# Research Papers — 2026-01 · bundle page 66 of 189

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### DeMark: A Query-Free Black-Box Attack on Deepfake Watermarking Defenses

Authors: Wei Song, Zhenchang Xing, Liming Zhu, Yulei Sui, Jingling Xue
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16473v1

The rapid proliferation of realistic deepfakes has raised urgent concerns over their misuse, motivating the use of defensive watermarks in synthetic images for reliable detection and provenance tracking. However, this defense paradigm assumes such watermarks are inherently resistant to removal. We challenge this assumption with DeMark, a query-free black-box attack framework that targets defensive image watermarking schemes for deepfakes. DeMark exploits latent-space vulnerabilities in encoder-decoder watermarking models through a compressive sensing based sparsification process, suppressing watermark signals while preserving perceptual and structural realism appropriate for deepfakes. Across eight state-of-the-art watermarking schemes, DeMark reduces watermark detection accuracy from 100% to 32.9% on average while maintaining natural visual quality, outperforming existing attacks. We further evaluate three defense strategies, including image super resolution, sparse watermarking, and adversarial training, and find them largely ineffective. These results demonstrate that current encoder decoder watermarking schemes remain vulnerable to latent-space manipulations, underscoring the need for more robust watermarking methods to safeguard against deepfakes.

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### Order from Chaos: Physical World Understanding from Glitchy Gameplay Videos

Authors: Meng Cao, Haoran Tang, Haoze Zhao, Mingfei Han, Ruyang Liu, Qiang Sun, Xiaojun Chang, Ian Reid, Xiaodan Liang
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16471v2

Understanding the physical world, including object dynamics, material properties, and causal interactions, remains a core challenge in artificial intelligence. Although recent multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive general reasoning capabilities, they still fall short of achieving human-level understanding of physical principles. Existing datasets for physical reasoning either rely on real-world videos, which incur high annotation costs, or on synthetic simulations, which suffer from limited realism and diversity. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm that leverages glitches in gameplay videos, referring to visual anomalies that violate predefined physical laws, as a rich and scalable supervision source for physical world understanding. We introduce PhysGame, an meta information guided instruction-tuning dataset containing 140,057 glitch-centric question-answer pairs across five physical domains and sixteen fine-grained categories. To ensure data accuracy, we design a prompting strategy that utilizes gameplay metadata such as titles and descriptions to guide high-quality QA generation. Complementing PhysGame, we construct GameBench, an expert-annotated benchmark with 880 glitch-identified gameplay videos designed to evaluate physical reasoning capabilities. Extensive experiments show that PhysGame significantly enhances both Game2Real transferability, improving the real world physical reasoning performance of Qwen2.5VL by 2.5% on PhysBench, and Game2General transferability, yielding a 1.9% gain on the MVBench benchmark. Moreover, PhysGame-tuned models achieve a 3.7% absolute improvement on GameBench, demonstrating enhanced robustness in detecting physical implausibilities. These results indicate that learning from gameplay anomalies offers a scalable and effective pathway toward advancing physical world understanding in multimodal intelligence.

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### A Cautionary Tale of Self-Supervised Learning for Imaging Biomarkers: Alzheimer's Disease Case Study

Authors: Maxwell Reynolds, Chaitanya Srinivasan, Vijay Cherupally, Michael Leone, Ke Yu, Li Sun, Tigmanshu Chaudhary, Andreas Pfenning, Kayhan Batmanghelich
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16467v1

Discovery of sensitive and biologically grounded biomarkers is essential for early detection and monitoring of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Structural MRI is widely available but typically relies on hand-crafted features such as cortical thickness or volume. We ask whether self-supervised learning (SSL) can uncover more powerful biomarkers from the same data. Existing SSL methods underperform FreeSurfer-derived features in disease classification, conversion prediction, and amyloid status prediction. We introduce Residual Noise Contrastive Estimation (R-NCE), a new SSL framework that integrates auxiliary FreeSurfer features while maximizing additional augmentation-invariant information. R-NCE outperforms traditional features and existing SSL methods across multiple benchmarks, including AD conversion prediction. To assess biological relevance, we derive Brain Age Gap (BAG) measures and perform genome-wide association studies. R-NCE-BAG shows high heritability and associations with MAPT and IRAG1, with enrichment in astrocytes and oligodendrocytes, indicating sensitivity to neurodegenerative and cerebrovascular processes.

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### Persona Jailbreaking in Large Language Models

Authors: Jivnesh Sandhan, Fei Cheng, Tushar Sandhan, Yugo Murawaki
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16466v1

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in domains such as education, mental health and customer support, where stable and consistent personas are critical for reliability. Yet, existing studies focus on narrative or role-playing tasks and overlook how adversarial conversational history alone can reshape induced personas. Black-box persona manipulation remains unexplored, raising concerns for robustness in realistic interactions. In response, we introduce the task of persona editing, which adversarially steers LLM traits through user-side inputs under a black-box, inference-only setting. To this end, we propose PHISH (Persona Hijacking via Implicit Steering in History), the first framework to expose a new vulnerability in LLM safety that embeds semantically loaded cues into user queries to gradually induce reverse personas. We also define a metric to quantify attack success. Across 3 benchmarks and 8 LLMs, PHISH predictably shifts personas, triggers collateral changes in correlated traits, and exhibits stronger effects in multi-turn settings. In high-risk domains mental health, tutoring, and customer support, PHISH reliably manipulates personas, validated by both human and LLM-as-Judge evaluations. Importantly, PHISH causes only a small reduction in reasoning benchmark performance, leaving overall utility largely intact while still enabling significant persona manipulation. While current guardrails offer partial protection, they remain brittle under sustained attack. Our findings expose new vulnerabilities in personas and highlight the need for context-resilient persona in LLMs. Our codebase and dataset is available at: https://github.com/Jivnesh/PHISH

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### On the Effects of Adversarial Perturbations on Distribution Robustness

Authors: Yipei Wang, Zhaoying Pan, Xiaoqian Wang
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16464v1

Adversarial robustness refers to a model's ability to resist perturbation of inputs, while distribution robustness evaluates the performance of the model under data shifts. Although both aim to ensure reliable performance, prior work has revealed a tradeoff in distribution and adversarial robustness. Specifically, adversarial training might increase reliance on spurious features, which can harm distribution robustness, especially the performance on some underrepresented subgroups. We present a theoretical analysis of adversarial and distribution robustness that provides a tractable surrogate for per-step adversarial training by studying models trained on perturbed data. In addition to the tradeoff, our work further identified a nuanced phenomenon that $\ell_\infty$ perturbations on data with moderate bias can yield an increase in distribution robustness. Moreover, the gain in distribution robustness remains on highly skewed data when simplicity bias induces reliance on the core feature, characterized as greater feature separability. Our theoretical analysis extends the understanding of the tradeoff by highlighting the interplay of the tradeoff and the feature separability. Despite the tradeoff that persists in many cases, overlooking the role of feature separability may lead to misleading conclusions about robustness.

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### Finding What Matters: Anchoring Context Knowledge with Evolving Indices for Iterative Retrieval

Authors: Mingyan Wu, Zhenghao Liu, Xinze Li, Yuqing Lan, Yukun Yan, Shuo Wang, Cheng Yang, Minghe Yu, Zheni Zeng, Maosong Sun
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16462v2

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a dominant paradigm for mitigating hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge. However, existing RAG systems often struggle to effectively integrate and reason over key evidence scattered across noisy retrieved documents, particularly in multi-hop scenarios. In this paper, we propose KAIR, a Knowledge Anchoring framework for Iterative Retrieval that anchors knowledge within retrieved knowledge to guide LLMs to locate the key information. During iterative retrieval, KAIR progressively updates the knowledge index to anchor salient evidence from retrieved documents. The evolving index serves as a navigational anchoring index that enables the LLM to assess knowledge sufficiency and formulate subsequent retrieval queries. Finally, KAIR generates answers by jointly leveraging the retrieved documents and the finalized anchoring index. Experiments on four multi-hop question answering benchmarks demonstrate that KAIR consistently outperforms strong RAG baselines. Further analysis shows that KAIR effectively anchors key knowledge and alleviates the context noise during iterative retrieval, improving the LLM's ability to associate and reason over dispersed evidence across retrieved documents. All code and data are available at https://github.com/NEUIR/KAIR.

