# Research Papers — 2026-01 · bundle page 7 of 189 > Full-text markdown of papers #301–350 of 9403 published in 2026-01, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 9403-paper 2026-01 archive (50 papers per file). Canonical page: https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-01/page/7 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-01/page/6.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-01/page/8.md) ### PolarMem: A Training-Free Polarized Latent Graph Memory for Verifiable Vision-Language Models Authors: Zhisheng Chen, Tingyu Wu, Zijie Zhou, Zhengwei Xie, Jinhan Li, Ziyan Weng, Liang Lin, Jingwei Song, Zikai Xiao, Yingwei Zhang Published: 2026-01-31 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00415v2 Memory is not merely a storage mechanism for intelligent systems, but a structure for organizing evidence and constraining belief. This is especially important for multimodal reasoning, where retrieved evidence must be both query-relevant and visually consistent. However, current memory systems for vision-language models (VLMs) remain largely positive-associative: they retrieve what is similar or previously observed, but lack an explicit way to remember what has been verified as absent or logically excluded. To this end, we propose \textbf{PolarMem}, a training-free polarized latent graph memory framework for verifiable vision-language reasoning. PolarMem transforms frozen VLM perceptual signals into \textit{HAS}, \textit{NOT\_HAS}, and \textit{Uncertain} memory states through semantic consistency verification and adaptive distributional partitioning, and stores them in a polarized graph with distinct positive and negative memory relations. During inference, a lexicographical logic-aware retrieval protocol enforces logical consistency before semantic similarity, suppressing conflicting memories before they enter the model context. Across eight frozen VLM backbones and six multimodal benchmarks, PolarMem consistently improves retrieval-intensive tasks and reduces retrieval-level contradictions. These results highlight negative memory as a key mechanism for building more reliable multimodal memory systems. Our code is available at https://github.com/czs-ict/PolarMem. --- ### Toward Autonomous Laboratory Safety Monitoring with Vision Language Models: Learning to See Hazards Through Scene Structure Authors: Trishna Chakraborty, Udita Ghosh, Aldair Ernesto Gongora, Ruben Glatt, Yue Dong, Jiachen Li, Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury, Chengyu Song Published: 2026-01-31 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00414v1 Laboratories are prone to severe injuries from minor unsafe actions, yet continuous safety monitoring -- beyond mandatory pre-lab safety training -- is limited by human availability. Vision language models (VLMs) offer promise for autonomous laboratory safety monitoring, but their effectiveness in realistic settings is unclear due to the lack of visual evaluation data, as most safety incidents are documented primarily as unstructured text. To address this gap, we first introduce a structured data generation pipeline that converts textual laboratory scenarios into aligned triples of (image, scene graph, ground truth), using large language models as scene graph architects and image generation models as renderers. Our experiments on the synthetic dataset of 1,207 samples across 362 unique scenarios and seven open- and closed-source models show that VLMs perform effectively given textual scene graph, but degrade substantially in visual-only settings indicating difficulty in extracting structured object relationships directly from pixels. To overcome this, we propose a post-training context-engineering approach, scene-graph-guided alignment, to bridge perceptual gaps in VLMs by translating visual inputs into structured scene graphs better aligned with VLM reasoning, improving hazard detection performance in visual only settings. --- ### Alignment of Diffusion Model and Flow Matching for Text-to-Image Generation Authors: Yidong Ouyang, Liyan Xie, Hongyuan Zha, Guang Cheng Published: 2026-01-31 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00413v1 Diffusion models and flow matching have demonstrated remarkable success in text-to-image generation. While many existing alignment methods primarily focus on fine-tuning pre-trained generative models to maximize a given reward function, these approaches require extensive computational resources and may not generalize well across different objectives. In this work, we propose a novel alignment framework by leveraging the underlying nature of the alignment problem -- sampling from reward-weighted distributions -- and show that it applies to both diffusion models (via score guidance) and flow matching models (via velocity guidance). The score function (velocity field) required for the reward-weighted distribution can be decomposed into the pre-trained score (velocity field) plus a conditional expectation of the reward. For the alignment on the diffusion model, we identify a fundamental challenge: the adversarial nature of the guidance term can introduce undesirable artifacts in the generated images. Therefore, we propose a finetuning-free framework that trains a guidance network to estimate the conditional expectation of the reward. We achieve comparable performance to finetuning-based models with one-step generation with at least a 60% reduction in computational cost. For the alignment on flow matching, we propose a training-free framework that improves the generation quality without additional computational cost. --- ### Robustness of AutoML on Dirty Categorical Data Authors: Marcos L. P. Bueno, Joaquin Vanschoren Published: 2026-01-31 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00412v1 The goal of automated machine learning (AutoML) is to reduce trial and error when doing machine learning (ML). Although AutoML methods for classification are able to deal with data imperfections, such as outliers, multiple scales and missing data, their behavior is less known on dirty categorical datasets. These datasets often have several categorical features with high cardinality arising from issues such as lack of curation and automated collection. Recent research has shown that ML models can benefit from morphological encoders for dirty categorical data, leading to significantly superior predictive performance. However the effects of using such encoders in AutoML methods are not known at the moment. In this paper, we propose a pipeline that transforms categorical data into numerical data so that an AutoML can handle categorical data transformed by more advanced encoding schemes. We benchmark the current robustness of AutoML methods on a set of dirty datasets and compare it with the proposed pipeline. This allows us to get insight on differences in predictive performance. We also look at the ML pipelines built by AutoMLs in order to gain insight beyond the best model as typically returned by these methods. --- ### RAG-DIVE: A Dynamic Approach for Multi-Turn Dialogue Evaluation in Retrieval-Augmented Generation Authors: Lorenz Brehme, Benedikt Dornauer, Jan-Henrik Böttcher, Klaus Schmid, Mircea-Cristian Racasan, Ruth Breu Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.16310v1 Evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems using static multi-turn datasets fails to capture the dynamic nature of real-world dialogues. Existing evaluation methods rely on predefined datasets, which restrict them to static, one-directional queries and limit their ability to capture the adaptive, context-dependent performance of RAG systems in interactive, multi-turn settings. Thus, we introduce the RAG-DIVE, a Dynamic Interactive Validation and Evaluation approach, that simulates user interactions with RAG systems. RAG-DIVE leverages an LLM to generate multi-turn conversations dynamically and is organized into three components. The dialogue generation stage consists of the (1) Conversation Generator, which simulates a user by creating multi-turn queries, and the (2) Conversation Validator, which filters and corrects invalid or low-quality outputs to ensure coherent conversations. The evaluation stage is handled by the (3) Conversation Evaluator, which assesses the RAG system's performance across the entire dialogue and generates both per-turn and multi-turn metrics that provide an aggregated view of system behavior. We validated RAG-DIVE through two experimental setups. First, we tested a sample RAG system, including human evaluation of dialogue quality, repeated trials to assess consistency, and an ablation study showing that RAG-DIVE detects performance changes caused by system modifications. Second, we compared RAG-DIVE with a traditional static dataset evaluation on an industrial RAG system under different configurations to verify whether both approaches reveal similar performance trends. Our findings demonstrate that RAG-DIVE facilitates dynamic, interaction-driven evaluation for multi-turn conversations, thereby advancing the assessment of RAG systems. --- ### SemaCDR: LLM-Powered Transferable Semantics for Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation Authors: Chunxu Zhang, Shanqiang Huang, Zijian Zhang, Jiahong Liu, Linsong Yu, Ruiqi Wan, Bo Yang, Irwin King Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.09551v1 Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) addresses the data sparsity and cold-start problems in the target domain by leveraging knowledge from data-rich source domains. However, existing CDR methods often rely on domain-specific features or identifiers that lack transferability across different domains, limiting their ability to capture inter-domain semantic patterns. To overcome this, we propose SemaCDR, a semantics-driven framework for cross-domain sequential recommendation that leverages large language models (LLMs) to construct a unified semantic space. SemaCDR creates multiview item features by integrating LLM-generated domain-agnostic semantics with domain-specific content, aligned by contrastive regularization. SemaCDR systematically creates LLM-generated domain-specific and domain-agnostic semantics, and employs adaptive fusion to generate unified preference representations. Furthermore, it aligns cross-domain behavior sequences with an adaptive fusion mechanism to synthesize interaction sequences from source, target, and mixed domains. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that SemaCDR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating its effectiveness in capturing coherent intra-domain patterns while facilitating knowledge transfer across domains. --- ### Toward a Universal Color Naming System: A Clustering-Based Approach using Multisource Data Authors: Aruzhan Sabitkyzy, Maksat Shagyrov, Pakizar Shamoi Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03235v1 Is it coral, salmon, or peach? What seems like a simple color can have many names, and without a standard, these variations create confusion across design, technology, and communication. Color naming is a fundamental task across industries such as fashion, cosmetics, web design, and visualization tools. However, the lack of universally accepted color naming standards leads to inconsistent color standards across platforms, applications, and industries. Moreover, these systems include hundreds or thousands of overlapping, perceptually indistinct shades, despite the fact that humans typically distinguish only a limited number of unique color categories in practice. In this study, we propose a clustering-based multisource data framework to build a standardized color-naming system. We collected a dataset of over 19,555 RGB values paired with color names from 20 diverse sources. After data cleaning and normalization, we converted the colors to the perceptually uniform CIELAB color space and applied K-means clustering using the CIEDE2000 color difference metric, identifying 280 optimal clusters. For each cluster, we performed a frequency analysis of the associated names to assign representative labels. The resulting system reflects naturally occurring linguistic patterns. We demonstrate its effectiveness in automatic annotation and content-based image retrieval on a clothing dataset. This approach opens new opportunities for standardized, perceptually grounded color labeling in practical applications such as generative AI, visual search, and design systems. --- ### BeSafe-Bench: Unveiling Behavioral Safety Risks of Situated Agents in Functional Environments Authors: Yuxuan Li, Yi Lin, Peng Wang, Shiming Liu, Xuetao Wei Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.25747v1 The rapid evolution of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) has enabled agents to perform complex digital and physical tasks, yet their deployment as autonomous decision-makers introduces substantial unintentional behavioral safety risks. However, the absence of a comprehensive safety benchmark remains a major bottleneck, as existing evaluations rely on low-fidelity environments, simulated APIs, or narrowly scoped tasks. To address this gap, we present BeSafe-Bench (BSB), a benchmark for exposing behavioral safety risks of situated agents in functional environments, covering four representative domains: Web, Mobile, Embodied VLM, and Embodied VLA. Using functional environments, we construct a diverse instruction space by augmenting tasks with nine categories of safety-critical risks, and adopt a hybrid evaluation framework that combines rule-based checks with LLM-as-a-judge reasoning to assess real environmental impacts. Evaluating 13 popular agents reveals a concerning trend: even the best-performing agent completes fewer than 40% of tasks while fully adhering to safety constraints, and strong task performance frequently coincides with severe safety violations. These findings underscore the urgent need for improved safety alignment before deploying agentic systems in real-world settings. --- ### Unveiling the Potential of Quantization with MXFP4: Strategies for Quantization Error Reduction Authors: Jatin Chhugani, Geonhwa Jeong, Bor-Yiing Su, Yunjie Pan, Hanmei Yang, Aayush Ankit, Jiecao Yu, Summer Deng, Yunqing Chen, Nadathur Satish, Changkyu Kim Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.AR, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.PF arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08713v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) have intensified the need for low-precision formats that enable efficient, large-scale inference. The Open Compute Project (OCP) Microscaling (MX) standard is attractive due to its favorable hardware efficiency, but its 4-bit variant (MXFP4) lags behind NVIDIA's NVFP4 in accuracy, limiting adoption. We introduce two software-only techniques, Overflow-Aware Scaling (OAS) and Macro Block Scaling (MBS), that improve MXFP4 quantization fidelity without requiring hardware changes. OAS reduces overall errors by increasing effective dynamic range under power-of-two block scaling, while MBS allocates higher-precision scaling at a coarser granularity to better preserve outliers. Across multiple LLMs and standard downstream benchmarks, OAS and MBS reduce the end-to-end accuracy gap between MXFP4 and NVFP4 from about 10% to below 1% on average, while incurring modest GEMM overhead (6.2% on average). These results re-establish MXFP4 as a practical alternative to NVFP4, enabling near-NVFP4 accuracy while retaining MX's hardware-efficiency advantages (e.g., 12% relative area savings in tensor cores). --- ### Traversal-as-Policy: Log-Distilled Gated Behavior Trees as Externalized, Verifiable Policies for Safe, Robust, and Efficient Agents Authors: Peiran Li, Jiashuo Sun, Fangzhou Lin, Shuo Xing, Tianfu Fu, Suofei Feng, Chaoqun Ni, Zhengzhong Tu Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CR, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05517v1 Autonomous LLM agents fail because long-horizon policy remains implicit in model weights and transcripts, while safety is retrofitted post hoc. We propose Traversal-as-Policy: distill sandboxed OpenHands execution logs into a single executable Gated Behavior Tree (GBT) and treat tree traversal -- rather than unconstrained generation -- as the control policy whenever a task is in coverage. Each node encodes a state-conditioned action macro mined and merge-checked from successful trajectories; macros implicated by unsafe traces attach deterministic pre-execution gates over structured tool context and bounded history, updated under experience-grounded monotonicity so previously rejected unsafe contexts cannot be re-admitted. At runtime, a lightweight traverser matches the base model's intent to child macros, executes one macro at a time under global and node-local gating, and when stalled performs risk-aware shortest-path recovery to a feasible success leaf; the visited path forms a compact spine memory that replaces transcript replay. Evaluated in a unified OpenHands sandbox on 15+ software, web, reasoning, and safety/security benchmarks, GBT improves success while driving violations toward zero and reducing cost. On SWE-bench Verified (Protocol A, 500 issues), GBT-SE raises success from 34.6% to 73.6%, reduces violations from 2.8% to 0.2%, and cuts token/character usage from 208k/820k to 126k/490k; with the same distilled tree, 8B executors more than double success on SWE-bench Verified (14.0%58.8%) and WebArena (9.1%37.3%). --- ### Applied Sociolinguistic AI for Community Development (ASA-CD): A New Scientific Paradigm for Linguistically-Grounded Social Intervention Authors: S M Ruhul Alam, Rifa Ferzana Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21217v1 This paper establishes Applied Sociolinguistic AI for Community Development (ASA-CD) as a novel scientific paradigm for addressing community challenges through linguistically grounded, AI-enabled intervention. ASA-CD introduces three key contributions: (1) linguistic biomarkers as computational indicators of discursive fragmentation; (2) development-aligned natural language processing (NLP), an AI optimisation paradigm prioritising collective outcomes; and (3) a standardised five-phase protocol for discursive intervention. A proof-of-concept study, incorporating real-world and synthetic corpora, demonstrates systematic associations between exclusionary language and negative sentiment and simulates intervention-based improvements. ASA-CD provides a unified methodological, ethical and empirical framework for scalable, value-aligned AI in the service of community empowerment. --- ### EQ-5D Classification Using Biomedical Entity-Enriched Pre-trained Language Models and Multiple Instance Learning Authors: Zhyar Rzgar K Rostam, Gábor Kertész Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21216v1 The EQ-5D (EuroQol 5-Dimensions) is a standardized instrument for the evaluation of health-related quality of life. In health economics, systematic literature reviews (SLRs) depend on the correct identification of publications that use the EQ-5D, but manual screening of large volumes of scientific literature is time-consuming, error-prone, and inconsistent. In this study, we investigate fine-tuning of general-purpose (BERT) and domain-specific (SciBERT, BioBERT) pre-trained language models (PLMs), enriched with biomedical entity information extracted through scispaCy models for each statement, to improve EQ-5D detection from abstracts. We conduct nine experimental setups, including combining three scispaCy models with three PLMs, and evaluate their performance at both the sentence and study levels. Furthermore, we explore a Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) approach with attention pooling to aggregate sentence-level information into study-level predictions, where each abstract is represented as a bag of enriched sentences (by scispaCy). The findings indicate consistent improvements in F1-scores (reaching 0.82) and nearly perfect recall at the study-level, significantly exceeding classical bag-of-words baselines and recently reported PLM baselines. These results show that entity enrichment significantly improves domain adaptation and model generalization, enabling more accurate automated screening in systematic reviews. --- ### Inference-time Alignment via Sparse Junction Steering Authors: Runyi Hu, Jie Zhang, Shiqian Zhao, Jiale Meng, Jiwei