, which can limit interpretability and generalizability. In this paper, we present Geo-R, a retrieval-free framework that uncovers structured reasoning paths from existing ground-truth coordinates and optimizes geolocation accuracy via reinforcement learning. We propose the Chain of Region, a rule-based hierarchical reasoning paradigm that generates precise, interpretable supervision by mapping GPS coordinates to geographic entities (e.g., country, province, city) without relying on model-generated or synthetic labels. Building on this, we introduce a lightweight reinforcement learning strategy with coordinate-aligned rewards based on Haversine distance, enabling the model to refine predictions through spatially meaningful feedback. Our approach bridges structured geographic reasoning with direct spatial supervision, yielding improved localization accuracy, stronger generalization, and more transparent inference. Experimental results across multiple benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of Geo-R, establishing a new retrieval-free paradigm for scalable and interpretable image geolocalization. To facilitate further research and ensure reproducibility, both the model and code will be made publicly available.

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### Engineering Attack Vectors and Detecting Anomalies in Additive Manufacturing

Authors: Md Mahbub Hasan, Marcus Sternhagen, Krishna Chandra Roy
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00384v1

Additive manufacturing (AM) is rapidly integrating into critical sectors such as aerospace, automotive, and healthcare. However, this cyber-physical convergence introduces new attack surfaces, especially at the interface between computer-aided design (CAD) and machine execution layers. In this work, we investigate targeted cyberattacks on two widely used fused deposition modeling (FDM) systems, Creality's flagship model K1 Max, and Ender 3. Our threat model is a multi-layered Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) intrusion, where the adversary intercepts and manipulates G-code files during upload from the user interface to the printer firmware. The MitM intrusion chain enables several stealthy sabotage scenarios. These attacks remain undetectable by conventional slicer software or runtime interfaces, resulting in structurally defective yet externally plausible printed parts. To counter these stealthy threats, we propose an unsupervised Intrusion Detection System (IDS) that analyzes structured machine logs generated during live printing. Our defense mechanism uses a frozen Transformer-based encoder (a BERT variant) to extract semantic representations of system behavior, followed by a contrastively trained projection head that learns anomaly-sensitive embeddings. Later, a clustering-based approach and a self-attention autoencoder are used for classification. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively distinguishes between benign and compromised executions.

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### Word Frequency Counting Based on Serverless MapReduce

Authors: Hanzhe Li, Bingchen Lin, Mengyuan Xu
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.DC, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00380v1

With the increasing demand for high-performance and high-efficiency computing, cloud computing, especially serverless computing, has gradually become a research hotspot in recent years, attracting numerous research attention. Meanwhile, MapReduce, which is a popular big data processing model in the industry, has been widely applied in various fields. Inspired by the serverless framework of Function as a Service and the high concurrency and robustness of MapReduce programming model, this paper focus on combining them to reduce the time span and increase the efficiency when executing the word frequency counting task. In this case, the paper use a MapReduce programming model based on a serverless computing platform to figure out the most optimized number of Map functions and Reduce functions for a particular task. For the same amount of workload, extensive experiments show both execution time reduces and the overall efficiency of the program improves at different rates as the number of map functions and reduce functions increases. This paper suppose the discovery of the most optimized number of map and reduce functions can help cooperations and programmers figure out the most optimized solutions.

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### Sparse Tucker Decomposition and Graph Regularization for High-Dimensional Time Series Forecasting

Authors: Sijia Xia, Michael K. Ng, Xiongjun Zhang
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: math.ST, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00377v1

Existing methods of vector autoregressive model for multivariate time series analysis make use of low-rank matrix approximation or Tucker decomposition to reduce the dimension of the over-parameterization issue. In this paper, we propose a sparse Tucker decomposition method with graph regularization for high-dimensional vector autoregressive time series. By stacking the time-series transition matrices into a third-order tensor, the sparse Tucker decomposition is employed to characterize important interactions within the transition third-order tensor and reduce the number of parameters. Moreover, the graph regularization is employed to measure the local consistency of the response, predictor and temporal factor matrices in the vector autoregressive model.The two proposed regularization techniques can be shown to more accurate parameters estimation. A non-asymptotic error bound of the estimator of the proposed method is established, which is lower than those of the existing matrix or tensor based methods. A proximal alternating linearized minimization algorithm is designed to solve the resulting model and its global convergence is established under very mild conditions. Extensive numerical experiments on synthetic data and real-world datasets are carried out to verify the superior performance of the proposed method over existing state-of-the-art methods.

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### In Line with Context: Repository-Level Code Generation via Context Inlining

Authors: Chao Hu, Wenhao Zeng, Yuling Shi, Beijun Shen, Xiaodong Gu
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00376v3

Repository-level code generation has attracted growing attention in recent years. Unlike function-level code generation, it requires the model to understand the entire repository, reasoning over complex dependencies across functions, classes, and modules. However, existing approaches such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) or context-based function selection often fall short: they primarily rely on surface-level similarity and struggle to capture the rich dependencies that govern repository-level semantics. In this paper, we introduce InlineCoder, a novel framework for repository-level code generation. InlineCoder enhances the understanding of repository context by inlining the unfinished function into its call graph, thereby reframing the challenging repository understanding as an easier function-level coding task. Given a function signature, InlineCoder first generates a draft completion, termed an anchor, which approximates downstream dependencies and enables perplexity-based confidence estimation. This anchor drives a bidirectional inlining process: (i) Upstream Inlining, which embeds the anchor into its callers to capture diverse usage scenarios; and (ii) Downstream Retrieval, which integrates the anchor's callees into the prompt to provide precise dependency context. The enriched context, combining draft completion with upstream and downstream perspectives, equips the LLM with a comprehensive repository view.