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### VISTA-PATH: An interactive foundation model for pathology image segmentation and quantitative analysis in computational pathology

Authors: Peixian Liang, Songhao Li, Shunsuke Koga, Yutong Li, Zahra Alipour, Yucheng Tang, Daguang Xu, Zhi Huang
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16451v1

Accurate semantic segmentation for histopathology image is crucial for quantitative tissue analysis and downstream clinical modeling. Recent segmentation foundation models have improved generalization through large-scale pretraining, yet remain poorly aligned with pathology because they treat segmentation as a static visual prediction task. Here we present VISTA-PATH, an interactive, class-aware pathology segmentation foundation model designed to resolve heterogeneous structures, incorporate expert feedback, and produce pixel-level segmentation that are directly meaningful for clinical interpretation. VISTA-PATH jointly conditions segmentation on visual context, semantic tissue descriptions, and optional expert-provided spatial prompts, enabling precise multi-class segmentation across heterogeneous pathology images. To support this paradigm, we curate VISTA-PATH Data, a large-scale pathology segmentation corpus comprising over 1.6 million image-mask-text triplets spanning 9 organs and 93 tissue classes. Across extensive held-out and external benchmarks, VISTA-PATH consistently outperforms existing segmentation foundation models. Importantly, VISTA-PATH supports dynamic human-in-the-loop refinement by propagating sparse, patch-level bounding-box annotation feedback into whole-slide segmentation. Finally, we show that the high-fidelity, class-aware segmentation produced by VISTA-PATH is a preferred model for computational pathology. It improve tissue microenvironment analysis through proposed Tumor Interaction Score (TIS), which exhibits strong and significant associations with patient survival. Together, these results establish VISTA-PATH as a foundation model that elevates pathology image segmentation from a static prediction to an interactive and clinically grounded representation for digital pathology. Source code and demo can be found at https://github.com/zhihuanglab/VISTA-PATH.

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### On the Expressive Power of Floating-Point Transformers

Authors: Sejun Park, Yeachan Park, Geonho Hwang
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16450v1

The study on the expressive power of transformers shows that transformers are permutation equivariant, and they can approximate all permutation-equivariant continuous functions on a compact domain. However, these results are derived under real parameters and exact operations, while real implementations on computers can only use a finite set of numbers and inexact machine operations with round-off errors. In this work, we investigate the representability of floating-point transformers that use floating-point parameters and floating-point operations. Unlike existing results under exact operations, we first show that floating-point transformers can represent a class of non-permutation-equivariant functions even without positional encoding. Furthermore, we prove that floating-point transformers can represent all permutation-equivariant functions when the sequence length is bounded, but they cannot when the sequence length is large. We also found the minimal equivariance structure in floating-point transformers, and show that all non-trivial additive positional encoding can harm the representability of floating-point transformers.

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### Emotion-LLaMAv2 and MMEVerse: A New Framework and Benchmark for Multimodal Emotion Understanding

Authors: Xiaojiang Peng, Jingyi Chen, Zebang Cheng, Bao Peng, Fengyi Wu, Yifei Dong, Shuyuan Tu, Qiyu Hu, Huiting Huang, Yuxiang Lin, Jun-Yan He, Kai Wang et al.
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16449v2

Understanding human emotions from multimodal signals poses a significant challenge in affective computing and human-robot interaction. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have excelled in general vision-language tasks, their capabilities in emotional reasoning remain limited. The field currently suffers from a scarcity of large-scale datasets with high-quality, descriptive emotion annotations and lacks standardized benchmarks for evaluation. Our preliminary framework, Emotion-LLaMA, pioneered instruction-tuned multimodal learning for emotion reasoning but was restricted by explicit face detectors, implicit fusion strategies, and low-quality training data with limited scale. To address these limitations, we present Emotion-LLaMAv2 and the MMEVerse benchmark, establishing an end-to-end pipeline together with a standardized evaluation setting for emotion recognition and reasoning. Emotion-LLaMAv2 introduces three key advances. First, an end-to-end multiview encoder eliminates external face detection and captures nuanced emotional cues via richer spatial and temporal multiview tokens. Second, a Conv Attention pre-fusion module is designed to enable simultaneous local and global multimodal feature interactions external to the LLM backbone. Third, a perception-to-cognition curriculum instruction tuning scheme within the LLaMA2 backbone unifies emotion recognition and free-form emotion reasoning. To support large-scale training and reproducible evaluation, MMEVerse aggregates twelve publicly available emotion datasets, including IEMOCAP, MELD, DFEW, and MAFW, into a unified multimodal instruction format. The data are re-annotated via a multi-agent pipeline involving Qwen2 Audio, Qwen2.5 VL, and GPT 4o, producing 130k training clips and 36k testing clips across 18 evaluation benchmarks.

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### Mixing Expert Knowledge: Bring Human Thoughts Back To the Game of Go

Authors: Yichuan Ma, Linyang Li, Yongkang Chen, Peiji Li, Jiasheng Ye, Qipeng Guo, Dahua Lin, Kai Chen
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16447v1

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in reasoning tasks such as mathematics and coding, matching or surpassing human capabilities. However, these impressive reasoning abilities face significant challenges in specialized domains. Taking Go as an example, although AlphaGo has established the high performance ceiling of AI systems in Go, mainstream LLMs still struggle to reach even beginner-level proficiency, let alone perform natural language reasoning. This performance gap between general-purpose LLMs and domain experts is significantly limiting the application of LLMs on a wider range of domain-specific tasks. In this work, we aim to bridge the divide between LLMs' general reasoning capabilities and expert knowledge in domain-specific tasks. We perform mixed fine-tuning with structured Go expertise and general long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning data as a cold start, followed by reinforcement learning to integrate expert knowledge in Go with general reasoning capabilities. Through this methodology, we present \textbf{LoGos}, a powerful LLM that not only maintains outstanding general reasoning abilities, but also conducts Go gameplay in natural language, demonstrating effective strategic reasoning and accurate next-move prediction. LoGos achieves performance comparable to human professional players, substantially surpassing all existing LLMs. Through this work, we aim to contribute insights on applying general LLM reasoning capabilities to specialized domains. We will release the first large-scale Go dataset for LLM training, the first LLM Go evaluation benchmark, and the first general LLM that reaches human professional-level performance in Go at: https://github.com/Entarochuan/LoGos.

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### Brownian ReLU(Br-ReLU): A New Activation Function for a Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) Network

Authors: George Awiakye-Marfo, Elijah Agbosu, Victoria Mawuena Barns, Samuel Asante Gyamerah
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.LG, q-fin.CP
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16446v1

Deep learning models are effective for sequential data modeling, yet commonly used activation functions such as ReLU, LeakyReLU, and PReLU often exhibit gradient instability when applied to noisy, non-stationary financial time series. This study introduces BrownianReLU, a stochastic activation function induced by Brownian motion that enhances gradient propagation and learning stability in Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. Using Monte Carlo simulation, BrownianReLU provides a smooth, adaptive response for negative inputs, mitigating the dying ReLU problem. The proposed activation is evaluated on financial time series from Apple, GCB, and the S&P 500, as well as LendingClub loan data for classification. Results show consistently lower Mean Squared Error and higher $R^2$ values, indicating improved predictive accuracy and generalization. Although ROC-AUC metric is limited in classification tasks, activation choice significantly affects the trade-off between accuracy and sensitivity, with Brownian ReLU and the selected activation functions yielding practically meaningful performance.