Li, Jason Zeng, Ming Wu, Michael Heinrich, Yonggang Wen, Tianwei Zhang Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21215v1 Token-level steering has emerged as a pivotal approach for inference-time alignment, enabling fine grained control over large language models by modulating their output distributions without parameter updates. While effective, existing methods rely on dense intervention at every decoding step. This persistent manipulation not only incurs substantial computational overhead but also risks compromising generation quality by excessively drifting from the model's intrinsic distribution. In this work, we show that dense intervention is unnecessary and propose Sparse Inference time Alignment (SIA), which performs sparse junction steering by intervening only at critical decision points along the generation trajectory. Our key insight is that high entropy junctions mark pivotal decision points in the generation trajectory and are particularly susceptible to misalignment, indicating the need to introduce alignment related reward signals at these points. Extensive experiments across different model families and alignment objectives show that steering only 20% to 80% of tokens achieves superior alignment-efficiency trade offs. For strong base models such as Qwen3, intervening on as few as 20% of tokens matches or even surpasses heavily post-trained instruct models. This sparsity enables stronger guidance while better preserving the model's native distribution, integrates seamlessly with search based methods such as Best-of-N, and reduces computational cost by up to 6x. --- ### Prompt Optimization Via Diffusion Language Models Authors: Shiyu Wang, Haolin Chen, Liangwei Yang, Jielin Qiu, Rithesh Murthy, Ming Zhu, Zixiang Chen, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong, Shelby Heinecke, Huan Wang Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18449v1 We propose a diffusion-based framework for prompt optimization that leverages Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) to iteratively refine system prompts through masked denoising. By conditioning on interaction traces, including user queries, model responses, and optional feedback, our method enables flexible, span-level prompt updates without requiring gradient access or modifying the downstream language model. Across diverse benchmarks (e.g., $τ$-bench, SST-2, SST-5), DLM-optimized prompts consistently improve the performance of a frozen target LLM (e.g., GPT-4o-mini). We further show that moderate diffusion step counts provide the best balance between refinement quality and stability. These results highlight diffusion-based prompt optimization as a general, model-agnostic, and scalable approach for enhancing LLM performance through iterative prompt refinement. --- ### Retrieval Augmented (Knowledge Graph), and Large Language Model-Driven Design Structure Matrix (DSM) Generation of Cyber-Physical Systems Authors: H. Sinan Bank, Daniel R. Herber Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16715v2 We explore the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and Graph-based RAG (GraphRAG) for generating Design Structure Matrices (DSMs). We test these methods on two distinct use cases--a power screwdriver and a CubeSat with known architectural references--evaluating their performance on two key tasks: determining relationships between predefined components, and the more complex challenge of identifying components and their subsequent relationships. We measure the performance by assessing each element of the DSM and overall architecture. Despite design and computational challenges, we identify opportunities for automated DSM generation, with all code publicly available for reproducibility and further feedback from the domain experts. --- ### Empowering 9-1-1 Calltaking Training with Generative AI: Experiences and Lessons Learned Authors: Zirong Chen, Meiyi Ma Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13241v3 Emergency call-takers form the first operational link in public safety response, handling over 240 million calls annually while facing a sustained training crisis: staffing shortages exceed 25\% in many centers, and preparing a single new hire can require up to 720 hours of one-on-one instruction that removes experienced personnel from active duty. Traditional training approaches struggle to scale under these constraints, limiting both coverage and feedback timeliness. In partnership with Metro Nashville Department of Emergency Communications (MNDEC), we designed, developed, and deployed a GenAI-powered call-taking training system under real-world constraints. Over six months, deployment scaled from initial pilot to 190 operational users across 1,120 training sessions, exposing systematic challenges around system delivery, rigor, resilience, and human factors that remain largely invisible in controlled or purely simulated evaluations. By analyzing deployment logs capturing 98,429 user interactions, organizational processes, and stakeholder engagement patterns, we distill four key lessons, each coupled with concrete design and governance practices. These lessons provide grounded guidance for researchers and practitioners seeking to deliver AI-driven training systems in safety-critical public sector environments where practical constraints fundamentally shape human-centric design. --- ### AST-PAC: AST-guided Membership Inference for Code Authors: Roham Koohestani, Ali Al-Kaswan, Jonathan Katzy, Maliheh Izadi Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.AI, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13240v1 Code Large Language Models are frequently trained on massive datasets containing restrictively licensed source code. This creates urgent data governance and copyright challenges. Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) can serve as an auditing mechanism to detect unauthorized data usage in models. While attacks like the Loss Attack provide a baseline, more involved methods like Polarized Augment Calibration (PAC) remain underexplored in the code domain. This paper presents an exploratory study evaluating these methods on 3B--7B parameter code models. We find that while PAC generally outperforms the Loss baseline, its effectiveness relies on augmentation strategies that disregard the rigid syntax of code, leading to performance degradation on larger, complex files. To address this, we introduce AST-PAC, a domain-specific adaptation that utilizes Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) based perturbations to generate syntactically valid calibration samples. Preliminary results indicate that AST-PAC improves as syntactic size grows, where PAC degrades, but under-mutates small files and underperforms on alphanumeric-rich code. Overall, the findings motivate future work on syntax-aware and size-adaptive calibration as a prerequisite for reliable provenance auditing of code language models. --- ### CrisiSense-RAG: Crisis Sensing Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Rapid Disaster Impact Assessment Authors: Yiming Xiao, Kai Yin, Ali Mostafavi Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.CY, cs.CV, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13239v2 Timely and spatially resolved disaster impact assessment is essential for effective emergency response. However, automated methods typically struggle with temporal asynchrony. Real-time human reports capture peak hazard conditions while high-resolution satellite imagery is frequently acquired after peak conditions. This often reflects flood recession rather than maximum extent. Naive fusion of these misaligned streams can yield dangerous underestimates when post-event imagery overrides documented peak flooding. We present CrisiSense-RAG, which is a multimodal retrieval-augmented generation framework that reframes impact assessment as evidence synthesis over heterogeneous data sources without disaster-specific fine-tuning. The system employs hybrid dense-sparse retrieval for text sources and CLIP-based retrieval for aerial imagery. A split-pipeline architecture feeds into asynchronous fusion logic that prioritizes real-time social evidence for peak flood extent while treating imagery as persistent evidence of structural damage. Evaluated on Hurricane Harvey across 207 ZIP-code queries, the framework achieves a flood extent MAE of 10.94% to 28.40% and damage severity MAE of 16.47% to 21.65% in zero-shot settings. Prompt-level alignment proves critical for quantitative validity because metric grounding improves damage estimates by up to 4.75 percentage points. These results demonstrate a practical and deployable approach to rapid resilience intelligence under real-world data constraints. --- ### Hybrid operator learning of wave scattering maps in high-contrast media Authors: Advait Balaji, Trevor Teolis, S. David Mis, Jose Antonio Lara Benitez, Chao Wang, Maarten V. de Hoop Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: eess.SP, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11197v1 Surrogate modeling of wave propagation and scattering (i.e. the wave speed and source to wave field map) in heterogeneous media has significant potential in applications such as seismic imaging and inversion. High-contrast settings, such as subsurface models with salt bodies, exhibit strong scattering and phase sensitivity that challenge existing neural operators. We propose a hybrid architecture that decomposes the scattering operator into two separate contributions: a smooth background propagation and a high-contrast scattering correction. The smooth component is learned with a Fourier Neural Operator (FNO), which produces globally coupled feature tokens encoding background wave propagation; these tokens are then passed to a vision transformer, where attention is used to model the high-contrast scattering correction dominated by strong, spatial interactions. Evaluated on high-frequency Helmholtz problems with strong contrasts, the hybrid model achieves substantially improved phase and amplitude accuracy compared to standalone FNOs or transformers, with favorable accuracy-parameter scaling. --- ### Position-Aware Self-supervised Representation Learning for