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### BHaRNet: Reliability-Aware Body-Hand Modality Expertized Networks for Fine-grained Skeleton Action Recognition

Authors: Seungyeon Cho, Tae-kyun Kim
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00369v1

Skeleton-based human action recognition (HAR) has achieved remarkable progress with graph-based architectures. However, most existing methods remain body-centric, focusing on large-scale motions while neglecting subtle hand articulations that are crucial for fine-grained recognition. This work presents a probabilistic dual-stream framework that unifies reliability modeling and multi-modal integration, generalizing expertized learning under uncertainty across both intra-skeleton and cross-modal domains. The framework comprises three key components: (1) a calibration-free preprocessing pipeline that removes canonical-space transformations and learns directly from native coordinates; (2) a probabilistic Noisy-OR fusion that stabilizes reliability-aware dual-stream learning without requiring explicit confidence supervision; and (3) an intra- to cross-modal ensemble that couples four skeleton modalities (Joint, Bone, Joint Motion, and Bone Motion) to RGB representations, bridging structural and visual motion cues in a unified cross-modal formulation. Comprehensive evaluations across multiple benchmarks (NTU RGB+D~60/120, PKU-MMD, N-UCLA) and a newly defined hand-centric benchmark exhibit consistent improvements and robustness under noisy and heterogeneous conditions.

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### Mask-Conditioned Voxel Diffusion for Joint Geometry and Color Inpainting

Authors: Aarya Sumuk
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00368v1

We present a lightweight two-stage framework for joint geometry and color inpainting of damaged 3D objects, motivated by the digital restoration of cultural heritage artifacts. The pipeline separates damage localization from reconstruction. In the first stage, a 2D convolutional network predicts damage masks on RGB slices extracted from a voxelized object, and these predictions are aggregated into a volumetric mask. In the second stage, a diffusion-based 3D U-Net performs mask-conditioned inpainting directly on voxel grids, reconstructing geometry and color while preserving observed regions. The model jointly predicts occupancy and color using a composite objective that combines occupancy reconstruction with masked color reconstruction and perceptual regularization. We evaluate the approach on a curated set of textured artifacts with synthetically generated damage using standard geometric and color metrics. Compared to symmetry-based baselines, our method produces more complete geometry and more coherent color reconstructions at a fixed 32^3 resolution. Overall, the results indicate that explicit mask conditioning is a practical way to guide volumetric diffusion models for joint 3D geometry and color inpainting.

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### PatchBlock: A Lightweight Defense Against Adversarial Patches for Embedded EdgeAI Devices

Authors: Nandish Chattopadhyay, Abdul Basit, Amira Guesmi, Muhammad Abdullah Hanif, Bassem Ouni, Muhammad Shafique
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00367v1

Adversarial attacks pose a significant challenge to the reliable deployment of machine learning models in EdgeAI applications, such as autonomous driving and surveillance, which rely on resource-constrained devices for real-time inference. Among these, patch-based adversarial attacks, where small malicious patches (e.g., stickers) are applied to objects, can deceive neural networks into making incorrect predictions with potentially severe consequences. In this paper, we present PatchBlock, a lightweight framework designed to detect and neutralize adversarial patches in images. Leveraging outlier detection and dimensionality reduction, PatchBlock identifies regions affected by adversarial noise and suppresses their impact. It operates as a pre-processing module at the sensor level, efficiently running on CPUs in parallel with GPU inference, thus preserving system throughput while avoiding additional GPU overhead. The framework follows a three-stage pipeline: splitting the input into chunks (Chunking), detecting anomalous regions via a redesigned isolation forest with targeted cuts for faster convergence (Separating), and applying dimensionality reduction on the identified outliers (Mitigating). PatchBlock is both model- and patch-agnostic, can be retrofitted to existing pipelines, and integrates seamlessly between sensor inputs and downstream models. Evaluations across multiple neural architectures, benchmark datasets, attack types, and diverse edge devices demonstrate that PatchBlock consistently improves robustness, recovering up to 77% of model accuracy under strong patch attacks such as the Google Adversarial Patch, while maintaining high portability and minimal clean accuracy loss. Additionally, PatchBlock outperforms the state-of-the-art defenses in efficiency, in terms of computation time and energy consumption per sample, making it suitable for EdgeAI applications.

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### BERT-JEPA: Reorganizing CLS Embeddings for Language-Invariant Semantics

Authors: Taj Gillin, Adam Lalani, Kenneth Zhang, Marcel Mateos Salles
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00366v1

Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA) are a novel self supervised training technique that have shown recent promise across domains. We introduce BERT-JEPA (BEPA), a training paradigm that adds a JEPA training objective to BERT-style models, working to combat a collapsed (CLS) embedding space and turning it into a language-agnostic space. This new structure leads to increased performance across multilingual benchmarks.

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### The Role of Mixed-Language Documents for Multilingual Large Language Model Pretraining

Authors: Jiandong Shao, Raphael Tang, Crystina Zhang, Karin Sevegnani, Pontus Stenetorp, Jianfei Yang, Yao Lu
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00364v2

Multilingual large language models achieve impressive cross-lingual performance despite largely monolingual pretraining. While bilingual data in pretraining corpora is widely believed to enable these abilities, details of its contributions remain unclear. We investigate this question by pretraining models from scratch under controlled conditions, comparing the standard web corpus with a monolingual-only version that removes all multilingual documents. Despite constituting only 2% of the corpus, removing bilingual data causes translation performance to drop 56% in BLEU, while behaviour on cross-lingual QA and general reasoning tasks remains stable, with training curves largely overlapping the baseline. To understand this asymmetry, we categorize bilingual data into parallel (14%), code-switching (72%), and miscellaneous documents (14%) based on the semantic relevance of content in different languages. We then conduct granular ablations by reintroducing parallel or code-switching data into the monolingual-only corpus. Our experiments reveal that parallel data almost fully restores translation performance (91% of the unfiltered baseline), whereas code-switching contributes minimally. Other cross-lingual tasks remain largely unaffected by either type. These findings reveal that translation critically depends on systematic token-level alignments from parallel data, whereas cross-lingual understanding and reasoning appear to be achievable even without bilingual data.