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### Exploring the Effects of Alignment on Numerical Bias in Large Language Models

Authors: Ayako Sato, Hwichan Kim, Zhousi Chen, Masato Mita, Mamoru Komachi
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16444v2

"LLM-as-a-judge," which utilizes large language models (LLMs) as evaluators, has proven effective in many evaluation tasks. However, evaluator LLMs exhibit numerical bias, a phenomenon where certain evaluation scores are generated disproportionately often, leading reduced evaluation performance. This study investigates the cause of this bias. Given that most evaluator LLMs are aligned through instruction tuning and preference tuning, and that prior research suggests alignment reduces output diversity, we hypothesize that numerical bias arises from alignment. To test this, we compare outputs from pre- and post-alignment LLMs, and observe that alignment indeed increases numerical bias. We also explore mitigation strategies for post-alignment LLMs, including temperature scaling, distribution calibration, and score range adjustment. Among these, score range adjustment is most effective in reducing bias and improving performance, though still heuristic. Our findings highlight the need for further work on optimal score range selection and more robust mitigation strategies.

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### Endless Terminals: Scaling RL Environments for Terminal Agents

Authors: Kanishk Gandhi, Shivam Garg, Noah D. Goodman, Dimitris Papailiopoulos
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16443v3

Environments are the bottleneck for self-improving agents. Current terminal benchmarks were built for evaluation, not training; reinforcement learning requires a scalable pipeline, not just a dataset. We introduce Endless Terminals, a fully autonomous pipeline that procedurally generates terminal-use tasks without human annotation. The pipeline has four stages: generating diverse task descriptions, building and validating containerized environments, producing completion tests, and filtering for solvability. From this pipeline we obtain 3255 tasks spanning file operations, log management, data processing, scripting, and database operations. We train agents using vanilla PPO with binary episode level rewards and a minimal interaction loop: no retrieval, multi-agent coordination, or specialized tools. Despite this simplicity, models trained on Endless Terminals show substantial gains: on our held-out dev set, Llama-3.2-3B improves from 4.0% to 18.2%, Qwen2.5-7B from 10.7% to 53.3%, and Qwen3-8B-openthinker-sft from 42.6% to 59.0%. These improvements transfer to human-curated benchmarks: models trained on Endless Terminals show substantial gains on held out human curated benchmarks: on TerminalBench 2.0, Llama-3.2-3B improves from 0.0% to 2.2%, Qwen2.5-7B from 2.2% to 3.4%, and Qwen3-8B-openthinker-sft from 1.1% to 6.7%, in each case outperforming alternative approaches including models with more complex agentic scaffolds. These results demonstrate that simple RL succeeds when environments scale.

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### Masked Face Recognition under Different Backbones

Authors: Bo Zhang, Ming Zhang, Kun Wu, Lei Bian, Yi Lin
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16440v1

Erratum to the paper (Zhang et al., 2025): corrections to Table IV and the data in Page 3, Section A. In the post-pandemic era, a high proportion of civil aviation passengers wear masks during security checks, posing significant challenges to traditional face recognition models. The backbone network serves as the core component of face recognition models. In standard tests, r100 series models excelled (98%+ accuracy at 0.01% FAR in face comparison, high top1/top5 in search). r50 ranked second, r34_mask_v1 lagged. In masked tests, r100_mask_v2 led (90.07% accuracy), r50_mask_v3 performed best among r50 but trailed r100. Vit-Small/Tiny showed strong masked performance with gains in effectiveness. Through extensive comparative experiments, this paper conducts a comprehensive evaluation of several core backbone networks, aiming to reveal the impacts of different models on face recognition with and without masks, and provide specific deployment recommendations.

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### MDAFNet: Multiscale Differential Edge and Adaptive Frequency Guided Network for Infrared Small Target Detection

Authors: Shuying Li, Qiang Ma, San Zhang, Wuwei Wang, Chuang Yang
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16434v2

Infrared small target detection (IRSTD) plays a crucial role in numerous military and civilian applications. However, existing methods often face the gradual degradation of target edge pixels as the number of network layers increases, and traditional convolution struggles to differentiate between frequency components during feature extraction, leading to low-frequency backgrounds interfering with high-frequency targets and high-frequency noise triggering false detections. To address these limitations, we propose MDAFNet (Multi-scale Differential Edge and Adaptive Frequency Guided Network for Infrared Small Target Detection), which integrates the Multi-Scale Differential Edge (MSDE) module and Dual-Domain Adaptive Feature Enhancement (DAFE) module. The MSDE module, through a multi-scale edge extraction and enhancement mechanism, effectively compensates for the cumulative loss of target edge information during downsampling. The DAFE module combines frequency domain processing mechanisms with simulated frequency decomposition and fusion mechanisms in the spatial domain to effectively improve the network's capability to adaptively enhance high-frequency targets and selectively suppress high-frequency noise. Experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate the superior detection performance of MDAFNet.

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### AlphaFace: High Fidelity and Real-time Face Swapper Robust to Facial Pose

Authors: Jongmin Yu, Hyeontaek Oh, Zhongtian Sun, Angelica I Aviles-Rivero, Moongu Jeon, Jinhong Yang
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16429v1

Existing face-swapping methods often deliver competitive results in constrained settings but exhibit substantial quality degradation when handling extreme facial poses. To improve facial pose robustness, explicit geometric features are applied, but this approach remains problematic since it introduces additional dependencies and increases computational cost. Diffusion-based methods have achieved remarkable results; however, they are impractical for real-time processing. We introduce AlphaFace, which leverages an open-source vision-language model and CLIP image and text embeddings to apply novel visual and textual semantic contrastive losses. AlphaFace enables stronger identity representation and more precise attribute preservation, all while maintaining real-time performance. Comprehensive experiments across FF++, MPIE, and LPFF demonstrate that AlphaFace surpasses state-of-the-art methods in pose-challenging cases. The project is publicly available on `https://github.com/andrewyu90/Alphaface_Official.git'.

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### DCCS-Det: Directional Context and Cross-Scale-Aware Detector for Infrared Small Target

Authors: Shuying Li, Qiang Ma, San Zhang, Chuang Yang
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16428v1

Infrared small target detection (IRSTD) is critical for applications like remote sensing and surveillance, which aims to identify small, low-contrast targets against complex backgrounds. However, existing methods often struggle with inadequate joint modeling of local-global features (harming target-background discrimination) or feature redundancy and semantic dilution (degrading target representation quality). To tackle these issues, we propose DCCS-Det (Directional Context and Cross-Scale Aware Detector for Infrared Small Target), a novel detector that incorporates a Dual-stream Saliency Enhancement (DSE) block and a Latent-aware Semantic Extraction and Aggregation (LaSEA) module. The DSE block integrates localized perception with direction-aware context aggregation to help capture long-range spatial dependencies and local details. On this basis, the LaSEA module mitigates feature degradation via cross-scale feature extraction and random pooling sampling strategies, enhancing discriminative features and suppressing noise. Extensive experiments show that DCCS-Det achieves state-of-the-art detection accuracy with competitive efficiency across multiple datasets. Ablation studies further validate the contributions of DSE and LaSEA in improving target perception and feature representation under complex scenarios. \href{https://huggingface.co/InPeerReview/InfraredSmallTargetDetection-IRSTD.DCCS}{DCCS-Det Official Code is Available Here!}

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### Exact Recovery by Neighborhood Smoothing in Directed Stochastic Block Models

Authors: Behzad Aalipur, Yichen Qin
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, stat.AP, stat.ME
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16427v3

We study exact community recovery in sparse directed stochastic block models using neighborhood smoothing of connection-probability profiles. The proposed method clusters vertices according to their estimated outgoing connection-probability profiles. For each vertex, its complete outgoing profile is estimated by averaging the adjacency rows of empirically similar vertices, after which \(K\)-means is applied to the estimated profiles. An analogous procedure based on incoming connection-probability profiles is obtained by applying the same construction to the transposed adjacency matrix. We establish a finite-sample uniform row-wise error bound for the asymmetric smoothed estimator and derive consistency in the normalized two-to-infinity norm. We then show that exact recovery follows when the minimum separation between distinct population profiles dominates the row-wise estimation error. The result permits a vanishing sparsity factor, a general asymmetric block-probability matrix, and a number of communities that may diverge with the network size. We are unaware of a previous exact-recovery theorem that simultaneously covers these features for a directed stochastic block model. Numerical studies and an application to a directed neuronal connectome illustrate the practical behavior and limitations of the profile-based clustering approach.