Cross-mode Radar Signal Recognition Authors: Hongyang Zhang, Haitao Zhang, Yinhao Liu, Kunjie Lin, Yue Huang, Xinghao Ding Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: eess.SP, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11196v1 Radar signal recognition in open electromagnetic environments is challenging due to diverse operating modes and unseen radar types. Existing methods often overlook position relations in pulse sequences, limiting their ability to capture semantic dependencies over time. We propose RadarPos, a position-aware self-supervised framework that leverages pulse-level temporal dynamics without complex augmentations or masking, providing improved position relation modeling over contrastive learning or masked reconstruction. Using this framework, we evaluate cross-mode radar signal recognition under the long-tailed setting to assess adaptability and generalization. Experimental results demonstrate enhanced discriminability and robustness, highlighting practical applicability in real-world electromagnetic environments. --- ### Predicting the post-wildfire mudflow onset using machine learning models on multi-parameter experimental data Authors: Mahta Movasat, Ingrid Tomac Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.LG, cond-mat.soft arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11194v1 Post-wildfire mudflows are increasingly hazardous due to the prevalence of wildfires, including those on the wildland-urban interface. Upon burning, soil on the surface or immediately beneath becomes hydrophobic, a phenomenon that occurs predominantly on sand-based hillslopes. Rainwater and eroded soil blanket the downslope, leading to catastrophic debris flows. Soil hydrophobicity enhances erosion, resulting in post-wildfire debris flows that differ from natural mudflows in intensity, duration, and destructiveness. Thus, it is crucial to understand the timing and conditions of debris-flow onset, driven by the coupled effects of critical parameters: varying rain intensities (RI), slope gradients, water-entry values, and grain sizes (D50). Machine Learning (ML) techniques have become increasingly valuable in geotechnical engineering due to their ability to model complex systems without predefined assumptions. This study applies multiple ML algorithms: multiple linear regression (MLR), logistic regression (LR), support vector classifier (SVC), K-means clustering, and principal component analysis (PCA) to predict and classify outcomes from laboratory experiments that model field conditions using a rain device on various soils in sloped flumes. While MLR effectively predicted total discharge, erosion predictions were less accurate, especially for coarse sand. LR and SVC achieved good accuracy in classifying failure outcomes, supported by clustering and dimensionality reduction. Sensitivity analysis revealed that fine sand is highly susceptible to erosion, particularly under low-intensity, long-duration rainfall. Results also show that the first 10 minutes of high-intensity rain are most critical for discharge and failure. These findings highlight the potential of ML for post-wildfire hazard assessment and emergency response planning. --- ### MELINOE: Fine-Tuning Enables Memory-Efficient Inference for Mixture-of-Experts Models Authors: Arian Raje, Anupam Nayak, Gauri Joshi Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11192v1 Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model architectures can significantly reduce the number of activated parameters per token, enabling computationally efficient training and inference. However, their large overall parameter counts and model sizes have precluded their widespread usage in resource-constrained settings as all of the parameters must still be loaded into GPU memory. Prior works aim to address this memory bottleneck by offloading certain experts into CPU memory and porting them to GPU memory only when they are activated. In practice, these methods suffer from the significant I/O latency incurred by expert transfer. We present MELINOE, a method that fine-tunes an MoE model to more strongly prefer activating a smaller number of experts per sequence. Caching these preferred experts in GPU memory reduces expert churn and CPU-GPU transfer overhead. MELINOE increases throughput by $1.2-3\times$ over efficient baselines and up to $14.7\times$ over transfer-heavy baselines while retaining or even improving the performance of the model on a downstream task, making it a reliable method for improving MoE inference efficiency. --- ### Time-TK: A Multi-Offset Temporal Interaction Framework Combining Transformer and Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Time Series Forecasting Authors: Fan Zhang, Shiming Fan, Hua Wang Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11190v1 Time series forecasting is crucial for the World Wide Web and represents a core technical challenge in ensuring the stable and efficient operation of modern web services, such as intelligent transportation and website throughput. However, we have found that existing methods typically employ a strategy of embedding each time step as an independent token. This paradigm introduces a fundamental information bottleneck when processing long sequences, the root cause of which is that independent token embedding destroys a crucial structure within the sequence - what we term as multi-offset temporal correlation. This refers to the fine-grained dependencies embedded within the sequence that span across different time steps, which is especially prevalent in regular Web data. To fundamentally address this issue, we propose a new perspective on time series embedding. We provide an upper bound on the approximate reconstruction performance of token embedding, which guides our design of a concise yet effective Multi-Offset Time Embedding method to mitigate the performance degradation caused by standard token embedding. Furthermore, our MOTE can be integrated into various existing models and serve as a universal building block. Based on this paradigm, we further design a novel forecasting architecture named Time-TK. This architecture first utilizes a Multi-Offset Interactive KAN to learn and represent specific temporal patterns among multiple offset sub-sequences. Subsequently, it employs an efficient Multi-Offset Temporal Interaction mechanism to effectively capture the complex dependencies between these sub-sequences, achieving global information integration. Extensive experiments on 14 real-world benchmark datasets, covering domains such as traffic flow and BTC/USDT throughput, demonstrate that Time-TK significantly outperforms all baseline models, achieving state-of-the-art forecasting accuracy. --- ### MuCO: Generative Peptide Cyclization Empowered by Multi-stage Conformation Optimization Authors: Yitian Wang, Fanmeng Wang, Angxiao Yue, Wentao Guo, Yaning Cui, Hongteng Xu Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: q-bio.BM, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11189v2 Modeling peptide cyclization is critical for the virtual screening of candidate peptides with desirable physical and pharmaceutical properties. This task is challenging because a cyclic peptide often exhibits diverse, ring-shaped conformations, which cannot be well captured by deterministic prediction models derived from linear peptide folding. In this study, we propose MuCO (Multi-stage Conformation Optimization), a generative peptide cyclization method that models the distribution of cyclic peptide conformations conditioned on the corresponding linear peptide. In principle, MuCO decouples the peptide cyclization task into three stages: topology-aware backbone design, generative side-chain packing, and physics-aware all-atom optimization, thereby generating and optimizing conformations of cyclic peptides in a coarse-to-fine manner. This multi-stage framework enables an efficient parallel sampling strategy for conformation generation and allows for rapid exploration of diverse, low-energy conformations. Experiments on the large-scale CPSea dataset demonstrate that MuCO significantly and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in physical stability, structural diversity, secondary structure recovery, and computational efficiency, making it a promising computational tool for exploring and designing cyclic peptides. The demo of the proposed method can be found at https://github.com/mianqiu00/MuCO. --- ### TDPNavigator-Placer: Thermal- and Wirelength-Aware Chiplet Placement in 2.5D Systems Through Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Authors: Yubo Hou, Furen Zhuang, Partha Pratim Kundu, Sezin Ata Kircali, Jie Wang, Mihai Dragos Rotaru, Dutta Rahul, Ashish James Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11187v1 The rapid growth of electronics has accelerated the adoption of 2.5D integrated circuits, where effective automated chiplet placement is essential as systems scale to larger and more heterogeneous chiplet assemblies. Existing placement methods typically focus on minimizing wirelength or transforming multi-objective optimization into a single objective through weighted sum, which limits their ability to handle competing design requirements. Wirelength reduction and thermal management are inherently conflicting objectives, making prior approaches inadequate for practical deployment. To address this challenge, we propose TDPNavigator-Placer, a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning framework that dynamically optimizes placement based on chiplet's thermal design power (TDP). This approach explicitly assigns these inherently conflicting objectives to specialized agents, each operating under distinct reward mechanisms and environmental constraints within a unified placement paradigm. Experimental results demonstrate that TDPNavigator-Placer delivers a significantly improved Pareto front over state-of-the-art methods, enabling more balanced trade-offs between wirelength and thermal performance. --- ### GAC-KAN: An Ultra-Lightweight GNSS Interference Classifier for GenAI-Powered Consumer Edge Devices Authors: Zhihan Zeng, Kaihe Wang, Zhongpei Zhang, Yue Xiu Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11186v1 