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### Deterministic Coreset for Lp Subspace

Authors: Rachit Chhaya, Anirban Dasgupta, Dan Feldman, Supratim Shit
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.DS, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00361v3

We introduce the first iterative algorithm for constructing a $\varepsilon$-coreset that guarantees deterministic $\ell_p$ subspace embedding for any $p \in (1,\infty)$ and any $\varepsilon > 0$. For a given full rank matrix $\mathbf{X} \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times d}$ where $n \gg d$, $\mathbf{X}' \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times d}$ is an $(\varepsilon,\ell_p)$-subspace embedding of $\mathbf{X}$, if for every $\mathbf{q} \in \mathbb{R}^d$, $(1-\varepsilon)\|\mathbf{Xq}\|_{p}^{p} \leq \|\mathbf{X'q}\|_{p}^{p} \leq (1+\varepsilon)\|\mathbf{Xq}\|_{p}^{p}$. Specifically, in this paper, $\mathbf{X}'$ is a weighted subset of rows of $\mathbf{X}$ which is commonly known in the literature as a coreset. In every iteration, the algorithm ensures that the loss on the maintained set is upper and lower bounded by the loss on the original dataset with appropriate scalings. So, unlike typical coreset guarantees, due to bounded loss, our coreset gives a deterministic guarantee for the $\ell_p$ subspace embedding. For an error parameter $\varepsilon$, our algorithm takes $O(\mathrm{poly}(n,d,\varepsilon^{-1}))$ time and returns a deterministic $\varepsilon$-coreset, for $\ell_p$ subspace embedding whose size is $O\left(\frac{d^{\max\{1,p/2\}}}{\varepsilon^{2}}\right)$. Here, we remove the $\log$ factors in the coreset size, which had been a long-standing open problem. Our coresets are optimal as they are tight with the lower bound. As an application, our coreset can also be used for approximately solving the $\ell_p$ regression problem in a deterministic manner.

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### Mapping Human Anti-collusion Mechanisms to Multi-agent AI Systems

Authors: Jamiu Idowu, Ahmed Almasoud, Ayman Alfahid
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.MA, cs.AI, cs.CY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00360v3

As multi-agent AI systems become increasingly autonomous, evidence shows they can develop collusive strategies similar to those long observed in human markets and institutions. While human domains have accumulated centuries of anti-collusion mechanisms, it remains unclear how these can be adapted to AI settings. This paper addresses that gap by (i) developing a taxonomy of human anti-collusion mechanisms, including sanctions, leniency & whistleblowing, monitoring & auditing, market design, and governance and (ii) mapping them to potential interventions for multi-agent AI systems. For each mechanism, we propose implementation approaches. We also highlight open challenges, such as the attribution problem (difficulty attributing emergent coordination to specific agents), identity fluidity (agents being easily forked or modified), the boundary problem (distinguishing beneficial cooperation from harmful collusion), and adversarial adaptation (agents learning to evade detection).

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### Efficient Prediction of Dense Visual Embeddings via Distillation and RGB-D Transformers

Authors: Söhnke Benedikt Fischedick, Daniel Seichter, Benedict Stephan, Robin Schmidt, Horst-Michael Gross
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00359v1

In domestic environments, robots require a comprehensive understanding of their surroundings to interact effectively and intuitively with untrained humans. In this paper, we propose DVEFormer - an efficient RGB-D Transformer-based approach that predicts dense text-aligned visual embeddings (DVE) via knowledge distillation. Instead of directly performing classical semantic segmentation with fixed predefined classes, our method uses teacher embeddings from Alpha-CLIP to guide our efficient student model DVEFormer in learning fine-grained pixel-wise embeddings. While this approach still enables classical semantic segmentation, e.g., via linear probing, it further enables flexible text-based querying and other applications, such as creating comprehensive 3D maps. Evaluations on common indoor datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive performance while meeting real-time requirements, operating at 26.3 FPS for the full model and 77.0 FPS for a smaller variant on an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin. Additionally, we show qualitative results that highlight the effectiveness and possible use cases in real-world applications. Overall, our method serves as a drop-in replacement for traditional segmentation approaches while enabling flexible natural-language querying and seamless integration into 3D mapping pipelines for mobile robotics.

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### The Impact of Lesion Focus on the Performance of AI-Based Melanoma Classification

Authors: Tanay Donde
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00355v1

Melanoma is the most lethal subtype of skin cancer, and early and accurate detection of this disease can greatly improve patients' outcomes. Although machine learning models, especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have shown great potential in automating melanoma classification, their diagnostic reliability still suffers due to inconsistent focus on lesion areas. In this study, we analyze the relationship between lesion attention and diagnostic performance, involving masked images, bounding box detection, and transfer learning. We used multiple explainability and sensitivity analysis approaches to investigate how well models aligned their attention with lesion areas and how this alignment correlated with precision, recall, and F1-score. Results showed that models with a higher focus on lesion areas achieved better diagnostic performance, suggesting the potential of interpretable AI in medical diagnostics. This study provides a foundation for developing more accurate and trustworthy melanoma classification models in the future.

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### OmniVaT: Single Domain Generalization for Multimodal Visual-Tactile Learning

Authors: Liuxiang Qiu, Hui Da, Yuzhen Niu, Tiesong Zhao, Yang Cao, Zheng-Jun Zha
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00352v1

Visual-tactile learning (VTL) enables embodied agents to perceive the physical world by integrating visual (VIS) and tactile (TAC) sensors. However, VTL still suffers from modality discrepancies between VIS and TAC images, as well as domain gaps caused by non-standardized tactile sensors and inconsistent data collection procedures. We formulate these challenges as a new task, termed single domain generalization for multimodal VTL (SDG-VTL). In this paper, we propose an OmniVaT framework that, for the first time, successfully addresses this task. On the one hand, OmniVaT integrates a multimodal fractional Fourier adapter (MFFA) to map VIS and TAC embeddings into a unified embedding-frequency space, thereby effectively mitigating the modality gap without multi-domain training data or careful cross-modal fusion strategies. On the other hand, it also incorporates a discrete tree generation (DTG) module that obtains diverse and reliable multimodal fractional representations through a hierarchical tree structure, thereby enhancing its adaptivity to fluctuating domain shifts in unseen domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior cross-domain generalization performance of OmniVaT on the SDG-VTL task.