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### Safe Multitask Molecular Graph Networks for Vapor Pressure and Odor Threshold Prediction

Authors: Shuang Wu, Meijie Wang, Lun Yu
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16426v1

We investigate two important tasks in odor-related property modeling: Vapor Pressure (VP) and Odor Threshold (OP). To evaluate the model's out-of-distribution (OOD) capability, we adopt the Bemis-Murcko scaffold split. In terms of features, we introduce the rich A20/E17 molecular graph features (20-dimensional atom features + 17-dimensional bond features) and systematically compare GINE and PNA backbones. The results show: for VP, PNA with a simple regression head achieves Val MSE $\approx$ 0.21 (normalized space); for the OP single task under the same scaffold split, using A20/E17 with robust training (Huber/winsor) achieves Val MSE $\approx$ 0.60-0.61. For multitask training, we propose a **"safe multitask"** approach: VP as the primary task and OP as the auxiliary task, using delayed activation + gradient clipping + small weight, which avoids harming the primary task and simultaneously yields the best VP generalization performance. This paper provides complete reproducible experiments, ablation studies, and error-similarity analysis while discussing the impact of data noise and method limitations.

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### Bayesian Experimental Design for Model Discrepancy Calibration: A Rivalry between Kullback--Leibler Divergence and Wasserstein Distance

Authors: Huchen Yang, Xinghao Dong, Jin-Long Wu
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16425v2

Designing experiments that systematically gather data from complex physical systems is central to accelerating scientific discovery. While Bayesian experimental design (BED) provides a principled, information-based framework that integrates experimental planning with probabilistic inference, the selection of utility functions in BED is a long-standing and active topic, where different criteria emphasize different notions of information. Although Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence has been one of the most common choices, recent studies have proposed Wasserstein distance as an alternative. In this work, we first employ a toy example to illustrate an issue of Wasserstein distance - the value of Wasserstein distance of a fixed-shape posterior depends on the relative position of its main mass within the support and can exhibit false rewards unrelated to information gain, especially with a non-informative prior (e.g., uniform distribution). We then further provide a systematic comparison between these two criteria through a classical source inversion problem in the BED literature, revealing that the KL divergence tends to lead to faster convergence in the absence of model discrepancy, while Wasserstein metrics provide more robust sequential BED results if model discrepancy is non-negligible. These findings clarify the trade-offs between KL divergence and Wasserstein metrics for the utility function and provide guidelines for selecting suitable criteria in practical BED applications.

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### RENEW: Risk- and Energy-Aware Navigation in Dynamic Waterways

Authors: Mingi Jeong, Alberto Quattrini Li
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16424v1

We present RENEW, a global path planner for Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV) in dynamic environments with external disturbances (e.g., water currents). RENEW introduces a unified risk- and energy-aware strategy that ensures safety by dynamically identifying non-navigable regions and enforcing adaptive safety constraints. Inspired by maritime contingency planning, it employs a best-effort strategy to maintain control under adverse conditions. The hierarchical architecture combines high-level constrained triangulation for topological diversity with low-level trajectory optimization within safe corridors. Validated with real-world ocean data, RENEW is the first framework to jointly address adaptive non-navigability and topological path diversity for robust maritime navigation.

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### Learning Domain Knowledge in Multimodal Large Language Models through Reinforcement Fine-Tuning

Authors: Qinglong Cao, Yuntian Chen, Chao Ma, Xiaokang Yang
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.CL, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16419v2

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in multimodal perception and understanding tasks. However, their effectiveness in specialized domains, such as remote sensing and medical imaging, remains limited. A natural approach to domain adaptation is to inject domain knowledge through textual instructions, prompts, or auxiliary captions. Surprisingly, we find that such input-level domain knowledge injection yields little to no improvement on scientific multimodal tasks, even when the domain knowledge is explicitly provided. This observation suggests that current MLLMs fail to internalize domain-specific priors through language alone, and that domain knowledge must be integrated at the optimization level. Motivated by this insight, we propose a reinforcement fine-tuning framework that incorporates domain knowledge directly into the learning objective. Instead of treating domain knowledge as descriptive information, we encode it as domain-informed constraints and reward signals, shaping the model's behavior in the output space. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets in remote sensing and medical domains consistently demonstrate good performance gains, achieving state-of-the-art results on multimodal domain tasks. Our results highlight the necessity of optimization-level domain knowledge integration and reveal a fundamental limitation of textual domain conditioning in current MLLMs.

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### PyHealth 2.0: A Comprehensive Open-Source Toolkit for Accessible and Reproducible Clinical Deep Learning

Authors: John Wu, Yongda Fan, Zhenbang Wu, Paul Landes, Eric Schrock, Sayeed Sajjad Razin, Arjun Chatterjee, Naveen Baskaran, Joshua Steier, Andrea Fitzpatrick, Bilal Arif, Rian Atri et al.
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16414v2

Difficulty replicating baselines, high computational costs, and required domain expertise create persistent barriers to clinical AI research. To address these challenges, we introduce PyHealth 2.0, an enhanced clinical deep learning toolkit that enables predictive modeling in as few as 7 lines of code. PyHealth 2.0 offers three key contributions: (1) a comprehensive toolkit addressing reproducibility and compatibility challenges by unifying 15+ datasets, 20+ clinical tasks, 25+ models, 5+ interpretability methods, and uncertainty quantification including conformal prediction within a single framework that supports diverse clinical data modalities - signals, imaging, and electronic health records - with translation of 5+ medical coding standards; (2) accessibility-focused design accommodating multimodal data and diverse computational resources with up to 39x faster processing and 20x lower memory usage, enabling work from 16GB laptops to production systems; and (3) an active open-source community of 400+ members lowering domain expertise barriers through extensive documentation, reproducible research contributions, and collaborations with academic health systems and industry partners, including multi-language support via RHealth. PyHealth 2.0 establishes an open-source foundation and community advancing accessible, reproducible healthcare AI. Available at pip install pyhealth.

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### A Cosine Network for Image Super-Resolution

Authors: Chunwei Tian, Chengyuan Zhang, Bob Zhang, Zhiwu Li, C. L. Philip Chen, David Zhang
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16413v1

Deep convolutional neural networks can use hierarchical information to progressively extract structural information to recover high-quality images. However, preserving the effectiveness of the obtained structural information is important in image super-resolution. In this paper, we propose a cosine network for image super-resolution (CSRNet) by improving a network architecture and optimizing the training strategy. To extract complementary homologous structural information, odd and even heterogeneous blocks are designed to enlarge the architectural differences and improve the performance of image super-resolution. Combining linear and non-linear structural information can overcome the drawback of homologous information and enhance the robustness of the obtained structural information in image super-resolution. Taking into account the local minimum of gradient descent, a cosine annealing mechanism is used to optimize the training procedure by performing warm restarts and adjusting the learning rate. Experimental results illustrate that the proposed CSRNet is competitive with state-of-the-art methods in image super-resolution.