The integration of Generative AI (GenAI) into Consumer Electronics (CE)--from AI-powered assistants in wearables to generative planning in autonomous Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)--has revolutionized user experiences. However, these GenAI applications impose immense computational burdens on edge hardware, leaving strictly limited resources for fundamental security tasks like Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signal protection. Furthermore, training robust classifiers for such devices is hindered by the scarcity of real-world interference data. To address the dual challenges of data scarcity and the extreme efficiency required by the GenAI era, this paper proposes a novel framework named GAC-KAN. First, we adopt a physics-guided simulation approach to synthesize a large-scale, high-fidelity jamming dataset, mitigating the data bottleneck. Second, to reconcile high accuracy with the stringent resource constraints of GenAI-native chips, we design a Multi-Scale Ghost-ACB-Coordinate (MS-GAC) backbone. This backbone combines Asymmetric Convolution Blocks (ACB) and Ghost modules to extract rich spectral-temporal features with minimal redundancy. Replacing the traditional Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) decision head, we introduce a Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN), which employs learnable spline activation functions to achieve superior non-linear mapping capabilities with significantly fewer parameters. Experimental results demonstrate that GAC-KAN achieves an overall accuracy of 98.0\%, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines. Significantly, the model contains only 0.13 million parameter--approximately 660 times fewer than Vision Transformer (ViT) baselines. This extreme lightweight characteristic makes GAC-KAN an ideal "always-on" security companion, ensuring GNSS reliability without contending for the computational resources required by primary GenAI tasks. --- ### Spectra: Rethinking Optimizers for LLMs Under Spectral Anisotropy Authors: Zhendong Huang, Hengjie Cao, Fang Dong, Ruijun Huang, Mengyi Chen, Yifeng Yang, Xin Zhang, Anrui Chen, Mingzhi Dong, Yujiang Wang, Jinlong Hou, Qin Lv et al. Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11185v1 Gradient signals in LLM training are highly anisotropic: recurrent linguistic structure concentrates energy into a small set of dominant spectral directions, while context specific information resides in a long tail. We show that this spike tail separation persists throughout training, with the spike occupying only about 1.5% of directions yet dominating optimizer statistics. This dominance suppresses tail learning by contracting tail updates through second moment normalization and tightening the globally stable learning rate bound. Motivated by this analysis, we propose Spectra, a spike aware optimizer that suppresses the dominant low rank spike subspace without amplifying the noise sensitive spectral tail. Spectra tracks the spike subspace via cached, warm started power iteration and applies low rank spectral shaping with negligible overhead and substantially reduced optimizer state memory. On LLaMA3 8B trained on 50B tokens, Spectra reaches the same target loss 30% faster than AdamW, reduces per step end to end overhead by 0.7%, cuts optimizer state memory by 49.25%, and improves average downstream accuracy by 1.62%. Compared to Muon, Spectra is 5.1x faster in optimizer processing time, achieves a lower final loss, and improves average accuracy by 0.66%. --- ### KBVQ-MoE: KLT-guided SVD with Bias-Corrected Vector Quantization for MoE Large Language Models Authors: Zukang Xu, Zhixiong Zhao, Xing Hu, Zhixuan Chen, Dawei Yang Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11184v2 Mixture of Experts (MoE) models have achieved great success by significantly improving performance while maintaining computational efficiency through sparse expert activation. However, their enormous parameter sizes and memory demands pose major challenges for deployment in resource-constrained environments. Vector Quantization (VQ) offers a promising approach for ultra-low-bit compression in Large Language Models (LLMs) by leveraging a codebook, where weight vectors are mapped to the most similar discrete codewords. Yet, directly applying VQ to MoEs often leads to substantial performance degradation due to two critical obstacles: (1) redundant representations among experts cause VQ to repeatedly quantize similar representations for each expert, resulting in inefficient use of limited codebook capacity; and (2) cumulative output bias is amplified by expert aggregation in MoE layers, leading to distributional shifts in the quantized outputs. To address these issues, we propose KBVQ-MoE, a novel VQ framework to enhance extremely low-bit quantization for MoE-based LLMs. KBVQ-MoE integrates two techniques: (1) input-driven redundancy elimination, where a Karhunen-Loeve Transform (KLT) guided singular value decomposition (SVD) extracts dominant weight components and shares them across experts; and (2) bias-corrected output stabilization, where vector quantization is applied only to expert-specific (non-redundant) representations and the quantized outputs are corrected via channel-wise affine compensation. Experiments on various MoE LLMs demonstrate that KBVQ-MoE preserves accuracy substantially better than existing quantization methods. For example, 3-bit quantization of Qwen1.5-MoE-A2.7B achieves an average accuracy of 67.99, nearly identical to the FP16 baseline of 68.07, underscoring KBVQ-MoE's potential for efficient deployment on edge devices and other resource-constrained platforms. --- ### Mitigating Error Accumulation in Continuous Navigation via Memory-Augmented Kalman Filtering Authors: Yin Tang, Jiawei Ma, Jinrui Zhang, Alex Jinpeng Wang, Deyu Zhang Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11183v2 Continuous navigation in complex environments is critical for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). However, the existing Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) models follow the dead-reckoning, which iteratively updates its position for the next waypoint prediction, and subsequently construct the complete trajectory. Then, such stepwise manner will inevitably lead to accumulated errors of position over time, resulting in misalignment between internal belief and objective coordinates, which is known as "state drift" and ultimately compromises the full trajectory prediction. Drawing inspiration from classical control theory, we propose to correct for errors by formulating such sequential prediction as a recursive Bayesian state estimation problem. In this paper, we design NeuroKalman, a novel framework that decouples navigation into two complementary processes: a Prior Prediction, based on motion dynamics and a Likelihood Correction, from historical observation. We first mathematically associate Kernel Density Estimation of the measurement likelihood with the attention-based retrieval mechanism, which then allows the system to rectify the latent representation using retrieved historical anchors without gradient updates. Comprehensive experiments on TravelUAV benchmark demonstrate that, with only 10% of the training data fine-tuning, our method clearly outperforms strong baselines and regulates drift accumulation. --- ### URBAN-SPIN: A street-level bikeability index to inform design implementations in historical city centres Authors: Haining Ding, Chenxi Wang, Michal Gath-Morad Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: physics.soc-ph, cs.CV, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.10124v1 Cycling is reported by an average of 35\% of adults at least once per week across 28 countries, and as vulnerable road users directly exposed to their surroundings, cyclists experience the street at an intensity unmatched by other modes. Yet the street-level features that shape this experience remain under-analysed, particularly in historical urban contexts where spatial constraints rule out large-scale infrastructural change and where typological context is often overlooked. This study develops a perception-led, typology-based, and data-integrated framework that explicitly models street typologies and their sub-classifications to evaluate how visual and spatial configurations shape cycling experience. Drawing on the Cambridge Cycling Experience Video Dataset (CCEVD), a first-person and handlebar-mounted corpus developed in this study, we extract fine-grained streetscape indicators with computer vision and pair them with built-environment variables and subjective ratings from a Balanced Incomplete Block Design (BIBD) survey, thereby constructing a typology-sensitive Bikeability Index that integrates subjective and perceived dimensions with physical metrics for segment-level comparison. Statistical analysis shows that perceived bikeability arises from cumulative, context-specific interactions among features. While greenness and openness consistently enhance comfort and pleasure, enclosure, imageability, and building continuity display threshold or divergent effects contingent on street type and subtype. AI-assisted visual redesigns further demonstrate that subtle, targeted changes can yield meaningful perceptual gains without large-scale structural interventions. The framework offers a transferable model for evaluating and improving cycling conditions in heritage cities through perceptually attuned, typology-aware design strategies. --- ### Soft Clustering Anchors for Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning in Joint Embedding Prediction Architectures Authors: Georgios Ioannides, Adrian Kieback, Judah Goldfeder, Linsey Pang, Aman Chadha, Aaron Elkins, Yann LeCun, Ravid Shwartz-Ziv Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: eess.AS, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09040v1 Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA) offer a promising approach to self-supervised speech representation learning, but suffer from representation collapse without explicit grounding. We propose GMM-Anchored JEPA, which fits a Gaussian Mixture Model once