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### Robust Uncertainty Quantification for Factual Generation of Large Language Models

Authors: Yuhao Zhang, Zhongliang Yang, Linna Zhou
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00348v1

The rapid advancement of large language model(LLM) technology has facilitated its integration into various domains of professional and daily life. However, the persistent challenge of LLM hallucination has emerged as a critical limitation, significantly compromising the reliability and trustworthiness of AI-generated content. This challenge has garnered significant attention within the scientific community, prompting extensive research efforts in hallucination detection and mitigation strategies. Current methodological frameworks reveal a critical limitation: traditional uncertainty quantification approaches demonstrate effectiveness primarily within conventional question-answering paradigms, yet exhibit notable deficiencies when confronted with non-canonical or adversarial questioning strategies. This performance gap raises substantial concerns regarding the dependability of LLM responses in real-world applications requiring robust critical thinking capabilities. This study aims to fill this gap by proposing an uncertainty quantification scenario in the task of generating with multiple facts. We have meticulously constructed a set of trap questions contained with fake names. Based on this scenario, we innovatively propose a novel and robust uncertainty quantification method(RU). A series of experiments have been conducted to verify its effectiveness. The results show that the constructed set of trap questions performs excellently. Moreover, when compared with the baseline methods on four different models, our proposed method has demonstrated great performance, with an average increase of 0.1-0.2 in ROCAUC values compared to the best performing baseline method, providing new sights and methods for addressing the hallucination issue of LLMs.

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### Intelligent Traffic Surveillance for Real-Time Vehicle Detection, License Plate Recognition, and Speed Estimation

Authors: Bruce Mugizi, Sudi Murindanyi, Olivia Nakacwa, Andrew Katumba
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00344v1

Speeding is a major contributor to road fatalities, particularly in developing countries such as Uganda, where road safety infrastructure is limited. This study proposes a real-time intelligent traffic surveillance system tailored to such regions, using computer vision techniques to address vehicle detection, license plate recognition, and speed estimation. The study collected a rich dataset using a speed gun, a Canon Camera, and a mobile phone to train the models. License plate detection using YOLOv8 achieved a mean average precision (mAP) of 97.9%. For character recognition of the detected license plate, the CNN model got a character error rate (CER) of 3.85%, while the transformer model significantly reduced the CER to 1.79%. Speed estimation used source and target regions of interest, yielding a good performance of 10 km/h margin of error. Additionally, a database was established to correlate user information with vehicle detection data, enabling automated ticket issuance via SMS via Africa's Talking API. This system addresses critical traffic management needs in resource-constrained environments and shows potential to reduce road accidents through automated traffic enforcement in developing countries where such interventions are urgently needed.

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### Solving nonlinear subsonic compressible flow in infinite domain via multi-stage neural networks

Authors: Xuehui Qian, Hongkai Tao, Yongji Wang
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: physics.flu-dyn, cs.LG, physics.comp-ph
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00342v1

In aerodynamics, accurately modeling subsonic compressible flow over airfoils is critical for aircraft design. However, solving the governing nonlinear perturbation velocity potential equation presents computational challenges. Traditional approaches often rely on linearized equations or finite, truncated domains, which introduce non-negligible errors and limit applicability in real-world scenarios. In this study, we propose a novel framework utilizing Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) to solve the full nonlinear compressible potential equation in an unbounded (infinite) domain. We address the unbounded-domain and convergence challenges inherent in standard PINNs by incorporating a coordinate transformation and embedding physical asymptotic constraints directly into the network architecture. Furthermore, we employ a Multi-Stage PINN (MS-PINN) approach to iteratively minimize residuals, achieving solution accuracy approaching machine precision. We validate this framework by simulating flow over circular and elliptical geometries, comparing our results against traditional finite-domain and linearized solutions. Our findings quantify the noticeable discrepancies introduced by domain truncation and linearization, particularly at higher Mach numbers, and demonstrate that this new framework is a robust, high-fidelity tool for computational fluid dynamics.

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### Bio-inspired Agentic Self-healing Framework for Resilient Distributed Computing Continuum Systems

Authors: Alaa Saleh, Praveen Kumar Donta, Roberto Morabito, Sasu Tarkoma, Anders Lindgren, Qiyang Zhang, Schahram Dustdar, Susanna Pirttikangas, Lauri Lovén
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.AI, cs.DC, cs.ET, cs.MA, cs.NE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00339v1

Human biological systems sustain life through extraordinary resilience, continually detecting damage, orchestrating targeted responses, and restoring function through self-healing. Inspired by these capabilities, this paper introduces ReCiSt, a bio-inspired agentic self-healing framework designed to achieve resilience in Distributed Computing Continuum Systems (DCCS). Modern DCCS integrate heterogeneous computing resources, ranging from resource-constrained IoT devices to high-performance cloud infrastructures, and their inherent complexity, mobility, and dynamic operating conditions expose them to frequent faults that disrupt service continuity. These challenges underscore the need for scalable, adaptive, and self-regulated resilience strategies. ReCiSt reconstructs the biological phases of Hemostasis, Inflammation, Proliferation, and Remodeling into the computational layers Containment, Diagnosis, Meta-Cognitive, and Knowledge for DCCS. These four layers perform autonomous fault isolation, causal diagnosis, adaptive recovery, and long-term knowledge consolidation through Language Model (LM)-powered agents. These agents interpret heterogeneous logs, infer root causes, refine reasoning pathways, and reconfigure resources with minimal human intervention. The proposed ReCiSt framework is evaluated on public fault datasets using multiple LMs, and no baseline comparison is included due to the scarcity of similar approaches. Nevertheless, our results, evaluated under different LMs, confirm ReCiSt's self-healing capabilities within tens of seconds with minimum of 10% of agent CPU usage. Our results also demonstrated depth of analysis to over come uncertainties and amount of micro-agents invoked to achieve resilience.

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### Smart Fault Detection in Nanosatellite Electrical Power System

Authors: Alireza Rezaee, Niloofar Nobahari, Amin Asgarifar, Farshid Hajati
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00335v1

This paper presents a new detection method of faults at Nanosatellites' electrical power without an Attitude Determination Control Subsystem (ADCS) at the LEO orbit. Each part of this system is at risk of fault due to pressure tolerance, launcher pressure, and environmental circumstances. Common faults are line to line fault and open circuit for the photovoltaic subsystem, short circuit and open circuit IGBT at DC to DC converter, and regulator fault of the ground battery. The system is simulated without fault based on a neural network using solar radiation and solar panel's surface temperature as input data and current and load as outputs. Finally, using the neural network classifier, different faults are diagnosed by pattern and type of fault. For fault classification, other machine learning methods are also used, such as PCA classification, decision tree, and KNN.