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### Tight Regret Bounds for Bilateral Trade under Semi Feedback

Authors: Yaonan Jin
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.GT, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16412v1

The study of \textit{regret minimization in fixed-price bilateral trade} has received considerable attention in recent research. Previous works (CCC+24a, CCC+24b, AFF24, BCCF24, CJLZ25, LCM25a, GDFS25) have acquired a thorough understanding of the problem, except for determining the tight regret bound for GBB semi-feedback fixed-price mechanisms under adversarial values. In this paper, we resolve this open question by devising an $\widetilde{O}(T^{2 / 3})$-regret mechanism, matching the $Ω(T^{2 / 3})$ lower bound from (CJLZ25) up to polylogarithmic factors.

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### A Refinement of Vapnik--Chervonenkis' Theorem

Authors: A. Iosevich, A. Vagharshakyan, E. Wyman
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.LG, math.CA, math.PR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16411v1

Vapnik--Chervonenkis' theorem is a seminal result in machine learning. It establishes sufficient conditions for empirical probabilities to converge to theoretical probabilities, uniformly over families of events. It also provides an estimate for the rate of such uniform convergence. We revisit the probabilistic component of the classical argument. Instead of applying Hoeffding's inequality at the final step, we use a normal approximation with explicit Berry--Esseen error control. This yields a moderate-deviation sharpening of the usual VC estimate, with an additional factor of order $(\varepsilon\sqrt{n})^{-1}$ in the leading exponential term when $\varepsilon\sqrt{n}$ is large.

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### Jacobian Scopes: token-level causal attributions in LLMs

Authors: Toni J. B. Liu, Baran Zadeoğlu, Nicolas Boullé, Raphaël Sarfati, Gurbir Arora, Christopher J. Earls
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16407v4

Large language models (LLMs) make next-token predictions based on clues present in their context, such as semantic descriptions and in-context examples. Yet, elucidating which prior tokens most strongly influence a given prediction remains challenging due to the proliferation of layers and attention heads in modern architectures. We propose Jacobian Scopes, a suite of gradient-based, token-level causal attribution methods for interpreting LLM predictions. Grounded in perturbation theory and information geometry, Jacobian Scopes quantify how input tokens influence various aspects of a model's prediction, such as specific logits, the full predictive distribution, and model uncertainty (effective temperature). Through case studies spanning instruction understanding, translation, and in-context learning (ICL), we demonstrate how Jacobian Scopes reveal implicit political biases, uncover word- and phrase-level translation strategies, and shed light on recently debated mechanisms underlying in-context time-series forecasting. To facilitate exploration of Jacobian Scopes on custom text, we open-source our implementations and provide a cloud-hosted interactive demo at https://huggingface.co/spaces/Typony/JacobianScopes.

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### Reasoning-Enhanced Rare-Event Prediction with Balanced Outcome Correction

Authors: Vitaly Bulgakov, Alexander Turchin
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16406v2

Rare-event prediction is critical in domains such as healthcare, finance, reliability engineering, customer support, aviation safety, where positive outcomes are infrequent yet potentially catastrophic. Extreme class imbalance biases conventional models toward majority-class predictions, limiting recall, calibration, and operational usefulness. We propose LPCORP (Low-Prevalence CORrector for Prediction)*, a two-stage framework that combines reasoning-enhanced prediction with confidence-based outcome correction. A reasoning model first produces enriched predictions from narrative inputs, after which a lightweight classifier evaluates and selectively corrects these outputs to mitigate prevalence-driven bias. In this study we used Logistic-Regression (LR) and a simple Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) classifiers for this purpose. We evaluate LPCORP on real-world datasets from medical and consumer service domains. The results show that this method transforms the original rare-event prediction problem into a more balanced supervised correction task without discarding or resampling observations. Test-set evaluation demonstrates substantially improved performance, particularly in precision, which is a known weakness in low-prevalence data. We further provide a cost-reduction analysis comparing the expenses associated with rare-event damage control without preventive measures to those incurred when low-cost, prediction-based preventive interventions are applied that showed up to 40+% reduction in some cases.

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### Reinforcement Learning-Based Energy-Aware Coverage Path Planning for Precision Agriculture

Authors: Beining Wu, Zihao Ding, Leo Ostigaard, Jun Huang
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16405v1

Coverage Path Planning (CPP) is a fundamental capability for agricultural robots; however, existing solutions often overlook energy constraints, resulting in incomplete operations in large-scale or resource-limited environments. This paper proposes an energy-aware CPP framework grounded in Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) reinforcement learning, designed for grid-based environments with obstacles and charging stations. To enable robust and adaptive decision-making under energy limitations, the framework integrates Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for spatial feature extraction and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks for temporal dynamics. A dedicated reward function is designed to jointly optimize coverage efficiency, energy consumption, and return-to-base constraints. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently achieves over 90% coverage while ensuring energy safety, outperforming traditional heuristic algorithms such as Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) baselines by 13.4-19.5% in coverage and reducing constraint violations by 59.9-88.3%. These findings validate the proposed SAC-based framework as an effective and scalable solution for energy-constrained CPP in agricultural robotics.

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### Towards a Theoretical Understanding to the Generalization of RLHF

Authors: Zhaochun Li, Mingyang Yi, Yue Wang, Shisheng Cui, Yong Liu
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16403v1

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and its variants have emerged as the dominant approaches for aligning Large Language Models with human intent. While empirically effective, the theoretical generalization properties of these methods in high-dimensional settings remain to be explored. To this end, we build the generalization theory on RLHF of LLMs under the linear reward model, through the framework of algorithmic stability. In contrast to the existing works built upon the consistency of maximum likelihood estimations on reward model, our analysis is presented under an end-to-end learning framework, which is consistent with practice. Concretely, we prove that under a key \textbf{feature coverage} condition, the empirical optima of policy model have a generalization bound of order $\mathcal{O}(n^{-\frac{1}{2}})$. Moreover, the results can be extrapolated to parameters obtained by gradient-based learning algorithms, i.e., Gradient Ascent (GA) and Stochastic Gradient Ascent (SGA). Thus, we argue that our results provide new theoretical evidence for the empirically observed generalization of LLMs after RLHF.

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### Clarify or Answer: Reinforcement Learning for Agentic VQA with Context Under-specification

Authors: Zongwan Cao, Bingbing Wen, Lucy Lu Wang
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16400v1

Real-world visual question answering (VQA) is often context-dependent: an image-question pair may be under-specified, such that the correct answer depends on external information that is not observable in the image. In such cases, directly answering can lead to confident but incorrect predictions. We propose CoA(Clarify-or-Answer), an ask-or-answer agent that separately models the decision to ask or answer, and what to ask if needed. CoA first determines whether clarification is necessary; if so, it asks a single focused question and then incorporates the response to produce the final answer. We introduce CONTEXTCLARIFY with a set of ambiguous VQA questions and the contrast set that is non-ambiguous. We further introduce GRPO-CR (Clarification Reasoning), a reinforcement learning approach that optimizes clarification question generation with multiple reward signals encouraging well-formed, focused, non-trivial questions that resolve ambiguity. Across three VLLMs and three datasets, CoA achieves consistent improvements at both the module and system levels, improving end-to-end VQA accuracy by an average of +15.3 points (83%) over prompting-based baselines

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### A Hessian-Free Actor-Critic Algorithm for Bi-Level Reinforcement Learning with Applications to LLM Fine-Tuning

Authors: Sihan Zeng, Sujay Bhatt, Sumitra Ganesh, Alec Koppel
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.LG, math.OC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16399v6

We study a structured bi-level optimization problem where the upper-level objective is a smooth function and the lower-level problem is policy optimization in a Markov decision process (MDP). The upper-level decision variable parameterizes the reward of the lower-level MDP, and the upper-level objective depends on the optimal induced policy. Existing methods for bi-level optimization and RL often require second-order information, impose strong regularization at the lower level, or inefficiently use samples through nested-loop procedures. In this work, we propose a single-loop, first-order actor-critic algorithm that optimizes the bi-level objective via a penalty-based reformulation. We introduce into the lower-level RL objective an attenuating entropy regularization, which enables asymptotically unbiased upper-level hyper-gradient estimation without solving the unregularized RL problem exactly. We establish the finite-time and finite-sample convergence of the proposed algorithm to a stationary point of the original, unregularized bi-level optimization problem through a novel lower-level residual analysis under a special type of Polyak-Lojasiewicz condition. We validate the performance of our method through experiments on a GridWorld goal position problem and on happy tweet generation through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF).