on log-mel spectrograms and uses its frozen soft posteriors as auxiliary targets throughout training. A decaying supervision schedule allows GMM regularization to dominate early training before gradually yielding to the JEPA objective. Unlike HuBERT and WavLM, which require iterative re-clustering, our approach clusters input features once with soft rather than hard assignments. On ~50k hours of speech, GMM anchoring improves ASR (28.68% vs. 33.22% WER), emotion recognition (67.76% vs. 65.46%), and slot filling (64.7% vs. 59.1% F1) compared to a WavLM-style baseline with matched compute. Cluster analysis shows GMM-anchored representations achieve up to 98% entropy compared to 31% for WavLM-style, indicating substantially more uniform cluster utilization. Code is made available at https://github.com/gioannides/clustering-anchored-jepa. --- ### Efficient Distance Pruning for Process Suffix Comparison in Prescriptive Process Monitoring Authors: Sarra Madad Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.DB, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09039v1 Prescriptive process monitoring seeks to recommend actions that improve process outcomes by analyzing possible continuations of ongoing cases. A key obstacle is the heavy computational cost of large-scale suffix comparisons, which grows rapidly with log size. We propose an efficient retrieval method exploiting the triangle inequality: distances to a set of optimized pivots define bounds that prune redundant comparisons. This substantially reduces runtime and is fully parallelizable. Crucially, pruning is exact: the retrieved suffixes are identical to those from exhaustive comparison, thereby preserving accuracy. These results show that metric-based pruning can accelerate suffix comparison and support scalable prescriptive systems. --- ### Scaling GraphLLM with Bilevel-Optimized Sparse Querying Authors: Yangzhe Peng, Haiquan Qiu, Quanming Yao, Kun He Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.DB, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09038v2 LLMs have recently shown strong potential in enhancing node-level tasks on text-attributed graphs (TAGs) by providing explanation features. However, their practical use is severely limited by the high computational and monetary cost of repeated LLM queries. To illustrate, naively generating explanations for all nodes on a medium-sized benchmark like Photo (48k nodes) using a representative method (e.g., TAPE) would consume days of processing time. In this paper, we propose Bilevel-Optimized Sparse Querying (BOSQ), a general framework that selectively leverages LLM-derived explanation features to enhance performance on node-level tasks on TAGs. We design an adaptive sparse querying strategy that selectively decides when to invoke LLMs, avoiding redundant or low-gain queries and significantly reducing computation overhead. Extensive experiments on six real-world TAG datasets involving two types of node-level tasks demonstrate that BOSQ runs substantially faster than existing GraphLLM methods while consistently delivering on-par or superior performance. --- ### Predicting Gene Disease Associations in Type 2 Diabetes Using Machine Learning on Single-Cell RNA-Seq Data Authors: Maria De La Luz Lomboy Toledo, Daniel Onah Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: q-bio.GN, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09036v1 Diabetes is a chronic metabolic disorder characterized by elevated blood glucose levels due to impaired insulin production or function. Two main forms are recognized: type 1 diabetes (T1D), which involves autoimmune destruction of insulin-producing \b{eta}-cells, and type 2 diabetes (T2D), which arises from insulin resistance and progressive \b{eta}-cell dysfunction. Understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying these diseases is essential for the development of improved therapeutic strategies, particularly those targeting \b{eta}-cell dysfunction. To investigate these mechanisms in a controlled and biologically interpretable setting, mouse models have played a central role in diabetes research. Owing to their genetic and physiological similarity to humans, together with the ability to precisely manipulate their genome, mice enable detailed investigation of disease progression and gene function. In particular, mouse models have provided critical insights into \b{eta}-cell development, cellular heterogeneity, and functional failure under diabetic conditions. Building on these experimental advances, this study applies machine learning methods to single-cell transcriptomic data from mouse pancreatic islets. Specifically, we evaluate two supervised approaches identified in the literature; Extra Trees Classifier (ETC) and Partial Least Squares Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA), to assess their ability to identify T2D-associated gene expression signatures at single-cell resolution. Model performance is evaluated using standard classification metrics, with an emphasis on interpretability and biological relevance --- ### E2CAR: An Efficient 2D-CNN Framework for Real-Time EEG Artifact Removal on Edge Devices Authors: Haoliang Liu, Chengkun Cai, Xu Zhao, Lei Li Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: eess.SP, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09035v1 Electroencephalography (EEG) signals are frequently contaminated by artifacts, affecting the accuracy of subsequent analysis. Traditional artifact removal methods are often computationally expensive and inefficient for real-time applications in edge devices. This paper presents a method to reduce the computational cost of most existing convolutional neural networks (CNN) by replacing one-dimensional (1-D) CNNs with two-dimensional (2-D) CNNs and deploys them on Edge Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), which is an open-resource hardware accelerator widely used in edge devices for low-latency, low-power operation. A new Efficient 2D-CNN Artifact Removal (E2CAR) framework is also represented using the method above, and it achieves a 90\% reduction in inference time on the TPU and decreases power consumption by 18.98\%, while maintaining comparable artifact removal performance to existing methods. This approach facilitates efficient EEG signal processing on edge devices. --- ### Latent-Space Causal Discovery from Indirect Neuroimaging Observations Authors: Sangyoon Bae, Miruna Oprescu, David Keetae Park, Shinjae Yoo, Jiook Cha Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: q-bio.NC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09034v2 Neuroimaging does not observe causal variables directly: hemodynamics and volume conduction distort signals so that statistical dependence need not reflect latent neural influence. Before estimating graphs, one must specify under what assumptions delayed directed structure can be studied from such indirect observations. We formalize a conditional setting - recoverable inversion under modality physics together with nonstationary latent dynamics - and derive an inversion-error propagation bound under explicit assumptions. Building on this framing, we propose INCAMA (INdirect CAusal MAmba): physics-aware inversion coupled with a delay-aware Mamba encoder that uses mechanism shifts as informative variation for directed graph scoring. We use controlled simulations for quantitative validation and HCP motor-task fMRI as a zero-shot external transfer check based on anatomical and task-network consistency. Across TVB simulations, INCAMA improves directed-structure recovery by 2-3x in F1 over observation-space and two-stage baselines, and on HCP motor-task fMRI it produces sparse directed estimates concentrated in canonical visuo-motor pathways. --- ### Learning Alzheimer's Disease Signatures by bridging EEG with Spiking Neural Networks and Biophysical Simulations Authors: Szymon Mamoń, Max Talanov, Alessandro Crimi Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.NE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07010v1 As the prevalence of Alzheimer's disease (AD) rises, improving mechanistic insight from non-invasive biomarkers is increasingly critical. Recent work suggests that circuit-level brain alterations manifest as changes in electroencephalography (EEG) spectral features detectable by machine learning. However, conventional deep learning approaches for EEG-based AD detection are computationally intensive and mechanistically opaque. Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a biologically plausible and energy-efficient alternative, yet their application to AD diagnosis remains largely unexplored. We propose a neuro-bridge framework that links data-driven learning with minimal, biophysically grounded simulations, enabling bidirectional interpretation between machine learning signatures and circuit-level mechanisms in AD. Using resting-state clinical EEG, we train an SNN classifier that achieves competitive performance (AUC = 0.839) and identifies the aperiodic 1/f slope as a key discriminative marker. The 1/f slope reflects excitation-inhibition balance. To interpret this mechanistically, we construct spiking network simulations in which inhibitory-to-excitatory synaptic ratios are systematically varied to emulate healthy, mild cognitive impairment, and AD-like states. Using both membrane potential-based and synaptic current-based EEG proxies, we reproduce empirical spectral slowing and altered alpha organization. Incorporating empirical functional connectivity priors into multi-subnetwork simulations further enhances spectral differentiation, demonstrating that large-scale network topology constrains EEG signatures more strongly than excitation-inhibition balance alone. Overall, this neuro-bridge approach connects SNN-based classification with interpretable circuit simulations, advancing mechanistic understanding of EEG biomarkers while enabling scalable, explainable AD detection. --- ### Multi-Scale Temporal Homeostasis Enables Efficient and Robust Neural Networks Authors: MD Azizul Hakim Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.NE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07009v1 Artificial neural networks achieve