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### Sparse Probabilistic Coalition Structure Generation: Bayesian Greedy Pursuit and $\ell_1$ Relaxations

Authors: Angshul Majumdar
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.GT, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00329v1

We study coalition structure generation (CSG) when coalition values are not given but must be learned from episodic observations. We model each episode as a sparse linear regression problem, where the realised payoff \(Y_t\) is a noisy linear combination of a small number of coalition contributions. This yields a probabilistic CSG framework in which the planner first estimates a sparse value function from \(T\) episodes, then runs a CSG solver on the inferred coalition set. We analyse two estimation schemes. The first, Bayesian Greedy Coalition Pursuit (BGCP), is a greedy procedure that mimics orthogonal matching pursuit. Under a coherence condition and a minimum signal assumption, BGCP recovers the true set of profitable coalitions with high probability once \(T \gtrsim K \log m\), and hence yields welfare-optimal structures. The second scheme uses an \(\ell_1\)-penalised estimator; under a restricted eigenvalue condition, we derive \(\ell_1\) and prediction error bounds and translate them into welfare gap guarantees. We compare both methods to probabilistic baselines and identify regimes where sparse probabilistic CSG is superior, as well as dense regimes where classical least-squares approaches are competitive.

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### Joint Geometry-Appearance Human Reconstruction in a Unified Latent Space via Bridge Diffusion

Authors: Yingzhi Tang, Qijian Zhang, Junhui Hou
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00328v1

Achieving consistent and high-fidelity geometry and appearance reconstruction of 3D digital humans from a single RGB image is inherently a challenging task. Existing studies typically resort to decoupled pipelines for geometry estimation and appearance synthesis, often hindering unified reconstruction and causing inconsistencies. This paper introduces \textbf{JGA-LBD}, a novel framework that unifies the modeling of geometry and appearance into a joint latent representation and formulates the generation process as bridge diffusion. Observing that directly integrating heterogeneous input conditions (e.g., depth maps, SMPL models) leads to substantial training difficulties, we unify all conditions into the 3D Gaussian representations, which can be further compressed into a unified latent space through a shared sparse variational autoencoder (VAE). Subsequently, the specialized form of bridge diffusion enables to start with a partial observation of the target latent code and solely focuses on inferring the missing components. Finally, a dedicated decoding module extracts the complete 3D human geometric structure and renders novel views from the inferred latent representation. Experiments demonstrate that JGA-LBD outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches in terms of both geometry fidelity and appearance quality, including challenging in-the-wild scenarios. Our code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/haiantyz/JGA-LBD.

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### HarmoniAD: Harmonizing Local Structures and Global Semantics for Anomaly Detection

Authors: Naiqi Zhang, Chuancheng Shi, Jingtong Dou, Wenhua Wu, Fei Shen, Jianhua Cao
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00327v1

Anomaly detection is crucial in industrial product quality inspection. Failing to detect tiny defects often leads to serious consequences. Existing methods face a structure-semantics trade-off: structure-oriented models (such as frequency-based filters) are noise-sensitive, while semantics-oriented models (such as CLIP-based encoders) often miss fine details. To address this, we propose HarmoniAD, a frequency-guided dual-branch framework. Features are first extracted by the CLIP image encoder, then transformed into the frequency domain, and finally decoupled into high- and low-frequency paths for complementary modeling of structure and semantics. The high-frequency branch is equipped with a fine-grained structural attention module (FSAM) to enhance textures and edges for detecting small anomalies, while the low-frequency branch uses a global structural context module (GSCM) to capture long-range dependencies and preserve semantic consistency. Together, these branches balance fine detail and global semantics. HarmoniAD further adopts a multi-class joint training strategy, and experiments on MVTec-AD, VisA, and BTAD show state-of-the-art performance with both sensitivity and robustness.

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### Multiagent Reinforcement Learning for Liquidity Games

Authors: Alicia Vidler, Gal A. Kaminka
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00324v1

Making use of swarm methods in financial market modeling of liquidity, and techniques from financial analysis in swarm analysis, holds the potential to advance both research areas. In swarm research, the use of game theory methods holds the promise of explaining observed phenomena of collective utility adherence with rational self-interested swarm participants. In financial markets, a better understanding of how independent financial agents may self-organize for the betterment and stability of the marketplace would be a boon for market design researchers. This paper unifies Liquidity Games, where trader payoffs depend on aggregate liquidity within a trade, with Rational Swarms, where decentralized agents use difference rewards to align self-interested learning with global objectives. We offer a theoretical frameworks where we define a swarm of traders whose collective objective is market liquidity provision while maintaining agent independence. Using difference rewards within a Markov team games framework, we show that individual liquidity-maximizing behaviors contribute to overall market liquidity without requiring coordination or collusion. This Financial Swarm model provides a framework for modeling rational, independent agents where they achieve both individual profitability and collective market efficiency in bilateral asset markets.

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### Depth-Synergized Mamba Meets Memory Experts for All-Day Image Reflection Separation

Authors: Siyan Fang, Long Peng, Yuntao Wang, Ruonan Wei, Yuehuan Wang
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00322v1

Image reflection separation aims to disentangle the transmission layer and the reflection layer from a blended image. Existing methods rely on limited information from a single image, tending to confuse the two layers when their contrasts are similar, a challenge more severe at night. To address this issue, we propose the Depth-Memory Decoupling Network (DMDNet). It employs the Depth-Aware Scanning (DAScan) to guide Mamba toward salient structures, promoting information flow along semantic coherence to construct stable states. Working in synergy with DAScan, the Depth-Synergized State-Space Model (DS-SSM) modulates the sensitivity of state activations by depth, suppressing the spread of ambiguous features that interfere with layer disentanglement. Furthermore, we introduce the Memory Expert Compensation Module (MECM), leveraging cross-image historical knowledge to guide experts in providing layer-specific compensation. To address the lack of datasets for nighttime reflection separation, we construct the Nighttime Image Reflection Separation (NightIRS) dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DMDNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both daytime and nighttime.