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### White-Box Sensitivity Auditing with Steering Vectors

Authors: Hannah Cyberey, Yangfeng Ji, David Evans
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.CY, cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16398v3

Algorithmic audits are essential tools for examining systems for properties required by regulators or desired by operators. Current audits of large language models (LLMs) primarily rely on black-box evaluations that assess model behavior only through input-output testing. These methods are limited to tests constructed in the input space, often generated by heuristics. In addition, many socially relevant model properties (e.g., gender bias) are abstract and difficult to measure through text-based inputs alone. To address these limitations, we propose a white-box sensitivity auditing framework for LLMs that leverages activation steering to conduct more rigorous assessments through model internals. Our auditing method conducts internal sensitivity tests by manipulating key concepts relevant to the model's intended function for the task. We demonstrate its application to bias audits in four simulated high-stakes LLM decision tasks. Our method consistently indicates substantial dependence on protected attributes in model predictions, even in settings where standard black-box evaluations suggest little or no bias. Our code is openly available at https://github.com/hannahxchen/llm-steering-audit

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### From Attribution to Abstention: Training-Free Attention-Based Auditing for Clinical Summarization

Authors: Qianqi Yan, Huy Nguyen, Sumana Srivatsa, Hari Bandi, Xin Eric Wang, Krishnaram Kenthapadi
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16397v2

Deploying multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for clinical summarization demands not only fluent generation but also transparency about where each statement originates-and a mechanism to flag when statements lack evidential support. We present ClinTrace, a training-free framework that extracts two clinically useful signals from the decoder attention weights that every transformer-based MLLM already produces during generation: (i) fine-grained source attributions linking each output sentence to supporting text spans or images, and (ii) per-sentence groundedness scores that identify poorly supported claims as candidate hallucinations. Both signals are derived from the same attention tensors in a single pass, requiring no retraining, no auxiliary models, and no additional inference cost. We evaluate on two clinical summarization tasks: doctor-patient dialogue summarization (CliConSummation) and radiology report summarization (MIMIC-CXR) using a general-purpose MLLM (Qwen3-8B) and a medical-finetuned model (HuatuoGPT-Vision-7B). For source attribution, ClinTrace achieves over 92% text F1 on radiology and 88% on dialogue summarization, substantially outperforming embedding-based and self-attribution baselines. For hallucination detection, groundedness scores achieve 0.77 AUROC with the medical-finetuned model: competitive with embedding-based confidence at zero additional cost, and enable an abstention mechanism that improves faithfulness from 61.7% to 72.6% by withholding the least: grounded 20% of output for clinician review. Notably, medical finetuning substantially improves the reliability of attention-based hallucination detection, suggesting that domain adaptation produces more semantically structured attention patterns amenable to self-auditing.

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### ResAgent: Entropy-based Prior Point Discovery and Visual Reasoning for Referring Expression Segmentation

Authors: Yihao Wang, Jusheng Zhang, Ziyi Tang, Keze Wang, Meng Yang
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16394v1

Referring Expression Segmentation (RES) is a core vision-language segmentation task that enables pixel-level understanding of targets via free-form linguistic expressions, supporting critical applications such as human-robot interaction and augmented reality. Despite the progress of Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based approaches, existing RES methods still suffer from two key limitations: first, the coarse bounding boxes from MLLMs lead to redundant or non-discriminative point prompts; second, the prevalent reliance on textual coordinate reasoning is unreliable, as it fails to distinguish targets from visually similar distractors. To address these issues, we propose \textbf{\model}, a novel RES framework integrating \textbf{E}ntropy-\textbf{B}ased Point \textbf{D}iscovery (\textbf{EBD}) and \textbf{V}ision-\textbf{B}ased \textbf{R}easoning (\textbf{VBR}). Specifically, EBD identifies high-information candidate points by modeling spatial uncertainty within coarse bounding boxes, treating point selection as an information maximization process. VBR verifies point correctness through joint visual-semantic alignment, abandoning text-only coordinate inference for more robust validation. Built on these components, \model implements a coarse-to-fine workflow: bounding box initialization, entropy-guided point discovery, vision-based validation, and mask decoding. Extensive evaluations on four benchmark datasets (RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, RefCOCOg, and ReasonSeg) demonstrate that \model achieves new state-of-the-art performance across all four benchmarks, highlighting its effectiveness in generating accurate and semantically grounded segmentation masks with minimal prompts.

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### Cross-Lingual Activation Steering for Multilingual Language Models

Authors: Rhitabrat Pokharel, Ameeta Agrawal, Tanay Nagar
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16390v1

Large language models exhibit strong multilingual capabilities, yet significant performance gaps persist between dominant and non-dominant languages. Prior work attributes this gap to imbalances between shared and language-specific neurons in multilingual representations. We propose Cross-Lingual Activation Steering (CLAS), a training-free inference-time intervention that selectively modulates neuron activations. We evaluate CLAS on classification and generation benchmarks, achieving average improvements of 2.3% (Acc.) and 3.4% (F1) respectively, while maintaining high-resource language performance. We discover that effective transfer operates through functional divergence rather than strict alignment; performance gains correlate with increased language cluster separation. Our results demonstrate that targeted activation steering can unlock latent multilingual capacity in existing models without modification to model weights.

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### On The Robustness of Foundational 3D Medical Image Segmentation Models Against Imprecise Visual Prompts

Authors: Soumitri Chattopadhyay, Basar Demir, Marc Niethammer
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16383v1

While 3D foundational models have shown promise for promptable segmentation of medical volumes, their robustness to imprecise prompts remains under-explored. In this work, we aim to address this gap by systematically studying the effect of various controlled perturbations of dense visual prompts, that closely mimic real-world imprecision. By conducting experiments with two recent foundational models on a multi-organ abdominal segmentation task, we reveal several facets of promptable medical segmentation, especially pertaining to reliance on visual shape and spatial cues, and the extent of resilience of models towards certain perturbations. Codes are available at: https://github.com/ucsdbiag/Prompt-Robustness-MedSegFMs

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### VTFusion: A Vision-Text Multimodal Fusion Network for Few-Shot Anomaly Detection

Authors: Yuxin Jiang, Yunkang Cao, Yuqi Cheng, Yiheng Zhang, Weiming Shen
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16381v1

Few-Shot Anomaly Detection (FSAD) has emerged as a critical paradigm for identifying irregularities using scarce normal references. While recent methods have integrated textual semantics to complement visual data, they predominantly rely on features pre-trained on natural scenes, thereby neglecting the granular, domain-specific semantics essential for industrial inspection. Furthermore, prevalent fusion strategies often resort to superficial concatenation, failing to address the inherent semantic misalignment between visual and textual modalities, which compromises robustness against cross-modal interference. To bridge these gaps, this study proposes VTFusion, a vision-text multimodal fusion framework tailored for FSAD. The framework rests on two core designs. First, adaptive feature extractors for both image and text modalities are introduced to learn task-specific representations, bridging the domain gap between pre-trained models and industrial data; this is further augmented by generating diverse synthetic anomalies to enhance feature discriminability. Second, a dedicated multimodal prediction fusion module is developed, comprising a fusion block that facilitates rich cross-modal information exchange and a segmentation network that generates refined pixel-level anomaly maps under multimodal guidance. VTFusion significantly advances FSAD performance, achieving image-level AUROCs of 96.8% and 86.2% in the 2-shot scenario on the MVTec AD and VisA datasets, respectively. Furthermore, VTFusion achieves an AUPRO of 93.5% on a real-world dataset of industrial automotive plastic parts introduced in this paper, further demonstrating its practical applicability in demanding industrial scenarios.