strong performance on benchmark tasks but remain fundamentally brittle under perturbations, limiting their deployment in real-world settings. In contrast, biological nervous systems sustain reliable function across decades through homeostatic regulation coordinated across multiple temporal scales. Inspired by this principle, this presents Multi-Scale Temporal Homeostasis (MSTH), a biologically grounded framework that integrates ultra-fast (5-ms), fast (2-s), medium (5-min) and slow (1-hrs) regulation into artificial networks. MSTH implements the cross-scale coordination system for artificial neural networks, providing a unified temporal hierarchy that moves beyond superficial biomimicry. The cross-scale coordination enhances computational efficiency through evolutionary-refined optimization mechanisms. Experiments across molecular, graph and image classification benchmarks show that MSTH consistently improves accuracy, eliminates catastrophic failures and enhances recovery from perturbations. Moreover, MSTH outperforms both single-scale bio-inspired models and established state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating generality across diverse domains. These findings establish cross-scale temporal coordination as a core principle for stabilizing artificial neural systems, positioning MSTH as a foundation for building robust, resilient and biologically faithful intelligence. --- ### Where Not to Learn: Prior-Aligned Training with Subset-based Attribution Constraints Authors: Ruoyu Chen, Shangquan Sun, Xiaoqing Guo, Kangwei Liu, Sanyi Zhang, Zhangcheng Wang, Shiming Liu, Qunli Zhang, Hua Zhang, Wei Wang, Xiaochun Cao Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07008v6 Reliable models should not only predict correctly, but also base their decisions on acceptable evidence. However, conventional supervised learning typically provides only class-level labels, allowing models to achieve high accuracy by exploiting shortcut correlations rather than intended decision evidence. Human priors, such as bounding boxes or target interface elements, can help constrain such behavior, but aligning model evidence with these priors remains challenging because learned decision evidence often diverges from human perception. In this work, we study attribution-prior alignment with subset-selection-based attribution. Motivated by prior deletion and insertion evaluations showing that subset-selection attribution can identify compact decision-supporting regions, we use it as a training-time signal to expose the model's attributed evidence. When the top-attributed evidence deviates substantially from the prior region, we penalize off-prior attribution and encourage the model to shift its attributed evidence toward the intended regions. This yields a selective prior-constrained objective that avoids uniformly suppressing all non-prior regions. We validate our method on both image classification and click decision tasks in MLLM-based GUI agents. Across discriminative classification and autoregressive decision-making settings, our method improves task accuracy while enhancing attribution-prior alignment. --- ### Scalable spatial point process models for forensic footwear analysis Authors: Alokesh Manna, Neil Spencer, Dipak K. Dey Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07006v2 Shoe print evidence recovered from crime scenes plays a key role in forensic investigations. By examining shoe prints, investigators can determine details of the footwear worn by suspects. However, establishing that a suspect's shoes match the make and model of a crime scene print may not be sufficient. Typically, thousands of shoes of the same size, make, and model are manufactured, any of which could be responsible for the print. Accordingly, a popular approach used by investigators is to examine the print for signs of ``accidentals,'' i.e., cuts, scrapes, and other features that accumulate on shoe soles after purchase due to wear. While some patterns of accidentals are common on certain types of shoes, others are highly distinctive, potentially distinguishing the suspect's shoe from all others. Quantifying the rarity of a pattern is thus essential to accurately measuring the strength of forensic evidence. In this study, we address this task by developing a hierarchical Bayesian model. Our improvement over existing methods primarily stems from two advancements. First, we frame our approach in terms of a latent Gaussian model, thus enabling inference to be efficiently scaled to large collections of annotated shoe prints via integrated nested Laplace approximations. Second, we incorporate spatially varying coefficients to model the relationship between shoes' tread patterns and accidental locations. We demonstrate these improvements through superior performance on held-out data, which enhances accuracy and reliability in forensic shoe print analysis. --- ### iScheduler: Reinforcement Learning-Driven Continual Optimization for Large-Scale Resource Investment Problems Authors: Yi-Xiang Hu, Yuke Wang, Feng Wu, Zirui Huang, Shuli Zeng, Xiang-Yang Li Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.DC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06064v2 Scheduling precedence-constrained tasks under shared renewable resources is critical to modern computing platforms. It is often modeled as the Resource Investment Problem (RIP) by minimizing the cost of provisioned renewable resources under precedence and timing constraints. Unfortunately, exact mixed-integer programming and constraint programming become impractically slow on large RIP instances, and dynamic updates require schedule revisions under tight latency budgets. To address this, we present iScheduler, a reinforcement-learning-driven iterative scheduling framework for large RIP. Specifically, it formulates RIP solving as a Markov decision process over decomposed subproblems and constructs schedules through sequential process selection. By doing this, the framework accelerates optimization and supports reconfiguration by reusing unchanged process schedules and rescheduling only affected processes. To evaluate this framework, we release L-RIPLIB, an industrial-scale benchmark derived from cloud-platform workloads with 1,000 instances of 2,500-10,000 tasks. Our experiments show that iScheduler attains competitive resource costs while reducing time to feasibility by up to 43$\times$ against leading solver-backed baselines. --- ### Doc2Spec: Synthesizing Formal Programming Specifications from Natural Language via Grammar Induction Authors: Shihao Xia, Mengting He, Haomin Jia, Linhai Song Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.PL, cs.AI, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04892v1 Ensuring that API implementations and usage comply with natural language programming rules is critical for software correctness, security, and reliability. Formal verification can provide strong guarantees but requires precise specifications, which are difficult and costly to write manually. To address this challenge, we present Doc2Spec, a multi-agent framework that uses LLMs to automatically induce a specification grammar from natural-language rules and then generates formal specifications guided by the induced grammar. The grammar captures essential domain knowledge, constrains the specification space, and enforces consistent representations, thereby improving the reliability and quality of generated specifications. Evaluated on seven benchmarks across three programming languages, Doc2Spec outperforms a baseline without grammar induction and achieves competitive results against a technique with a manually crafted grammar, demonstrating the effectiveness of automated grammar induction for formalizing natural-language rules. --- ### PaperX: A Unified Framework for Multimodal Academic Presentation Generation with Scholar DAG Authors: Tao Yu, Minghui Zhang, Zhiqing Cui, Hao Wang, Zhongtian Luo, Shenghua Chai, Junhao Gong, Yuzhao Peng, Yuxuan Zhou, Yujia Yang, Zhenghao Zhang, Haopeng Jin et al. Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.DL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03866v3 Transforming scientific papers into multimodal presentation content is essential for research dissemination but remains labor intensive. Existing automated solutions typically treat each format as an isolated downstream task, leading to redundant processing and semantic inconsistency. We introduce PaperX, a unified framework that models academic presentation generation as a structural transformation and rendering process. Central to our approach is the Scholar DAG, an intermediate representation that decouples the paper's logical structure from its final presentation syntax. By applying adaptive graph traversal strategies, PaperX generates diverse, high quality outputs from a single source. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that our framework achieves the state of the art performance in content fidelity and aesthetic quality while significantly improving cost efficiency compared to specialized single task agents. --- ### A Comparative Simulation Study of the Fairness and Accuracy of Predictive Policing Systems in Baltimore City Authors: Samin Semsar, Kiran Laxmikant Prabhu, Gabriella Waters, James Foulds Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02566v1 There are ongoing discussions about predictive policing systems, such as those deployed in Los Angeles, California and Baltimore, Maryland, being unfair, for example, by exhibiting racial bias. Studies found that unfairness may be due to feedback loops and being trained on historically biased recorded data. However, comparative studies on predictive policing systems are few and are not sufficiently comprehensive. In this work, we perform a comprehensive comparative simulation study on the fairness and accuracy of predictive policing technologies in Baltimore. Our results suggest that the situation around bias in predictive policing is more complex than was previously assumed. While predictive policing exhibited bias due to feedback loops as was previously reported, we found that the traditional alternative, hot spots policing, had similar issues. Predictive policing was found to be more fair and accurate than hot spots policing in the short term, although it amplified bias faster, suggesting the potential for worse long-run behavior. In Baltimore, in some cases the bias in these systems tended toward over-policing in White neighborhoods, unlike in previous studies. Overall, this work demonstrates a methodology for city-specific evaluation and behavioral-tendency comparison of predictive policing systems, showing how such simulations can reveal inequities and long-term tendencies. --- ### High Rank Matrix Completion via Grassmannian Proxy Fusion Authors: Huanran Li, Jeremy Johnson, Daniel Pimentel-Alarcón Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02565v1 This paper approaches high-rank matrix completion (HRMC) by filling missing entries in a data matrix where columns lie near a union of subspaces, clustering these columns, and identifying the underlying subspaces. Current methods often lack theoretical support, produce uninterpretable results, and require more samples than theoretically necessary. We propose clustering incomplete vectors by grouping proxy subspaces and minimizing two criteria over the Grassmannian: (a) the chordal distance between each point and its corresponding subspace and (b) the geodesic distances between subspaces of all data points. Experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that our method performs comparably to leading methods in high sampling rates and significantly better in low sampling rates, thus narrowing the gap to the theoretical sampling limit of HRMC. --- ### Label Curation Using Agentic AI Authors: Subhodeep Ghosh, Bayan Divaaniaazar, Md Ishat-E-Rabban, Spencer Clarke, Senjuti Basu Roy Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.LG, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02564v1 Data annotation is essential for supervised learning, yet producing accurate, unbiased, and scalable labels remains challenging as datasets grow in size and modality. Traditional human-centric pipelines are costly, slow, and prone to annotator variability, motivating reliability-aware automated annotation. We present AURA (Agentic AI for Unified Reliability Modeling and Annotation Aggregation), an agentic AI framework for large-scale, multi-modal data annotation. AURA coordinates multiple AI agents to generate and validate labels without requiring ground truth. At its core, AURA adapts a classical probabilistic model that jointly infers latent true labels and annotator reliability via confusion matrices, using Expectation-Maximization to reconcile conflicting annotations and aggregate noisy predictions. Across the four benchmark datasets evaluated, AURA achieves accuracy improvements of up to 5.8% over baseline. In more challenging settings with poor quality annotators, the improvement is up to 50% over baseline. AURA also accurately estimates the reliability of annotators, allowing assessment of annotator quality even without any pre-validation steps. --- ### A General ReLearner: Empowering Spatiotemporal Prediction by Re-learning Input-label Residual Authors: Jiaming Ma, Binwu Wang, Pengkun Wang, Xu Wang, Zhengyang Zhou, Yang Wang Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02563v1 Prevailing spatiotemporal prediction models typically operate under a forward (unidirectional) learning paradigm, in which models extract spatiotemporal features from historical observation input and map them to target spatiotemporal space for future forecasting (label). However, these models frequently exhibit suboptimal performance when spatiotemporal discrepancies exist between inputs and labels, for instance, when nodes with similar time-series inputs manifest distinct future labels, or vice versa. To address this limitation, we propose explicitly incorporating label features during the training phase. Specifically, we introduce the Spatiotemporal Residual Theorem, which generalizes the conventional unidirectional spatiotemporal prediction paradigm into a bidirectional learning framework. Building upon this theoretical foundation, we design an universal module, termed ReLearner, which seamlessly augments Spatiotemporal Neural Networks (STNNs) with a bidirectional learning capability via an auxiliary inverse learning process. In this process, the model relearns the spatiotemporal feature residuals between input data and future data. The proposed ReLearner comprises two critical components: (1) a Residual Learning Module, designed to effectively disentangle spatiotemporal feature discrepancies between input and label representations; and (2) a Residual Smoothing Module, employed to smooth residual terms and facilitate stable convergence. Extensive experiments conducted on 11 real-world datasets across 14 backbone models demonstrate that ReLearner significantly enhances the predictive performance of existing STNNs.Our code is available on GitHub. --- ### MathlibLemma: Folklore Lemma Generation and Benchmark for Formal Mathematics Authors: Xinyu Liu, Zixuan Xie, Amir Moeini, Claire Chen, Shuze Daniel Liu, Yu Meng, Aidong Zhang, Shangtong Zhang Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.LO, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02561v3 While the ecosystem of Lean and Mathlib has enjoyed celebrated success in formal mathematical reasoning with the help of large language models (LLMs), the absence of many folklore lemmas in Mathlib remains a persistent barrier that limits Lean's usability as an everyday tool for mathematicians like \LaTeX{} or Maple. To address this, we introduce MathlibLemma, a modular LLM-based pipeline for automated folklore-lemma mining: the discovery, formalization, and proving of reusable intermediate facts that mathematicians often take for granted but that are not always present in formal libraries. At its core, MathlibLemma proactively mines the missing connective tissue of mathematics. The pipeline produces a verified library of folklore-style lemmas, including 1,506 Lean-checked proofs that pass a proof-bypass screen; a small curated pilot subset has also been merged into Mathlib, providing external evidence that selected outputs can meet expert library standards. Leveraging this pipeline, we further construct the MathlibLemma benchmark, a suite of 4,028 non-trivial type-checked Lean statements spanning a broad range of mathematical domains. By transforming the role of LLMs from passive consumers to active contributors, this work takes a step toward AI-assisted expansion of formal mathematical libraries. --- ### Auditing Sybil: Explaining Deep Lung Cancer Risk Prediction Through Generative Interventional Attributions Authors: Bartlomiej Sobieski, Jakub Grzywaczewski, Karol Dobiczek, Mateusz Wójcik, Tomasz Bartczak, Patryk Szatkowski, Przemysław Bombiński, Matthew Tivnan, Przemyslaw Biecek Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02560v2 Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer mortality, driving the development of automated screening tools to alleviate radiologist workload. Standing at the frontier of this effort is Sybil, a deep learning model capable of predicting future risk solely from computed tomography (CT) with high precision. However, despite extensive clinical validation, current assessments rely purely on observational metrics. This correlation-based approach overlooks the model's actual reasoning mechanism, necessitating a shift to causal verification to ensure robust decision-making before clinical deployment. We propose S(H)NAP, a model-agnostic auditing framework that constructs generative interventional attributions validated by expert radiologists. By leveraging realistic 3D diffusion bridge modeling to systematically modify anatomical features, our approach isolates object-specific causal contributions to the risk score. Providing the first interventional audit of Sybil, we demonstrate that while the model often exhibits behavior akin to an expert radiologist, differentiating malignant pulmonary nodules from benign ones, it suffers from critical failure modes, including dangerous sensitivity to clinically unjustified artifacts and a distinct radial bias. --- ### Experience-Driven Multi-Agent Systems Are Training-free Context-aware Earth Observers Authors: Pengyu Dai, Weihao Xuan, Junjue Wang, Hongruixuan Chen, Jian Song, Yafei Ou, Naoto Yokoya Published: 2026-01-30 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02559v1 Recent advances have enabled large language model (LLM) agents to solve complex tasks by orchestrating external tools. However, these agents often struggle in specialized, tool-intensive domains that demand long-horizon execution, tight coordination across modalities, and strict adherence to implicit tool constraints. Earth Observation (EO) tasks exemplify this challenge due to the multi-modal and multi-temporal data inputs, as well as the requirements of geo-knowledge constraints (spectrum library, spatial reasoning, etc): many high-level plans can be derailed by subtle execution errors that propagate through a pipeline and invalidate final results. A core difficulty is that existing agents lack a mechanism to learn fine-grained, tool-level expertise from interaction. Without such expertise, they cannot reliably configure tool parameters or recover from mid-execution failures, limiting their effectiveness in complex EO workflows. To address this, we introduce \textbf{GeoEvolver}, a self-evolving multi-agent system~(MAS) that enables LLM agents to acquire EO expertise through structured interaction without any parameter updates. GeoEvolver decomposes each query into independent sub-goals via a retrieval-augmented multi-agent orchestrator, then explores diverse tool-parameter configurations at the sub-goal level. Successful patterns and root-cause attribution from failures are then distilled in an evolving memory bank that provides in-context demonstrations for future queries. Experiments on three tool-integrated EO benchmarks show that GeoEvolver consistently improves end-to-end task success, with an average gain of 12\% across multiple LLM backbones, demonstrating that EO expertise can emerge progressively from efficient, fine-grained interactions with the environment. ---