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### Quantum King-Ring Domination in Chess: A QAOA Approach

Authors: Gerhard Stenzel, Michael Kölle, Tobias Rohe, Julian Hager, Leo Sünkel, Maximilian Zorn, Claudia Linnhoff-Popien
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.LG, quant-ph
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00318v1

The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) is extensively benchmarked on synthetic random instances such as MaxCut, TSP, and SAT problems, but these lack semantic structure and human interpretability, offering limited insight into performance on real-world problems with meaningful constraints. We introduce Quantum King-Ring Domination (QKRD), a NISQ-scale benchmark derived from chess tactical positions that provides 5,000 structured instances with one-hot constraints, spatial locality, and 10--40 qubit scale. The benchmark pairs human-interpretable coverage metrics with intrinsic validation against classical heuristics, enabling algorithmic conclusions without external oracles. Using QKRD, we systematically evaluate QAOA design choices and find that constraint-preserving mixers (XY, domain-wall) converge approximately 13 steps faster than standard mixers (p<10^{-7}, d\approx0.5) while eliminating penalty tuning, warm-start strategies reduce convergence by 45 steps (p<10^{-127}, d=3.35) with energy improvements exceeding d=8, and Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) optimization yields an informative negative result with worse energy (p<10^{-40}, d=1.21) and no coverage benefit. Intrinsic validation shows QAOA outperforms greedy heuristics by 12.6\% and random selection by 80.1\%. Our results demonstrate that structured benchmarks reveal advantages of problem-informed QAOA techniques obscured in random instances. We release all code, data, and experimental artifacts for reproducible NISQ algorithm research.

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### ReMA: A Training-Free Plug-and-Play Mixing Augmentation for Video Behavior Recognition

Authors: Feng-Qi Cui, Jinyang Huang, Sirui Zhao, Jinglong Guo, Qifan Cai, Xin Yan, Zhi Liu
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00311v1

Video behavior recognition demands stable and discriminative representations under complex spatiotemporal variations. However, prevailing data augmentation strategies for videos remain largely perturbation-driven, often introducing uncontrolled variations that amplify non-discriminative factors, which finally weaken intra-class distributional structure and representation drift with inconsistent gains across temporal scales. To address these problems, we propose Representation-aware Mixing Augmentation (ReMA), a plug-and-play augmentation strategy that formulates mixing as a controlled replacement process to expand representations while preserving class-conditional stability. ReMA integrates two complementary mechanisms. Firstly, the Representation Alignment Mechanism (RAM) performs structured intra-class mixing under distributional alignment constraints, suppressing irrelevant intra-class drift while enhancing statistical reliability. Then, the Dynamic Selection Mechanism (DSM) generates motion-aware spatiotemporal masks to localize perturbations, guiding them away from discrimination-sensitive regions and promoting temporal coherence. By jointly controlling how and where mixing is applied, ReMA improves representation robustness without additional supervision or trainable parameters. Extensive experiments on diverse video behavior benchmarks demonstrate that ReMA consistently enhances generalization and robustness across different spatiotemporal granularities.

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### Can Optimal Transport Improve Federated Inverse Reinforcement Learning?

Authors: David Millard, Ali Baheri
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.LG, eess.SY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00309v1

In robotics and multi-agent systems, fleets of autonomous agents often operate in subtly different environments while pursuing a common high-level objective. Directly pooling their data to learn a shared reward function is typically impractical due to differences in dynamics, privacy constraints, and limited communication bandwidth. This paper introduces an optimal transport-based approach to federated inverse reinforcement learning (IRL). Each client first performs lightweight Maximum Entropy IRL locally, adhering to its computational and privacy limitations. The resulting reward functions are then fused via a Wasserstein barycenter, which considers their underlying geometric structure. We further prove that this barycentric fusion yields a more faithful global reward estimate than conventional parameter averaging methods in federated learning. Overall, this work provides a principled and communication-efficient framework for deriving a shared reward that generalizes across heterogeneous agents and environments.

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### VisNet: Efficient Person Re-Identification via Alpha-Divergence Loss, Feature Fusion and Dynamic Multi-Task Learning

Authors: Anns Ijaz, Muhammad Azeem Javed
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00307v1

Person re-identification (ReID) is an extremely important area in both surveillance and mobile applications, requiring strong accuracy with minimal computational cost. State-of-the-art methods give good accuracy but with high computational budgets. To remedy this, this paper proposes VisNet, a computationally efficient and effective re-identification model suitable for real-world scenarios. It is the culmination of conceptual contributions, including feature fusion at multiple scales with automatic attention on each, semantic clustering with anatomical body partitioning, a dynamic weight averaging technique to balance classification semantic regularization, and the use of loss function FIDI for improved metric learning tasks. The multiple scales fuse ResNet50's stages 1 through 4 without the use of parallel paths, with semantic clustering introducing spatial constraints through the use of rule-based pseudo-labeling. VisNet achieves 87.05% Rank-1 and 77.65% mAP on the Market-1501 dataset, having 32.41M parameters and 4.601 GFLOPs, hence, proposing a practical approach for real-time deployment in surveillance and mobile applications where computational resources are limited.