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### Cognitively-Inspired Tokens Overcome Egocentric Bias in Multimodal Models

Authors: Bridget Leonard, Scott O. Murray
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, q-bio.NC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16378v1

Multimodal language models (MLMs) perform well on semantic vision-language tasks but fail at spatial reasoning that requires adopting another agent's visual perspective. These errors reflect a persistent egocentric bias and raise questions about whether current models support allocentric reasoning. Inspired by human spatial cognition, we introduce perspective tokens, specialized embeddings that encode orientation through either (1) embodied body-keypoint cues or (2) abstract representations supporting mental rotation. Integrating these tokens into LLaVA-1.5-13B yields performance on level-2 visual perspective-taking tasks. Across synthetic and naturalistic benchmarks (Isle Bricks V2, COCO, 3DSRBench), perspective tokens improve accuracy, with rotation-based tokens generalizing to non-human reference agents. Representational analyses reveal that fine-tuning enhances latent orientation sensitivity already present in the base model, suggesting that MLMs contain precursors of allocentric reasoning but lack appropriate internal structure. Overall, embedding cognitively grounded spatial structure directly into token space provides a lightweight, model-agnostic mechanism for perspective-taking and more human-like spatial reasoning.

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### Polymer-Agent: Large Language Model Agent for Polymer Design

Authors: Vani Nigam, Achuth Chandrasekhar, Amir Barati Farimani
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16376v2

On-demand Polymer discovery is essential for various industries, ranging from biomedical to reinforcement materials. Experiments with polymers have a long trial-and-error process, leading to use of extensive resources. For these processes, machine learning has accelerated scientific discovery at the property prediction and latent space search fronts. However, laboratory researchers cannot readily access codes and these models to extract individual structures and properties due to infrastructure limitations. We present a closed-loop polymer structure-property predictor integrated in a terminal for early-stage polymer discovery. The framework is powered by LLM reasoning to provide users with property prediction, property-guided polymer structure generation, and structure modification capabilities. The SMILES sequences are guided by the synthetic accessibility score and the synthetic complexity score (SC Score) to ensure that polymer generation is as close as possible to synthetically accessible monomer-level structures. This framework addresses the challenge of generating novel polymer structures for laboratory researchers, thereby providing computational insights into polymer research.

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### Improving the Accuracy of Community Detection on Signed Networks via Community Refinement and Contrastive Learning

Authors: Hyunuk Shin, Hojin Kim, Chanyoung Lee, Yeon-Chang Lee, David Yoon Suk Kang
Published: 2026-01-23
Categories: cs.SI, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16372v1

Community detection (CD) on signed networks is crucial for understanding how positive and negative relations jointly shape network structure. However, existing CD methods often yield inconsistent communities due to noisy or conflicting edge signs. In this paper, we propose ReCon, a model-agnostic post-processing framework that progressively refines community structures through four iterative steps: (1) structural refinement, (2) boundary refinement, (3) contrastive learning, and (4) clustering. Extensive experiments on eighteen synthetic and four real-world networks using four CD methods demonstrate that ReCon consistently enhances community detection accuracy, serving as an effective and easily integrable solution for reliable CD across diverse network properties.

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### Deep Sketch-Based 3D Modeling: A Survey

Authors: Alberto Tono, Jiajun Wu, Gordon Wetzstein, Iro Armeni, Hariharan Subramonyam, James Landay, Martin Fischer
Published: 2026-01-22
Categories: cs.GR, cs.CV, cs.HC
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03287v1

In the past decade, advances in artificial intelligence have revolutionized sketch-based 3D modeling, leading to a new paradigm known as Deep Sketch-Based 3D Modeling (DS-3DM). DS-3DM offers data-driven methods that address the long-standing challenges of sketch abstraction and ambiguity. DS-3DM keeps humans at the center of the creative process by enhancing the flexibility, usability, faithfulness, and adaptability of sketch-based 3D modeling interfaces. This paper contributes a comprehensive survey of the latest DS-3DM within a novel design space: MORPHEUS. Built upon the Input-Model-Output (IMO) framework, MORPHEUS categorizes Models outputting Options of 3D Representations and Parts, derived from Human inputs (varying in quantity and modality), and Evaluated across diverse User-views and Styles. Throughout MORPHEUS we highlight limitations and identify opportunities for interdisciplinary research in Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, and Human-Computer Interaction, revealing a need for controllability and information-rich outputs. These opportunities align design processes more closely with user' intent, responding to the growing importance of user-centered approaches.

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### GLEAN: Grounded Lightweight Evaluation Anchors for Contamination-Aware Tabular Reasoning

Authors: Qizhi Wang
Published: 2026-01-22
Categories: cs.DB, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02212v1

Tabular reasoning benchmarks mix semantic inference, numerical computation, and brittle table formatting, yet evaluations for small models remain vulnerable to contamination, dataset artifacts, and retrieval failures. We propose GLEAN, a lightweight evaluation protocol that integrates contamination-aware probes, weak-supervision governance, retrieval-reasoning diagnostics, and structured error attribution under tight hardware constraints. We evaluate across TabFact, WTQ via Squall, TableBench, RobuT, and SciTab under a 16GB GPU budget. Using Squall gold SQL as an executable anchor (95.2% execution), GLEAN assigns a deterministic error taxonomy (L0-L4 plus L0.5 context miss) and reveals a stable error-mode separation: TAPEX errors skew toward grounding (L3) while TAPAS errors skew toward hallucination/abstention (L2/L0). We validate evidence-row heuristics against SQL-derived rows on simple queries (0.62 precision / 0.71 recall; hybrid recall 0.81) and show that retrieval Recall@K can saturate even when end-to-end EM/F1 remains limited, motivating attribution beyond raw recall. We release a modular framework with audits and sensitivity checks to make small-model tabular evaluation more contamination-aware and diagnostic.

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### KD4MT: A Survey of Knowledge Distillation for Machine Translation

Authors: Ona de Gibert, Joseph Attieh, Timothee Mickus, Yves Scherrer, Jörg Tiedemann
Published: 2026-01-22
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.15845v1

Knowledge Distillation (KD) as a research area has gained a lot of traction in recent years as a compression tool to address challenges related to ever-larger models in NLP. Remarkably, Machine Translation (MT) offers a much more nuanced take on this narrative: in MT, KD also functions as a general-purpose knowledge transfer mechanism that shapes supervision and translation quality as well as efficiency. This survey synthesizes KD for MT (KD4MT) across 105 papers (through October 1, 2025). We begin by introducing both MT and KD for non-experts, followed by an overview of the standard KD approaches relevant to MT applications. Subsequently, we categorize advances in the KD4MT literature based on (i) their methodological contributions and (ii) their practical applications. Our qualitative and quantitative analyses identify common trends in the field and highlight key research gaps as well as the absence of unified evaluation practice for KD methods in MT. We further provide practical guidelines for selecting a KD method in concrete settings and highlight potential risks associated with the application of KD to MT such as increased hallucination and bias amplification. Finally, we discuss the role of LLMs in re-shaping the KD4MT field. To support further research, we complement our survey with a publicly available database summarizing the main characteristics of the surveyed KD methods and a glossary of key terms.