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### The Generative AI Paradox: GenAI and the Erosion of Trust, the Corrosion of Information Verification, and the Demise of Truth

Authors: Emilio Ferrara
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI, cs.HC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00306v1

Generative AI (GenAI) now produces text, images, audio, and video that can be perceptually convincing at scale and at negligible marginal cost. While public debate often frames the associated harms as "deepfakes" or incremental extensions of misinformation and fraud, this view misses a broader socio-technical shift: GenAI enables synthetic realities; coherent, interactive, and potentially personalized information environments in which content, identity, and social interaction are jointly manufactured and mutually reinforcing. We argue that the most consequential risk is not merely the production of isolated synthetic artifacts, but the progressive erosion of shared epistemic ground and institutional verification practices as synthetic content, synthetic identity, and synthetic interaction become easy to generate and hard to audit. This paper (i) formalizes synthetic reality as a layered stack (content, identity, interaction, institutions), (ii) expands a taxonomy of GenAI harms spanning personal, economic, informational, and socio-technical risks, (iii) articulates the qualitative shifts introduced by GenAI (cost collapse, throughput, customization, micro-segmentation, provenance gaps, and trust erosion), and (iv) synthesizes recent risk realizations (2023-2025) into a compact case bank illustrating how these mechanisms manifest in fraud, elections, harassment, documentation, and supply-chain compromise. We then propose a mitigation stack that treats provenance infrastructure, platform governance, institutional workflow redesign, and public resilience as complementary rather than substitutable, and outline a research agenda focused on measuring epistemic security. We conclude with the Generative AI Paradox: as synthetic media becomes ubiquitous, societies may rationally discount digital evidence altogether.

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### DepFlow: Disentangled Speech Generation to Mitigate Semantic Bias in Depression Detection

Authors: Yuxin Li, Xiangyu Zhang, Yifei Li, Zhiwei Guo, Haoyang Zhang, Eng Siong Chng, Cuntai Guan
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00303v1

Speech is a scalable and non-invasive biomarker for early mental health screening. However, widely used depression datasets like DAIC-WOZ exhibit strong coupling between linguistic sentiment and diagnostic labels, encouraging models to learn semantic shortcuts. As a result, model robustness may be compromised in real-world scenarios, such as Camouflaged Depression, where individuals maintain socially positive or neutral language despite underlying depressive states. To mitigate this semantic bias, we propose DepFlow, a three-stage depression-conditioned text-to-speech framework. First, a Depression Acoustic Encoder learns speaker- and content-invariant depression embeddings through adversarial training, achieving effective disentanglement while preserving depression discriminability (ROC-AUC: 0.693). Second, a flow-matching TTS model with FiLM modulation injects these embeddings into synthesis, enabling control over depressive severity while preserving content and speaker identity. Third, a prototype-based severity mapping mechanism provides smooth and interpretable manipulation across the depression continuum. Using DepFlow, we construct a Camouflage Depression-oriented Augmentation (CDoA) dataset that pairs depressed acoustic patterns with positive/neutral content from a sentiment-stratified text bank, creating acoustic-semantic mismatches underrepresented in natural data. Evaluated across three depression detection architectures, CDoA improves macro-F1 by 9%, 12%, and 5%, respectively, consistently outperforming conventional augmentation strategies in depression Detection. Beyond enhancing robustness, DepFlow provides a controllable synthesis platform for conversational systems and simulation-based evaluation, where real clinical data remains limited by ethical and coverage constraints.

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### TimeColor: Flexible Reference Colorization via Temporal Concatenation

Authors: Bryan Constantine Sadihin, Yihao Meng, Michael Hua Wang, Matteo Jiahao Chen, Hang Su
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00296v2

Most colorization models condition only on a single reference, typically the first frame of the scene. However, this approach ignores other sources of conditional data, such as character sheets, background images, or arbitrary colorized frames. We propose TimeColor, a sketch-based video colorization model that supports heterogeneous, variable-count references with the use of explicit per-reference region assignment. TimeColor encodes references as additional latent frames which are concatenated temporally, permitting them to be processed concurrently in each diffusion step while keeping the model's parameter count fixed. TimeColor also uses spatiotemporal correspondence-masked attention to enforce subject -- reference binding in addition to modality-disjoint RoPE indexing. These mechanisms mitigate shortcutting and cross-identity palette leakage. Experiments on Sakuga-42M under both single- and multi-reference protocols show that TimeColor improves color fidelity, identity consistency, and temporal stability over prior baselines. Our project page is available at https://bconstantine.github.io/TimeColor/.

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### ClinicalReTrial: Clinical Trial Redesign with Self-Evolving Agents

Authors: Sixue Xing, Kerui Wu, Xuanye Xia, Haoyu He, Meng Jiang, Jintai Chen, Tianfan Fu
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.AI, cs.MA
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00290v3

Clinical trials constitute a critical yet exceptionally challenging and costly stage of drug development (\$2.6B per drug), where protocols are encoded as complex natural language documents, motivating the use of AI systems beyond manual analysis. Existing AI methods accurately predict trial failure, but do not provide actionable remedies. To fill this gap, this paper proposes ClinicalReTrial, a multi-agent system that formulates clinical trial optimization as an iterative redesign problem on textual protocols. Our method integrates failure diagnosis, safety-aware modifications, and candidate evaluation in a closed-loop, reward-driven optimization framework. Serving the outcome prediction model as a simulation environment, ClinicalReTrial enables low-cost evaluation and dense reward signals for continuous self-improvement. We further propose a hierarchical memory that captures iteration-level feedback within trials and distills transferable redesign patterns across trials. Empirically, ClinicalReTrial turns 56.7% of failed protocols into predicted successes under the simulation environment, with a mean success probability gain of 7.4% at negligible cost (\$0.156 per trial). Extensive retrospective case studies further show that ClinicalReTrial recovers clinically meaningful modification patterns that align with real-world expert-driven protocol changes.

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### Identification and Estimation under Multiple Versions of Treatment: Mixture-of-Experts Approach

Authors: Kohei Yoshikawa, Shuichi Kawano
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: stat.ME, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00287v2

The Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption (SUTVA) includes the condition that there are no multiple versions of treatment in causal inference. Though we could not control the implementation of treatment in observational studies, multiple versions may exist in the treatment. It has been pointed out that ignoring such multiple versions of treatment can lead to biased estimates of causal effects, but a causal inference framework that explicitly deals with the unbiased identification and estimation has not been fully developed yet. Thus, it is difficult to obtain a deeper understanding for mechanisms of the complex treatments. In this paper, we introduce the Mixture-of-Experts framework into causal inference to estimate causal contrasts between underlying versions of a treatment, even when the versions are not observed. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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### Towards Automated Differential Diagnosis of Skin Diseases Using Deep Learning and Imbalance-Aware Strategies

Authors: Ali Anaissi, Ali Braytee, Weidong Huang, Junaid Akram, Alaa Farhat, Jie Hua
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00286v1

As dermatological conditions become increasingly common and the availability of dermatologists remains limited, there is a growing need for intelligent tools to support both patients and clinicians in the timely and accurate diagnosis of skin diseases. In this project, we developed a deep learning based model for the classification and diagnosis of skin conditions. By leveraging pretraining on publicly available skin disease image datasets, our model effectively extracted visual features and accurately classified various dermatological cases. Throughout the project, we refined the model architecture, optimized data preprocessing workflows, and applied targeted data augmentation techniques to improve overall performance. The final model, based on the Swin Transformer, achieved a prediction accuracy of 87.71 percent across eight skin lesion classes on the ISIC2019 dataset. These results demonstrate the model's potential as a diagnostic support tool for clinicians and a self assessment aid for patients.