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### EduResearchBench: A Hierarchical Atomic Task Decomposition Benchmark for Full-Lifecycle Educational Research

Authors: Houping Yue, Zixiang Di, Mei Jiang, Bingdong Li, Hao Hao, Yu Song, Bo Jiang, Aimin Zhou
Published: 2026-01-22
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.15034v1

While Large Language Models (LLMs) are reshaping the paradigm of AI for Social Science (AI4SS), rigorously evaluating their capabilities in scholarly writing remains a major challenge. Existing benchmarks largely emphasize single-shot, monolithic generation and thus lack the fine-grained assessments required to reflect complex academic research workflows. To fill this gap, we introduce EduResearchBench, the first comprehensive evaluation platform dedicated to educational academic writing. EduResearchBench is built upon our Hierarchical Atomic Task Decomposition (HATD) framework, which decomposes an end-to-end research workflow into six specialized research modules (e.g., Quantitative Analysis, Qualitative Research, and Policy Research) spanning 24 fine-grained atomic tasks. This taxonomy enables an automated evaluation pipeline that mitigates a key limitation of holistic scoring, where aggregate scores often obscure specific capability bottlenecks, and instead provides fine-grained, diagnostic feedback on concrete deficiencies. Moreover, recognizing the high cognitive load inherent in scholarly writing, we propose a curriculum learning strategy that progressively builds competence from foundational skills to complex methodological reasoning and argumentation. Leveraging 55K raw academic samples, we curate 11K high-quality instruction pairs to train EduWrite, a specialized educational scholarly writing model. Experiments show that EduWrite (30B) substantially outperforms larger general-purpose models (72B) on multiple core metrics, demonstrating that in vertical domains, data quality density and hierarchically staged training curricula are more decisive than parameter scale.

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### High Convergence Rates of CMOS Invertible Logic Circuits Based on Many-Body Hamiltonians

Authors: Naoya Onizawa, Takahiro Hanyu
Published: 2026-01-22
Categories: cs.ET, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.15033v1

This paper introduces CMOS invertible-logic (CIL) circuits based on many-body Hamiltonians. CIL can realize probabilistic forward and backward operations of a function by annealing a corresponding Hamiltonian using stochastic computing. We have created a Hamiltonian that includes three-body interaction of spins (probabilistic nodes). It provides some degrees of freedom to design a simpler landscape of Hamiltonian (energy) than that of the conventional two-body Hamiltonian. The simpler landscape makes it easier to reach the global minimum energy. The proposed three-body CIL circuits are designed and evaluated with the conventional two-body CIL circuits, resulting in few-times higher convergence rates with negligible area overhead on FPGA.

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### When to Think Fast and Slow? AMOR: Adaptive Entropy Gate for Hybrid Models

Authors: Haoran Zheng, Chen Shani
Published: 2026-01-22
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13215v3

Recurrent-attention hybrids aim to combine the efficiency of recurrence with the contextual recall of attention, but existing approaches typically apply attention uniformly across all positions, even when the recurrent state alone is sufficient for accurate prediction. We introduce AMOR (Adaptive Metacognitive Output Router), a post-hoc hybrid architecture that selectively invokes attention based on predictive uncertainty. A recurrent backbone is augmented with entropy-gated attention blocks that activate only when the model's output entropy exceeds a dynamic threshold derived from a running batch median and scaled standard deviation. The resulting binary gate requires no learned routing parameters. Pretrained from scratch on FineWeb-Edu and with attention invoked on only ~40% of positions, one of the AMOR variants (Mamba2 or Gated DeltaNet backbones) achieves the highest eight-task common-sense reasoning average at each scale among pure recurrent, pure attention, and fixed-schedule hybrid models. AMOR also improves retrieval performance over pure recurrent models while remaining competitive against fixed-schedule hybrids. Additionally, AMOR retains the long-context robustness of its recurrent backbones, where the Transformer and other hybrid architectures degrade under distribution shift. These results suggest that when attention is applied matters as much as how much: selectively allocating attention based on predictive uncertainty improves accuracy, robustness, and efficiency, offering a simple alternative to uniform or fixed routing strategies.

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### BotzoneBench: Scalable LLM Evaluation via Graded AI Anchors

Authors: Lingfeng Li, Yunlong Lu, Yuefei Zhang, Jingyu Yao, Yixin Zhu, KeYuan Cheng, Yongyi Wang, Qirui Zheng, Xionghui Yang, Wenxin Li
Published: 2026-01-22
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13214v1

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in interactive environments requiring strategic decision-making, yet systematic evaluation of these capabilities remains challenging. Existing benchmarks for LLMs primarily assess static reasoning through isolated tasks and fail to capture dynamic strategic abilities. Recent game-based evaluations employ LLM-vs-LLM tournaments that produce relative rankings dependent on transient model pools, incurring quadratic computational costs and lacking stable performance anchors for longitudinal tracking. The central challenge is establishing a scalable evaluation framework that measures LLM strategic reasoning against consistent, interpretable standards rather than volatile peer models. Here we show that anchoring LLM evaluation to fixed hierarchies of skill-calibrated game Artificial Intelligence (AI) enables linear-time absolute skill measurement with stable cross-temporal interpretability. Built on the Botzone platform's established competitive infrastructure, our BotzoneBench evaluates LLMs across eight diverse games spanning deterministic perfect-information board games to stochastic imperfect-information card games. Through systematic assessment of 177,047 state-action pairs from five flagship models, we reveal significant performance disparities and identify distinct strategic behaviors, with top-performing models achieving proficiency comparable to mid-to-high-tier specialized game AI in multiple domains. This anchored evaluation paradigm generalizes beyond games to any domain with well-defined skill hierarchies, establishing a scalable and reusable framework for assessing interactive AI capabilities.

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### CodeGuard: Improving LLM Guardrails in CS Education

Authors: Nishat Raihan, Noah Erdachew, Jayoti Devi, Joanna C. S. Santos, Marcos Zampieri
Published: 2026-01-22
Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02509v1

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in Computer Science (CS) classrooms to automate code generation, feedback, and assessment. However, their susceptibility to adversarial or ill-intentioned prompts threatens student learning and academic integrity. To cope with this important issue, we evaluate existing off-the-shelf LLMs in handling unsafe and irrelevant prompts within the domain of CS education. We identify important shortcomings in existing LLM guardrails which motivates us to propose CodeGuard, a comprehensive guardrail framework for educational AI systems. CodeGuard includes (i) a first-of-its-kind taxonomy for classifying prompts; (ii) the CodeGuard dataset, a collection of 8,000 prompts spanning the taxonomy; and (iii) PromptShield, a lightweight sentence-encoder model fine-tuned to detect unsafe prompts in real time. Experiments show that PromptShield achieves 0.93 F1 score, surpassing existing guardrail methods. Additionally, further experimentation reveals that CodeGuard reduces potentially harmful or policy-violating code completions by 30-65% without degrading performance on legitimate educational tasks. The code, datasets, and evaluation scripts are made freely available to the community.

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### Precoding-Oriented CSI Feedback Design with Mutual Information Regularized VQ-VAE

Authors: Xi Chen, Homa Esfahanizadeh, Foad Sohrabi
Published: 2026-01-22
Categories: cs.IT, cs.AI, eess.IV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02508v1

Efficient channel state information (CSI) compression at the user equipment plays a key role in enabling accurate channel reconstruction and precoder design in massive multiple-input multiple-output systems. A key challenge lies in balancing the CSI feedback overhead with the achievable downlink rate, i.e., maximizing the utility of limited feedback to maintain high system performance. In this work, we propose a precoding-oriented CSI feedback framework based on a vector quantized variational autoencoder, augmented with an information-theoretic regularization. To achieve this, we introduce a differentiable mutual information lower-bound estimator as a training regularizer to promote effective utilization of the learned codebook under a fixed feedback budget. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves rates comparable to variable-length neural compression schemes, while operating with fixed-length feedback. Furthermore, the learned codewords exhibit significantly more uniform usage and capture interpretable structures that are strongly correlated with the underlying channel state information.

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