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### SV-GS: Sparse View 4D Reconstruction with Skeleton-Driven Gaussian Splatting

Authors: Jun-Jee Chao, Volkan Isler
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00285v2

Reconstructing a dynamic target moving over a large area is challenging. Standard approaches for dynamic object reconstruction require dense coverage in both the viewing space and the temporal dimension, typically relying on multi-view videos captured at each time step. However, such setups are only possible in constrained environments. In real-world scenarios, observations are often sparse over time and captured sparsely from diverse viewpoints (e.g., from security cameras), making dynamic reconstruction highly ill-posed. We present SV-GS, a framework that simultaneously estimates a deformation model and the object's motion over time under sparse observations. To initialize SV-GS, we leverage a rough skeleton graph and an initial static reconstruction as inputs to guide motion estimation. (Later, we show that this input requirement can be relaxed.) Our method optimizes a skeleton-driven deformation field composed of a coarse skeleton joint pose estimator and a module for fine-grained deformations. By making only the joint pose estimator time-dependent, our model enables smooth motion interpolation while preserving learned geometric details. Experiments on synthetic datasets show that our method outperforms existing approaches under sparse observations by up to 34% in PSNR, and achieves comparable performance to dense monocular video methods on real-world datasets despite using significantly fewer frames. Moreover, we demonstrate that the input initial static reconstruction can be replaced by a diffusion-based generative prior, making our method more practical for real-world scenarios.

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### Deep learning estimation of the spectral density of functional time series on large domains

Authors: Neda Mohammadi, Soham Sarkar, Piotr Kokoszka
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: stat.ME, math.ST, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00284v1

We derive an estimator of the spectral density of a functional time series that is the output of a multilayer perceptron neural network. The estimator is motivated by difficulties with the computation of existing spectral density estimators for time series of functions defined on very large grids that arise, for example, in climate compute models and medical scans. Existing estimators use autocovariance kernels represented as large $G \times G$ matrices, where $G$ is the number of grid points on which the functions are evaluated. In many recent applications, functions are defined on 2D and 3D domains, and $G$ can be of the order $G \sim 10^5$, making the evaluation of the autocovariance kernels computationally intensive or even impossible. We use the theory of spectral functional principal components to derive our deep learning estimator and prove that it is a universal approximator to the spectral density under general assumptions. Our estimator can be trained without computing the autocovariance kernels and it can be parallelized to provide the estimates much faster than existing approaches. We validate its performance by simulations and an application to fMRI images.

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### Can Large Language Models Still Explain Themselves? Investigating the Impact of Quantization on Self-Explanations

Authors: Qianli Wang, Nils Feldhus, Pepa Atanasova, Fedor Splitt, Simon Ostermann, Sebastian Möller, Vera Schmitt
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00282v3

Quantization is widely used to accelerate inference and streamline the deployment of large language models (LLMs), yet its effects on self-explanations (SEs) remain unexplored. SEs, generated by LLMs to justify their own outputs, require reasoning about the model's own decision-making process, a capability that may exhibit particular sensitivity to quantization. As SEs are increasingly relied upon for transparency in high-stakes applications, understanding whether and to what extent quantization degrades SE quality and faithfulness is critical. To address this gap, we examine two types of SEs: natural language explanations (NLEs) and counterfactual examples, generated by LLMs quantized using three common techniques at distinct bit widths. Our findings indicate that quantization typically leads to moderate declines in both SE quality (up to 4.4%) and faithfulness (up to 3.9%). The user study further demonstrates that quantization considerably diminishes both the coherence and trustworthiness of SEs (by up to 8.5%). Compared to smaller models, larger models show limited resilience to quantization in terms of SE quality but maintain more faithfulness. Moreover, no quantization technique consistently excels across task accuracy, SE quality, and faithfulness. Because quantization's impact varies considerably by context and can be sizable in specific cases, we recommend validating SE quality for the intended use case. Despite these sometimes considerable drops, quantization remains an effective compression technique when its impact on SEs is properly validated.

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### Disentangling Hardness from Noise: An Uncertainty-Driven Model-Agnostic Framework for Long-Tailed Remote Sensing Classification

Authors: Chi Ding, Junxiao Xue, Xinyi Yin, Shi Chen, Yunyun Shi, Yiduo Wang, Fengjian Xue, Xuecheng Wu
Published: 2026-01-01
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00278v1

Long-Tailed distributions are pervasive in remote sensing due to the inherently imbalanced occurrence of grounded objects. However, a critical challenge remains largely overlooked, i.e., disentangling hard tail data samples from noisy ambiguous ones. Conventional methods often indiscriminately emphasize all low-confidence samples, leading to overfitting on noisy data. To bridge this gap, building upon Evidential Deep Learning, we propose a model-agnostic uncertainty-aware framework termed DUAL, which dynamically disentangles prediction uncertainty into Epistemic Uncertainty (EU) and Aleatoric Uncertainty (AU). Specifically, we introduce EU as an indicator of sample scarcity to guide a reweighting strategy for hard-to-learn tail samples, while leveraging AU to quantify data ambiguity, employing an adaptive label smoothing mechanism to suppress the impact of noise. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets across various backbones demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our framework, surpassing strong baselines such as TGN and SADE. Ablation studies provide further insights into the crucial choices of our design.

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